Born in 1939 and still ‘crawling from the wreckage’, Ken Campbell is an artist working in print, painting and recently sculpture and computer graphics. The 24 books he has made since 1975 bring together arts and crafts deploying mainly his own poems and imagery.

He writes, designs and prints his books by letterpress, with the occasional deployment of etching, embossing and hand work. He has recently been printing in inkjet process.

His works are represented in many private and public collections in England, America and Germany. The complete list, as of November 2007, can be found at the Herzog-August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, The New York City Public Library, the Yale Centre for British Art, and now at the Rare Books Division of the Library of Congress.

There follows a quote from the introduction to ‘The Maker’s Hand’ (a catalogue in paperback and hardback of the books printed at the time of the above mentioned exhibition at Wolfenbüttel):

“These books, with their design structures cradling imagery and words scattered through the procession of their pages, break the rules of what makes a book and how a book is made. But those rules are always in this maker’s mind and hand, and the form of the book is both referred to and revered. I have felt that all my books are really one work-in-progress, each book a chapter; and in the first can be seen the essence of all that follows.

The books are, in most part, made by letterpress printing, a process which held pre-eminence in graphic reproduction in Europe from the fifteenth to the mid twentieth century. Within this tradition were forged rules and an aesthetic for the revelation and protection of original texts above all other graphic gesturing. I was taught in this tradition as both a printer and a designer. This would seem to contradict what I now do, which is to find the form of the book on the bed of the press during its making; while texts, images and procedures find appropriate dramatic weight in the improvised final work. This contradiction I have learned to accept as both a joy and a source of discovery. That these books draw on the activities that engaged me over the years as a designer, writer and labouring printer is a synthesis too sweet to be missed (we are free to choose our chains). This activity, rooted in that personal history, has become a vehicle for the pursuit of a constantly unfolding poetic. Printing is the vehicle but not its own end, nor beauty the only pursuit. The effect of these books has been described (by Peter Townsend) as “darkness shot through with light”. Pretty much the way the world is put together – see the King James Bible, Genesis 1.”