Transformer Press ~ Canada
(Lise Melhorn-Boe)

Environment and health bookworks
Fairy Tales with a Modern Day Twist
Family Relationships
Good Girls / Bad Girls
Looking at Women

Pain
By Diane Dawber
North Bay, Canada: Transformer Press, 2007. Edition of 10.

7 x 10"; 12 pages. Bound in stiff covers of marbled paper (by Luci Lapierre). Accordion structure with pop-ups. Printed on an Epson Stylus Photo RX 600 printer on Eco-Source Eco-21 cardstock (hemp, flax and cotton). Pop-ups mounted on St. Armand cotton rag paper. Font: Garage Shock. Laid in suede wrap with pins and needles sticking out. Ribbon closure attached to suede with pins.

The subject is pain. Excerpts from Diane Dawber's Lifting the Bull: Back Pain, Fibromyalgia, and Environmental Illness offer first-person accounts of extreme pain. The pop-ups – jagged white on black – offer a visual metaphor. The pins/needles in the wraparound offer reader participation.

Painful.
$750

Library Book
By Wendy Cain
North Bay, Canada: Transformer Press, 2004. Edition of 30.

8.5 x 5.5" with 4 pages. Bound in colorful striped cloth. Includes three double page pop-ups and one pull tab pop-up.

Wendy Cain tells an amusing story about how she came to read all of Andrew Lang's Colour Fairy Books. Her Mother had died and the family moved into the city near a library. When she visited the library the librarian asked her what kind of books she liked. The librarian led her to the section of fairy tales. Cain visited this section for several weeks before an observant librarian introduced her to other book shelves in the library. Thus, began Cain's life of books.
$160

TV Blues
By Lise Melhorn-Boe
North Bay, Canada: Transformer Press, 2009. Edition of 14.

9 x 6.75" closed. Tunnel book.

Lise Melhorn-Boe: "I am an artist who has been making books as art objects for over twenty-five years. I have often used other women’s stories as the inspiration and text for my work."

Based on Robyn Mooney's story, this book speaks to the effect of a night spent in a home where the bed consisted of a pillow in front of the television.
$50

Slurping
By Lise Melhorn-Boe
North Bay, Canada: Transformer Press, 2004. Open Edition.

8.5" circular stainless steel dog bowl with six text pages laid in.

This stainless steel dogfood dish holds red acetate pages printed with Norma Homer's funny story about eating jello, and a lesson learned about proper eating etiquette.
$50

History Repeats Itself
By Lise Melhorn-Boe
North Bay, Canada: Transformer Press, 2003. Edition of 100.

5.5 x 3", 8 pages, a magic wallet book, photocopied on Ecosource Prf-21 55lb. hemp-flax-cotton Cover, with pink handmade paper inserts. "Magic Wallets" have a hidden text behind the visible one.

Sarah relates a couple of stories about being embarrassed by her parents and then realizes that she and her husband aren't perfect either.
$30

The Boy Who Liked to Eat
By Lise Melhorn-Boe
North Bay, Canada: Transformer Press, 2002. Edition of 10.

10 x 7.5" with eight spreads. Accordion book with handmade paper pages and hard covers. The text is rubber-stamped and the images colour-copied. There are five very simple pop-ups.

Tall tales and (possibly) true stories told to Lise Melhorn-Boe as a child are combined to create a fairy-tale version of her father's immigration to Canada, presented as a quest for food. The pages get more colourful and dimensional as the story progresses.

Lise Melhorn Boe: "My father grew up during World War I in Germany, the third youngest of nine. So he remembered not having enough to eat. He was a good storyteller, so I've just put together a number of his tales. The photos are all really of him and his family. It was very hand that my grandfather actually was a poor shoemaker with many children, considering that I was trying to make it like a fairy tale.

When I was away from home at university My father would always ask "Are you getting enough to eat?" (I was in a residence with an all-you-can-eat mean plan!) After my mother died, I would phone him and ask "Are you getting enough to eat?"
$750

Picky Eater
By Lise Melhorn-Boe
North Bay, Canada: Transformer Press, 2001. Edition of 3.

13.5 x 13.5"; 9 pages. Cloth book. Tablecloths have been cut, rubber-stamped, appliquéd with color-copy transfers and re-assembled to form a foldout book.

This is quite actually a tablecloth book. Unfolded and draped over a table, the story of how one picky eater is disciplined can be read by moving from place to place.

Lise Melhorn-Boe: "Lori Gilbert’s unpleasant memories of being forced to eat are combined with photos of a plate of food being mushed about and slowly consumed."
$1,200 (Last Copy)

The Tale of the Teabags
By Lise Melhorn-Boe
North Bay, Canada: Transformer Press, 2001. Edition of 12.

5.5 x 8"; 10 pages. Double-sided accordion. Text rubber stamped onto handmade cotton paper. Accordion openings restricted by a thread, representing a clothesline from which hang "tea bags" simulated by color Xerox transfers. Laid in paper wrapper with ribbon closure.

This is one father's theory of thrift and frugality. Or is it stinginess and tightfistedness? We can at least be thankful that the subject is teabags and not toilet paper.

Lise Melhorn-Boe: "This is a funny tale about the philosophy of the cost of teabags relative to the price of cold beer and hard work according to the father of the writer, Lori Gilbert. The handmade paper pages are rubber-stamped with photo-transfer teabags on a 'clothesline,' and are shaped at the top to represent elements of the story."

Text excerpt: "He points out that teabags are quite durable. They have substance; a lot of tea can be squeezed out of one little bag. He suggests that instead of two teabags per pot, from now on it will be two pots per teabag. And tea-drinking will occur only after a certain amount of housework has been accomplished. ..."
$250 (Last three copies)

A Good Wife Wouldn't
By Lise Melhorn-Boe
North Bay, Canada: Transformer Press, 1997. Edition of 10.

8.5 x 10.25" with 6 pages.

Lise Melhorn-Boe on the origin of this book: "This story about a woman who wants a dishwasher, but whose husband won't let her buy one, even with a prescription from her doctor, and money from his parents, was told to me by Danielle Hart. It's a tunnel book made of pink handmade paper hands with colour-copied images of dirty dishes, washed dishes in a drainer and a dishwasher at the end of the tunnel."
$500

Penelope's Apron
By Lise Melhorn-Boe
North Bay, Canada: Transformer Press, 1994. Edition of 60.

7 x 5" with four spreads. Made of sickly yellow handmade flax-linen paper with red rubber-stamped text and flowers augmenting the four simple pop-up aprons. Laid- in same paper wrapper with red ribbon tie.

A poignant story of thwarted creativity and conforming to parental expectations of how a good little girl should behave. It begins with the making of an apron from a yellow tea towel and red ribbon but as families and relationships go the apron becomes an item of irritation. The mother's anger becomes part of the "fabric" of the apron. So that finally Penelope puts it away - "I don't think I ever picked it up again."

Lise Melhorn-Boe: "Penelope Stewart is an artist who lives in Toronto. ... she graciously shared this story, having answered my questionnaire. I have always been touched and honored by the stories women share with me."
$85

Family Album
By Lise Melhorn-Boe
North Bay, Canada: Transformer Press, 1994. Edition of 100.

8.5 x 5.5" 12 pages. Text and family photos are photocopied on Hemp/cereal straw paper with pink Kuratani end papers and pink handmade cotton paper covers with plastic comb binding.

Photos of three generations of good little girls from the artist's family are paired with other women's stories about being good or their parents' expectations of goodness.

Lise Melhorn-Boe: "I had decided to explore the socialization of little girls and so wrote a questionnaire asking about being a good girl, or not, and sent it out to the women on my list - this wasn't the first questionnaire. So the stories come from a number of women but I chose to use photos of girls in my own family. I remembered how we used to get black and white photos in little booklets with the plastic "coils" so that's why I bound it that way."
$30

Three Sisters
By Lise Melhorn-Boe
North Bay, Canada: Transformer Press, 1999. Edition of 10.

10 x 8.5" three faces. Tri-hexaflexagon made of Arches cotton print paper with colour photocopies on Tree-free Eco-21 paper.

Flex the flexagon to reveal three views of the same set of parents. Drawings by the artist and her two sisters (Margaret Melhorn and Marie Cooper).

Lise Melhorn-Boe: "Years ago, during some "Reach for your inner-child-type workshop, I did a drawing of my parents. My husband was interested to note that I had drawn my father without ears. He actually had huge ears but was partially deaf. He had his back to my very worried-looking mother and was typing.

My youngest sister happened to come to Toronto to visit me, and, without showing her my drawing, I gave her paper and coloured pencils and asked her to draw them. Hers was completely different except that my father was wearing the same blue sweatshirt! "Her" parents were standing side-by side and looked very happy. ...

I wrote to my middle sister, ... and asked her to draw our parents in pencil crayons. The same blue sweatshirt appears again! It was perfect. It fit in between the other two drawings perfectly, making a progression from alienation to harmony. Three sisters with three different views."
$80

Recipes
By Lise Melhorn-Boe
North Bay, Canada: Transformer Press, 2001. Edition of 5.

3 x 5" with 129 cards
Recipe box with dividers holds family photos and stories collected from twelve women about food and family relationships. Printed on hemp paper recipes cards.

Instead of Casseroles, Salads and Desserts, these "recipes" are filed by categories such as Atmosphere, Force-Feeding, Obsessions and Prohibitions.
$400 (Last Copy)

Misleading advice
The Worst Advice You'll Ever Receive (And Why Most Follow It)
By Lise Melhorn-Boe
North Bay, Canada: Transformer Press, 1997. Edition of 25.

8.5 x 11"; 23 pages. Magazine format. Color photocopied on Domtar Plainfield Offset paper. Saddle stitch (staple) binding.

The titles of articles in women's magazines promise heaps of insider wisdom.

Lise Melhorn-Boe: "Women’s magazines are chock-full of advice—this handy volume wastes no space on articles but gives you nothing but advice on everything from “Eight things never to say to the man you love” to “Ten ways to make yourself miserable.”
$45

Germangoodgirls
By Lise Melhorn-Boe and Clarissa Lewis
North Bay, Canada: Transformer Press, 2005. Edition of 35.

7" circular book tunnel book. Constructed of Artist Bristol Board and Kizuki Kozo. Hand-colored with Windsor-Newton watercolors. Tied with satin ribbon. Text handwritten with Staedtler Gel Roller and Faber-Castell Pitt artist pen. Add on of goose down. Snowflakes hand-punched from Kozo paper.
18 (di.) x 2 cm.

Germangoodgirls was created for A Book Art Mosaic, a project of the Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artists Guild.

Lise Melhorn-Boe: "The reference to the Brothers Grimm fairy tale Frau Holle (sometimes called Mother Hulda in English) led us to create a tunnel book that opens like a well. In the fairy tale, when Frau Holle, who lives at the bottom of a well, shakes her feather bed, it snows on earth, hence the addition of the feathers and snowflakes. Does the blue at the bottom of the well represent the water or the sky?"

Text: "Growing up as Germangoodgirls we were praised for our Tugend und Fleiss [our virtue and industry]. We loved the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm because good and bad, industry and sloth, were so easy to tell apart and the heroines were so justly rewarded. We did identify with the good ones but the bad ones were intriguing too, especially as we got older. However, these stories left us with two somewhat contradictory notions: if we were tugendhaft und fleissig, didn’t complain and waited long enough, someone would notice and reward or rescue us, OR, if we were tugendhaft und fleissig, we could take care of ourselves and accomplish anything. But was this really a choice?"

$500

Someday
By Marilyn Zimmerman
North Bay, Canada: Transformer Press, 2004. Edition of 4.

8 x 11 x 5" curved pink-and-white quilted-brocade covered box. Pearl button and gold braid closure. Six cutout text pages (including title page) and four quilted fabric illustrations loose in box. Text rubber-stamped on handmade paper.

A Mother's story about the power of stereotypes – here the prince and princess – young girls are taught. She witnesses her three-year-old already identifying with strong men and weak women. The daughter insists upon acting the role of the princess who has to be saved. Mother fights back with feminist fairy tales. But the struggle is not easy. In the end Mother says, "My daughter has observed the world and has noticed that the boys are in charge. I do what I can. She is strong."

Lise Melhorn-Boe: "The story of Someday came from Marilyn Zimmerman, who teaches photography at Wayne State University in Detroit, and who was one of the members of my MFA Committee. She's a good storyteller and I have used several of hers before."
$750 (Last Copy)

Rough Girls
By Lise Melhorn-Boe
North Bay, Canada: Transformer Press, 1996. Edition of 10.

11 x 7.75 x 1.5" 5 pages, a handmade paper flag book with a hard cover.

Christine Charette's story about beating up boys in Grade Two is rubber-stamped on miniature blue jeans, which tumble across the accordion spine with tiny running shoes kicking here and there.

“It never would have occurred to me to kick boys in the crotch when I was in Grade Two.”
$500

WRONG!
By Melanie Egan
North Bay, Canada: Transformer Press, 1996. Edition of 5.

12 x 6"; 4 pages. Text rubber-stamped on pink and blue handmade flax paper, folded to represent baby blankets. Pages intended to look like baby blankets folded around a baby. Bound with satin ribbon like that used to edge blankets.

Melanie Egan's memory of an 5th grade Health class, when the teacher asked "How do you tell a girl baby from a boy baby?" is, perhaps, an amusing story now, but traumatic to a 10-year-old girl at the time.

Lise Melhorn-Boe: "This story was told to me by a friend. She was almost in tears when she told it, even though it had happened at least twenty years earlier."
$200

Good Girls Don't
By Lise Melhorn-Boe
North Bay, Canada: Transformer Press, 1994. Edition of 30.

5.5 x 3" four spreads. Rubber-stamped text and colour photography transfer images on handmade linen paper, with four pop-ups. Accordion folded into a self-cover with a tab. Closed with a ribbon.

Sunbonnet Sue pop-ups with the Virgin Mary superimposed upon them are surrounded by rules for good girls, such as "Good girls don't fight back" and "Good girls don't whine."

Lise Melhorn-Boe: "When I first moved to North Bay 15 years ago, I took a quilt-making class specifically to learn to make a "log cabin" quilt. I had been saving fabric for it for some time. I got quite excited about the names of traditional patterns of quilts and made a series of them which related the pattern names to issues in contemporary women's lives. They were all multi-squared quilts, many with texts, so I just saw ("read") them as big flat books. I had my first show here exhibiting the quilts and several books that used quilt patterns as images, "Good Girls Don't" being one of them."
$75

Once Upon a Time
By Lise Melhorn-Boe
North Bay, Canada: Transformer Press, 2006. Edition of 8.

50 pot-holder style pages including title and colophon. 48 (5 x 5") squares with text on one side only. Closed 7.5" deep. Open 72" horizontally. Twelve 5 x 5" base pages bound with leather and bias-tape. 36 foldout pages attached with metal rings through embroidered holes in base pages. Techniques and materials: quilting, embroidery, cloth, leather, thread, metal rings, and fabric.

An interactive work allowing the reader to create the tale within a multiple choice framework. The base line of the story begins: "Once there was a…." Choices ensue. Is the protagonist a CEO, police officer, pop star, environmentalist, computer geek, politician, or street person? Was s/he lazy? A workaholic? Very wise?

Lise Melhorn-Boe: "To make this multiple choice fairy tale, I started with archetypical fairy tale characters and situations and then adapted them to a contemporary setting. I have been collecting fabrics and thinking about it for a long time. I actually have only the one copy completely finished, and another almost finished. The others I still have to write the text, quilt, bind and make the holes and embroider round them. There will be three others with the burgundy leather and bias-tape edge-binding, and four of them will have tan-coloured leather and tape."
$800

Many-Fur
By Lise Melhorn-Boe
North Bay, Canada: Transformer Press, 2005. Edition of 10.

10.5 x 8.25"; 13 pages with six pop-ups. Accordion structure. Bound in patterned cloth with fashion magazine illustration and paper title on front board. Colophon on back pastedown. Uses illustrations from fashion magazines. Text computer typeset in Lucida Calligraphy. Printed using a Xerox Colour Series 50 photocopies on Rolland Hitech acid-free 80 lb. paper.

Many-Fur (Allerleirau in German) was one of the fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm. Perrault collected a similar story known as Donkeyskin (Peau d'Ane in French.) As it involves incest, it has fallen out of modern collections for children.

Lise Melhorn-Boe: "Because it is a less-well-known fairy tale, probably because of the implied incest, I chose to actually include the entire story as the text, rather than using words and phrases from the women's magazines as I did with the other four fairy tales."
$600

Wake Up the Frog
By Lise Melhorn-Boe
North Bay, Canada: Transformer Press, 2004. Edition of 30.

5.25 x 11.25"; 11 shaped pages (cut in the form of shoes or clothing). Computer typeset in Book Antiqua. Photocopied on Canson Mi-Tientes and Colour-Line acid free papers. Paper wrap with title cutout on front. Flutter binding.

Eleven women write about the effect of fairy tales on their lives.

Lori: "Something that affected my life was reading the original version of the Frog Prince. In this original, as in modern versions, the frog makes more and more demands for greater and greater intimacy with the princess. However, when he demands a kiss, instead of overcoming her revulsion and complying like a good girl, she defends her honour by picking him up and throwing him against the wall. And that is when he turns into a price. I think of all those little girls fed on the false story that 'you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you can find a prince.' The true story is that the only real prince is one who respects you, and that you can't bring out the prince in a guy by capitulating to his endless demands. Sometimes you have to wake up the frog in a big way before he leaves his slimy habits behind and learns to have respect for women."
$50

Sleeping Beauty:
Finding That Special Someone When You're Not the Aggressive Type
By Lise Melhorn-Boe
North Bay, Canada: Transformer Press, 2000. Edition of 8.

7.75 x 10.5" accordion fold with ten pages. Each double page with a moveable / pop-up structure. Created using text and images from popular magazines and Canon Laser colour copied on 55-lb. Pro-21 Eco-source paper.

No spinning wheels in this up-dated version of the well known story — it's a stiletto heel that puts this Beauty to sleep. Images and text are collaged from fashion magazines.
$400

Body Map
By Lise Melhorn-Boe
North Bay, Canada: Transformer Press, 2009. Edition of 50.

8 x 8"; 10 unnumbered leaves in a snake-fold format. Printed by an Epson Stylus Pro 9600 with the Ultrachrome Inkset onto Inkpress Fine Art Matte paper.

Lise Melhorn-Boe: "I have been struggling with my health since my mid-twenties, some problems caused by or exacerbated by art materials, and discovered a couple of years ago that I had breast cancer. I then learned that I had extremely high levels of heavy metals in my body, which my doctor attributed to growing up in two communities with smelters. He also felt that the cancer and my chronic infection could be attributed to the heavy metals contamination. I realize that there are probably many others, whose health has been compromised in some way by their environment. I decided to make a body of work on this topic, and have recently spent four months researching connections between health and the environment, as an Artist in Residence at Queen’s University."

Body Map is a show-and-tell book presenting some of the information that Lise has uncovered in her research about connections between our health and the environment. These tidbits of data surround a body - Lise's body.

A 1988 study showed Mercury Vapour in the air at a conference doubled during coffee breaks. Mercury emissions from dental amalgams were identified as the culprit. Mercury is linked to food allergies, an impaired immune system and to thyroid malfunction.

Metals mining is responsible for 39% of arsenic releases, 89% of mercury releases and 88% of lead releases.

$200

Toxic Kids
By Lise Melhorn-Boe
North Bay, Canada: Transformer Press, 2009. Edition of 50.

8.5 x 11"; 18 unnumbered pages. Photocopied on acid-free Boise HDP Color Copy and Color Copy cover.

Another bookwork featuring Lise Melhorn-Boe's research into connections between health and the environment. In conducting her research she prepared a questionnaire which included questions about childhood environments.

Lise Melhorn-Boe, Questionnaire: Tell me about your childhood. In what kind of environment did you grow up? For example, did you live near an electrical transformer or transmission line? in or near an agricultural/industrial area? near a gas station, print shop, dry-cleaning establishment? Was there a lot of tension in your family?

This young girl's paper doll book incorporates information uncovered in her research: certain articles of clothing hold information, hand-printed by the artist, that specifically relates to connections between childhood environments and adult health.

Breast-feeding infants occupy a higher rung on the food-chain than the rest of us. In many cases, human milk contains pesticide residues in excess of legal limits for commercially marketed food. Nursing babies take in the highest doses of contaminants that they will experience in their entire lives: levels ten to forty times greater than the daily exposure of an adult. (Living Downstream. Steingraber, Sandra. Don Mills: Addison-Wesley, 1997. Our Stolen Future. Colborn, Theo et al. New York: Dutton, 1976.)

$55

Homeless
By Lise Melhorn-Boe
North Bay, Canada: Transformer Press, 2008. Edition of 7.

7 x 7";15 pages. Accordion structure simulates a quilt by using the Little House quilt pattern to sew color photocopies of a row of solid-looking homes and sections of gray cotton paper handmade by the artist onto peat moss paper made by Papeterie St. Armand (Montreal). Color photocopies on Boise Fire 80 lb. acid free paper; text in Trebuchet MS Bold is black-and-white copy on acetate. Pages stitched together with cotton thread.

The quilt pattern is central. Not only does it echo the quilt the artist was forced to sleep under because of the toxicity of her home but it also simulates the fragmentation experienced by the homeless. What seems solid is really stitched together in a tenuous way.

Lise-Melhorn Boe: "In the fall of '06, I came across a disturbing statistic: according to a study from the Environmental Health Coalition of Western MA, 57% of people with Multiple Chemical Sensitivities have been homeless at one time or another. I thought "Whew! I'm lucky that I have a safe home," but by the fall of '07, my own house was making me sick, and by that winter, I had been forced to find a new place to work and was sleeping on our unheated front porch, with piles of quilts and a hot water bottle. I felt as if I were homeless. "
$400

Gypsy Moth
(Carol's Story)
By Lise Melhorn-Boe
North Bay, Canada: Transformer Press, 2001. Edition of 10.

6.375 x 8.75"; 10 pages. Set in Humana Serif and printed on an Epson Stylus Photo RX600 printer. Canal paper (peat moss and mustard flax) made by Papeterie St-Armand. Bound in green leafy cloth with green ribbon ties at both spine and foredges so it can become a two-dimensional carousel structure. Netting covers some openings; others have insect-like bodies hanging it them. Paper title on front cover.

That misfortune is often underserved and beyond our control is no surprising revelation. When the situation is compounded by supposed experts who are supposed to help, it becomes even more infuriation. This is a story of triumph over such misfortune and attendant human folly and foibles.

Gypsy Moth is a complex story — a true story — told simply. Carol was the unwitting victim of insecticide spraying. Her health suddenly took a nosedive. Doctors were wrong, pessimistic, and dismissive. She lost her job. Nevertheless, with the help of family, friends, nature, and her own spirit, she recovered.
$600