Beijing Heart: A Tiananmen Story

Larry Hanbrook, an American teacher working in Taiwan, was volunteering in Beijing's Tiananmen Square and documented the tensions leading up to the night of June 3, 1989, when the tanks came rumbling.

To mark the ten-year anniversary of the democracy movement in Tiananmen, Ma Nao Books published Larry Hanbrook’s eyewitness account of the final days of the student occupation and the logistics and sensibilities of the young revolutionaries.

Edition of 100, 1999, sold out
8 1/2 x 5 1/2 x 1/4, 22 pps
paper, silk thread, indigo cover
ISBN: 0-9670264-0-7

Through sharply observed vignettes — and an unusual layout design that highlights the words of square activists in pullquotes — Beijing Heart delineates the political and personal pressures that weighed on the students and their supporters.

Along with the traditional hand-sewn xian zhuang binding of silk thread and indigo cover, Beijing Heart features three photographic illustrations hand-printed by an experimental image-transfer process and a drawn map of the square, all of which provide visual counterpoint to Hanbrook’s account of camping with the students, workers, and Hong Kong activists until the military crackdown.

Readers say:

“a beautiful and affecting artist’s book” – Scripps College Bulletin

“exquisite” – Mike Miner, Chicago Reader

“The story, the photographs, the binding, the commitment and heart: the book is so honest and true.” – Judy Harvey Sahak, librarian

For more about the making of Beijing Heart, see the article in The Oregonian and the Scripps College Bulletin, in the Press section.

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Slice of Time (broadside)

Denali National Park in Alaska could be one of the last frontiers of the Last Frontier. For one Midwest traveler, it’s the loneliest place in the world.

Edition of 50, 1992
20 1/4 x 14 3/4
Letterpress on Arches
$50, plus $5 for shipping/handling

Written by Margaret Davis during a summer working in Alaska, Slice of Time takes a tourist’s encounter with a piece of cherry pie and makes a bittersweet daydream of it.

Ma Nao Books regrets that a real piece of cherry pie was harmed in the making of this broadside.

Artists Book Works, the Chicago print collective where Slice of Time was printed, had a lot of type, but not enough in each font to print the full text. So the type had to change with each paragraph, providing a chance to print some of the more unusual display type. It was fun applying old lead to words like “sproik.”

A framed copy of Slice of Time (no. 14) is available, 23 x 17 1/2 and ready to hang.
$175, plus $5 for shipping/handling

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