Three Cages by Joyce Cutler Shaw is a striking artist’s book and chapbook published by Center for Book Arts in 1993, distinguished by its triangular format and deep physical and symbolic resonance. The edition is limited to 250 signed and numbered copies, each featuring paper engineering by Allwyn Bookbinder (Allwyn O’Mara), and typographically rendered in Shaw’s own “Alphabet of Bones”—a calligraphic script formed from imagery of hollow bird bones—alongside Malibu italic type.
The structure of the book itself is an accordion fold of fourteen to fifteen panels (when fully extended measuring roughly 62 × 15 cm) that unfolds into a long, narrow strip, visually and materially evoking the confinement suggested by its title. The cover and end-pages are fitted with silhouette imagery of a bird skeleton and a cage, further reinforcing the interplay of freedom, captivity, and form.
With its merging of poetic language, visual metaphor, and finely crafted materiality, Three Cages transforms reading into a spatial experience: the reader must unfold, expand, and traverse the panels; in doing so, the book invites contemplation of boundaries, structures, and the possibility of flight. The work exemplifies the book art ideal — where content, form, and construction are inseparable — and remains a powerful example of Shaw’s practice in which drawing, typography, and book design intersect.