Hannah Batsel

Poor Charlie is a young knight who can't find a single beast to slay. If only the town of Little Import weren't so quiet. Hark! What is that? It's Mr. Galette, and he has a problem in his bakery. Clever Charlie realizes at once that a monster is the culprit: the triple-tier hungerbeak! So begins an epic quest to capture monsters throughout town and find a safe place for them to live . . . in the world’s very first monster sanctuary!

The Knight of Little Import is a picture book for ages 5-9 about how helping out in small ways can make a big difference. Booklist’s Starred Review says, “Batsel’s artwork is a mesmerizing display of extraordinary mixed-media collage using a variety of handmade and purchased paper alongside paints, ink, watercolors, embroidery floss, artificial turf, and painted sawdust. Every page, down to the endpapers, is textured, rich, layered, and lovely. Batsel’s second book as author-illustrator is quite the achievement.”

Published in September 2023 by Carolrhoda Books, an imprint of Lerner Publishing.

In this chaotic 2020 picture book, a rabbit-obsessed narrator makes an owl increasingly irate by refusing to play by the rules of a conventional alphabet book. Every entry is about bunnies, from "delightful, dynamic, daredevil rabbits" to "xylophone rabbits and rabbits on drums!" Readers will pore over scenes of bunnies at the circus, in a tiny town, at the museum, and cheering on rabbit superstars at a concert.

The illustrations in A is for Another Rabbit are all hand-painted with acrylics, and are full of easter eggs bound to delight readers young and old.

These handmade, acrylic-painted paper dolls are all fully articulated, meaning their joints move and allow for a wide range of lifelike poses. Some have changeable clothing, and some open to reveal secret compartments or moving accessories. To me, paper dolls serve not only as small feats of paper engineering, but also as renderings of fictional characters that are able to show more personality and movement than static drawings.

Ephemerus is the 2017 artist’s book edition from the Marjorie S. Coffey Library Endowment Residency at the George A. Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida. The book was designed by H.M. Batsel during the semester-long residency in the fall of 2017. The book is inspired by Batsel’s research and study of occult and magical texts from the Harold and Mary Jean Hanson Rare Book Collection in the Special and Area Studies Collections Department.

When the apprentice of a learned magician falls ill, the magician must push to (and beyond) the boundaries of his power to prevent the apprentice's soul from slipping into an inescapable sinkhole, the Devil's Millhopper. A dark fairytale about the limitations of human ability and the inherent impermanence of human life, Ephemerus is an edition of 45 hand-bound, signed copies with three moving pages and two double-size fold-out pages.

Forest Gods is a small artist book produced in an edition of 50 at Darien, GA's Ashantilly Press Project artist residency in October 2024. While walking through the marshy coastland at night, I came upon dozens of animals—deer, raccoons, toads, lizards, squirrels, and rabbits—all of whom dashed away at the sound of my approach. While I meant them no harm, I was cast as a predator to be desperately avoided. The animals were right, of course—I may not have intended to hurt them on an individual level, but mankind does pose the greatest risk of harm to the delicate coastal ecosystem I was traversing.

The artist book, printed in black, green, and golden brown, incorporates both linoleum relief illustrations and a poem set in lead type and ornament from Ashantilly’s type collection. The poem reads: “When leather-booted man tromps through the green, The forest gods all make themselves unseen. / For though they war—the hawk, the snake, the fawn—Tis man alone will waste their pantheon.”

When readers open the gate-style front covers of the book, fanciful green figures dash out of sight via folding mechanisms behind the central illustration. Only by peeking into the book or carefully opening one side at a time can readers see the forest gods in their full glory.

Forest Gods measures 6" x 7" when closed, and 6" x 15 3/8" when open.

To see a video of Forest Gods in motion, visit my Instagram here.

Weirder than Fiction (2021) is a hand-painted carousel pop-up book inspired by the Caxton Club publication Chicago by the Book - specifically, entry 43, which describes the sci-fi/fantasy pulp magazine Weird Tales. This one-of-a-kind artist book opens into a diorama of two Chicago two-flat apartments across the street from one another; the apartments are visible to each other through the real stained glass windows embedded in their walls.

The apartments' occupants are the book's two protagonists, devotees of Weird Tales who have grown suspicious of each other. One of them, a young man, has been reading the May 1932 issue, which includes the short story “The Brotherhood of Blood” by Hugh Cave. He has noticed that his neighbor across the way seems pale and sickly, operates only at night, and yowls like some supernatural creature; could she be a descendant of the cursed vampire family from “The Brotherhood of Blood,” doomed to become a batlike creature of horror on the midnight of her twenty-eighth year?

Meanwhile, across the street, the young woman has become paranoid as well; having read the February 1928 issue of Weird Tales, she is tormented by the idea that her neighbor is a deranged cultist just like those described in H.P. Lovecraft's “The Call of Cthulhu.” She hears him chanting late at night, worshiping a strange idol, and she dares not leave her house lest she be attacked by his fellow cultists.

With the benefit of seeing the whole story, the reader can find a perfectly reasonable explanation for everything: the woman is gaunt and nocturnal because she is afraid to go out and buy groceries (that's why her cat yowls so piteously.) The man chants so sleeplessly because he is reciting the Lord's Prayer; he has covered his apartment in crucifixes to ward off vampire attacks. And the ghoulish silhouettes visible through both windows? The man's strange tentacles and bizarre idol are nothing but a potted plant and Virgin Mary statuette. The woman's coffin and bat are a wardrobe and vase full of umbrellas.

Every paper detail in the book is hand-painted with acrylics except for the apartments' wallpaper, which is vintage stamped paper. Every miniature issue of Weird Tales references a real issue of the magazine, including the two waiting to be read in the protagonists' mailboxes outside. The stained glass windows allude to the Weird Tales stories being highlighted; a green-tentacled mass over aligned stars and undulating waves on one side, and a fanged open mouth on the other. The book's title is hand-lettered onto the cover in an iconic Weird Tales typeface. Closed, the book measures approx. 7" x 9". Photographs by Shelby Everette.

Actaeon (2021) is a linoleum-cut artist book in an edition of 50 regular copies and 20 special copies. Its small page spreads measure 12.25” x 18", and it contains two large foldout spreads which measure 12.25 x 36”. It is bound in drum-leaf style, and its case is wrapped in a hand-colored linoleum print.

This book is an illustrated retelling of the Greek myth of Actaeon, a skilled hunter who, on a hunt with his pack of dogs, stumbles upon the goddess Artemis and her retinue bathing in the forest. Artemis, enraged that Actaeon has seen her bathing, transforms him into a stag; he is quickly dispatched by his own hunting dogs.

In this version, Actaeon does not turn into a stag, but rather receives the treatment given to so many slasher film starlets: he becomes both victim of torment and erotic pinup. As Actaeon runs through the forest, his clothes are ripped from him until he is stripped naked before the gaze of the reader, seemingly enlightened by his rapturous suffering. This is an ancient tale of a man punished for violating the privacy and dignity of a woman, resurrected and subverted for a modern-day society in which such infractions are still going unpunished.

The special edition is a deluxe version of the book. It comes housed in a custom screen-printed slipcase featuring Artemis drawing an arrow on one side and a braying stag on the other. When the book is pulled from its slipcase, the dogs on its cover rush toward the stag. Additionally, the endsheets of the special edition are hand-stamped patterns of Actaeon and his hunting dogs in the style of antique hunting trophies. But most importantly, all “pinup-style” pages of the special edition are hand colored with sparse but vibrant watercolor elements.

Grave to Cradle (2021) is a handmade artist book in an edition of 35. When closed, it measures 4 1/4 x 5 5/8"; when the three covers are opened to display the wingspan of the moth screen-printed on the cover, it measures 5 5/8 x 12 7/8". Grave to Cradle was begun as part of an In Cahoots residency in Petaluma, CA, in October 2019. It was later completed and bound in Chicago, IL in February 2021.

The book's text and illustrations are linoleum prints; its text reads: "When the bagworms came to Liberty Cemetery, they were naked. Soon, they built their cocoons from what they found at the graves. When the bagworms came, it was as if the dead were coming back to life." Inspired by real-life bagworms, insects that construct different cocoons based on the materials available in their environments, and an actual cemetery in Petaluma, CA, Grave to Cradle is a short magical realism story about insects that synthesize not only physical objects found on graves (flowers, ribbons, cacti) but also the memories and emotions of the deceased into dense, crowded cocoons. The lives of a murderer, a young girl, and a married couple are woven into cradles that give new life to the bagworm moths that emerge from them.

Out of the Dark/Into the Water is an edition of 125 hand-printed and hand-bound artist books about the life and work of Oliver Robert Batsel, an American collector of exotic artifacts and art objects from around the world. Batsel spent his life gathering clothing, documents, jewelry, photographs, and other ephemera related to the Empyreal Trading Company (E.T.C.), a small mercantile enterprise which operated from the 17th through the 19th centuries.

In 2004, after decades of amassing the most complete E.T.C. collection in the world, Batsel lost his life when Hurricane Ivan leveled his beachside Florida home. The house, the collection, and Batsel himself were swept out to sea. Now, over a decade later, Batsel's granddaughter, Hannah, has begun to excavate the sand lot where the house once stood, recovering pieces of Batsel's story and restoring the artifacts to which he dedicated his life.

Out of the Dark/Into the Water is a dos-a-dos book, a historical binding in which two text blocks share a back cover. One half describes Hannah Batsel's memories of and relationship with her often-absent but endlessly fascinating grandfather. The other half takes a closer look at the collection itself and the progress that has been made towards restoring it. The book combines screen, offset, and letterpress printing techniques, and includes 14 original reduction linoleum prints.

Maneater is a set of four artist books, produced in a limited edition of 50 hand-print and hand-bound copies. The set consists of four stories whose physical and narrative structure nest within one another like Russian nesting dolls. The books can be read separately, but when taken together, reveal a legacy of greed and colonialism across generations.

Every time a new character’s name is spoken, a new book begins that follows that character’s life story. The first book’s protagonist is a wealthy shut-in who becomes obsessed with an exotic deity; the three enclosed books reveal this retired businessman’s colonialist past and the history of the deity’s native land. With every book, the narrative as a whole moves backwards chronologically in time. The visual style echoes that of 19th century children's mass-market hardcover adventure books, whose bright and captivating illustrations belied the troubling imperialist messages conveyed within.

Magnets embedded in the spine of each book hold them in place for display or easy reading as a set.

Heavy is the Head is a small foldout letterpress printed book depicting four members of a royal family and four of their servants. By lifting hidden flaps in the book’s design, viewers must discover how each servant plans to assassinate a different royal (the wardrobe keeper slips a snake into the queen’s stole, the cellar master poisons the king’s wine, etc.)

My smallest book yet, Overhead was designed, carved, printed, and bound on a series of commercial airline flights over a 24-hour period as part of Air Air Residency on May 4th, 2018. The 2”x3” book depicts a young boy drawing an angel and then meeting one that differs dramatically from his drawing. The book is an edition of three with two APs.