Emily Martin’s recent book Navigational Tools for the Willfully Lost, has won the 2025 Movable Book Society's Meggendorfer Artist's Book Prize!
Jurors Julie Chen and Hiromi Takeda selected Emily Martin's book Navigational Tools for the Willfully Lost as the winner of the 2025 Meggendorfer Artist's Book Prize at the biannual meeting of the international Movable Book Society in St. Louis, MO. As Juror and 2023 Artist Book Prize winner Hiromi Takeda noted: "The movement and structure of the pop-up mechanisms carried a deep sense of meaning, and it was the work that lingered with us the most."
As Juror and Keynote Speaker Julie Chen noted: "This book beautifully integrates movable mechanisms into the content of the book so that the reader's interaction with the movables become an important part of the reading experience. The book is beautifully printed and bound as well."
As MBS Director and Newberry Library curator Suzanne Karr Schmidt noted: "During the Newberry fellowship where she researched this artist book, Emily closely examined dozens of sixteenth-century volvelles. Then she modernized them, making them wonderfully her own."
Emily Martin was awarded a Jan and Frank Cicero artist’s research fellowship at the Newberry Library in Chicago, Illinois in 2023, where she studied, primarily, their many editions of Peter Apian’s Cosmographia from the 16th century, a time of scientific revolution. Apian included a set of five paper instruments in each of his editions. Martin made a new set of wry visual aids for those who will not, cannot see what is really happening in our time of plague, not just medical but political, ecological, and more.
The book has 24 pages and five paper tools, all volvelle variations of Martin's devising. Copies of this limited-edition book are held in the Library of Congress, the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford; the University of Iowa, the Newberry Library, and Stanford University among others.
