COME AGAIN WHEN YOU CAN'T STAY SO LONG is a handmade artist's book documenting Wray's return to her home state of Kansas after a long absence to visit her grandmother, Bessie, one final time before Bessie's death. The book is a portrait of love, mortality, and the ambivalence of family ties. It is a continuation of Wray's autobiographical work centered on family.
The books is included in the permanent collections of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, and the Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame.
Edition of 125. Sold out.
On the making of the book Wray says: I knew from the start I wanted to make something tangible that would honor my grandmother. I spent months working on the details of the book: the signatures were printed unbound, and then chain link stitched to join together with the endpapers. The covers were letterpressed on a Vandercook SP20 under the guidance of Sarah Smith at the Book Arts Workshop at Dartmouth—an open studio that teaches letterpress and relief printing techniques. One-hundred-year-old wooden type was used for the title. I had a halftone cut made from a digital image so I could add a picture to the inside back part of the cover, a secret element you have to hunt to find.
"With Come Again When You Can't Stay So Long, Tara Wray perfectly balances humor, pathos and tenderness...There are few artist's books I can think of that manage to be as simultaneously entertaining and heart-wrenching as Come Again."
-Alec Soth
