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Josh Hockensmith


Pittsboro, NC, USA
About

I am a book artist, poet, and library worker living in Pittsboro, North Carolina.

A bookworm from the age of 3, I didn’t think twice about books as material objects until I was given a handmade Japanese journal twenty years later. Seeing the stab binding on the outside of the journal switched on the proverbial light bulb, and I’ve been obsessed with the materiality of books ever since.

My background and training are as a writer, translator, and book repair technician, with a smattering of printmaking thrown in. My day job at the Sloane Art Library at UNC-Chapel Hill gives me the opportunity to work closely with a diverse collection of contemporary artists’ books from around the world.

I'm interested in the full spectrum of work being created in book form; in the convergence of digital technology and the physical book; and in the history of the book as the complicit vehicle for humanity’s strangest, most wonderful, most powerful creations through the ages.

Books by Josh Hockensmith