Enid Epstein Mark, 76, maker of books

Enid Epstein Mark, 76, an artist whose medium was handmade books, died of multiple myeloma Tuesday at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.

Mrs. Mark and her husband, Eugene, had lived in Wallingford for 51 years before moving to Center City three years ago.

A native New Yorker, Mrs. Mark took art courses as a child at the Brooklyn Museum. As an adult she painted, made prints, and did woodcuts and silk screening. Eventually, she told a reporter in 1994, she became interested in sequential images and "the idea of holding an art object in your hand and not just seeing it on a wall."

She took a course on book design and developed a familiarity with fine letterpress printing, hand-set typography, fine papers, hand lithography, and hand-binding.

In the early 1980s in her Wallingford studio, she produced Promises, which paired images from Israel with biblical passages. In 1986, she established the Elm Press and produced the book The Bewildering Thread with Ruth Mortimer, a rare-books curator at Smith College. Mortimer collected literary allusions and metaphors to thread and weaving, and Mrs. Mark provided the artwork and organization of the book and handled publication and sales.

Mrs. Mark's limited-edition books explore the relationship between image and text, which are often from contemporary poems by women. Her book About Sylvia was a tribute to poet Sylvia Plath, a friend of hers at Smith. Other book themes include travel, mythology, botany, time and space.

Though struggling with her illness for the last year, she had almost completed Labyrinth, a book her husband hopes to publish.

Mrs. Mark's work has been acquired by more than 90 public collections in the United States, Canada and England, and she received several awards and fellowships, including a $50,000 Pew Fellowship in 2001.

Mrs. Mark earned a bachelor's degree from Smith in 1954, and the next Sunday she married.

In addition to her husband, she is survived by a son, Peter, and a daughter, Melanie.

The funeral will begin at 11 a.m. today at Congregation Rodeph Shalom, 615 N. Broad St. Burial will be in Brookhaven Cemetery.

Memorial donations may be made to Mortimer Rare Book Room, Neilson Library, Smith College, Northampton, MA, 01063 or Congregation Rodeph Shalom, 615 North Broad St., Philadelphia, 19123, or Congregation Ohev Shalom, 2 Chester Rd., Wallingford, Pa. 19086.