Black Swans help launch a new altered book

I hope you'll join me as I start a new AB.

I realize I said I wasn't going to make another AB, but here I am, starting a new one, while several sit unfinished.  This one will be for various techniques or projects I want to try before I commit to more expensive substrates.

Here I've tested the sewn spine by pressing the pages backward in various places until the two covers met.  Next, I pulled out about 1/3 of the book pages.  All that was needed now, was a bit of inspiration.

The black swan caught my attention (and imagination) when I saw this swan image in a magazine.  I decided to make the background look like the black swan's wings in flight, since there is white underneath the black feathers.  Originally native to Australia, hunted to extinction in New Zealand, and coveted by some towns in Great Britain, these swans have an even deeper symbolism than their seemingly mythical beginnings.

As long ago as ancient Greek writings, black swans were assumed to not exist.  All "known" swans were white.  When discovered in Australia in 1697, the term Black Swan soon became well known, reaching England, where many pub owners named their English pubs "Black Swan."

And then there's the British saying "All his swans are turned to geese," which means a person's expectations were set too high.  Some poets and writers then turned that saying around to "All his geese are swans," which implies people place too much importance on their possessions.

Another myth, propagated by short sighted individuals, claims Black Swans are as dangerous and evil as black cats.  Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake adds credence to that myth, since the evil antagonist (Odile) is a black swan to the protagonist (Odette), a white swan.

Of course, what I think of when I hear the word "Black Swan" comes from my days as a scientist and statistician.  On a normal bell curve, the very ends of the curve are known as "outliers," or those extreme numbers (observations) that fall so far away from the center of the curve they are considered either random events, or measurement error.  If they are statistically improbable, they are sometimes usually called "Black Swans."  Examples of recent Black Swans include 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon that brought New York City and the airplane industry to their knees, the global financial crisis of 2008 that wreaked global havoc to the world's monetary system, and the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2011 that took its toll on both human and many species lives dependent upon that body of water.

In 2007, Nassim NicholasTaleb wrote a book entitled The Black Swan.  Later that year in a New York Times article, he explained his concept of Black Swans:

What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalise it) is an event with the following three attributes. First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility.  Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

I now give you my interpretation of this anomaly known as Black Swans.  Materials used: magazine images, black paint, black lace.

I hope you enjoyed this because although this may look like a "normal" altered book, it is not going to be my normal themes and techniques.