Lang Ingalls

Lang Ingalls is a graduate of the American Academy of Bookbinding and now teaches there. She has had truly wonderful opportunities to study under many fine binders, notably Monique Lallier, Edwin Heim, Ana Ruiz-Larrea, and Eleanor Ramsey. She presently works out of her atelier in Crested Butte, making fine bindings year-round. Her work is shown in the US and abroad regularly. 

Example Binding:
Rappoport, Lisa.
Words Fail {Me}
San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Center for the Book, 2014.

Full leather case binding in patterned deep-sea goat, with leather endbands of the same. Pastedowns and flyleaves of handmade Hook Papers. Hand-embroidered cover design in four shades of cotton gray floss; embroidered signature on rear pastedown. Bound in 2021. Clamshell traveling box.

This little book of poems is about typographic erosion. Ingall's design is influenced by one of the six versions of dissonance depicted by the author in her poems, the Greek Stoichedon, wherein all letters are capitalized and laid out in a grid with no letter spacing. Erosion is depicted on both the recto and verso with the squares falling into disorder, through both color and undoing.

Design Description:

Full leather, laced-on boards binding in sand goat. Handmade paper flyleaves in black by Hook Papers. Hand-tied endbands in sand floss. Ingalls proposes a design inspired by Kara Walker's second illustration, accompanying Morrison's poem "The Perfect Ease of Grain". This silhouette is abstracted, magnified and spun; embroidery is of the negative spaces. The silk embroidery floss is sand colored, as is the goatskin cover and is elusive, quiet, somewhat hidden. Spending time with the poetry brought Ingalls to a reflection on a privacy, the acceptance of the whole of life: love, power, sexuality, loss, illness. It is intended as a wink to Walker's illustrative style, and a nod to the roundness of Morrison's poetry.

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Lang Ingalls example binding

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Lang Ingalls design proposal

Lang Ingalls