Autumn color for the Artists

Last week we traveled from New Haven, CT to Kalamazoo, MI. Our schedule was full with all the driving and with visits to Penn State, The Morgan Conservatory, Cleveland Institute of Art, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Elderly Instruments, and Michigan State University in East Lansing.  As the weeks have passed and we moved further north and later into the season we have found ourselves regaled with the vibrant fall colors of the trees with their bright leaves falling all around us. Being Wandering Book Artists from the west coast, the autumn colors here in the east have amazed us, and we have been left completely surprised when folks out here have told us that this year has not been as vibrant as in years past!

Fort Custer State Park. A beautiful place for fall wandering.

Hardwoods turning golden.

We visited Fort Custer State Park with our friends, the artists Ladislav Hanka and Jana Hanka, near Kalamazoo. Along with gleaning apples from an abandoned orchard, we swam in Lake Michigan, foraged mushrooms (puffballs, cooked and eaten at three meals) and hiked in the woods. Above is some milkweed with bugs we found there.

We stayed with wood engraver Jim Horton and his partner Rowena who live down this leafy drive near Ann Arbor. The drive ended in a circle that was just a bit too tight for the truck and trailer and we had a heck of a time getting back out, but stuff like that happens when you travel in a Tiny Home. Jim is a letterpress printer, an antique collector with the worlds largest collection of pencil sharpeners, and he grows his own popcorn! Take a class with Jim at the John C. Campbell folk school when you can. He is an excellent teacher and we are always impressed with the quality of work his students produce at JCC.

We passed Amish farmers harvesting their fields in rural Pennsylvania. A nice sight: seeing these horses pulling old harvesting equipment down the road in the morning light. There was a young man driving the wagon, standing tall, the picture of health, head held high,  floppy hat flapping in the wind.

Peter demonstrated papermaking to the students at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, shaded by the leaves on a sunny fall day. We pulled right into the center of north campus, gave tours, talked to three art classes, and surprised many engineering majors who happened to wander by. 

Donna showing her books "Stories in the Rocks" and "Hetch Hetchy Flora" to the students in Ann Arbor. The class, titled Florilegium: A Plant Compendium taught by Cathy Berry focused on botanical illustration and the final project will require each student to make an accordion book. Peter had been talking, had played a song on his ukulele, and the students were all sitting at their seats listening studiously, but when Donna opened her book all hell broke loose and the students flew out of their seats to crowd around her and look. Her book was exactly what they were supposed to make and a complete and total inspiration. It was quite a moment and I tried my best to catch it in a photo.

Eric Alstrom of the Conservation Department and Peter stand beside the one of the displays of our books in the Michigan State University Library. This library has a good number of our works in their special collections, and this show is part of our celebration of 40 years of making books!

The books on display in East Lansing, MI.

Peter gave a talk about our 40 years of work. He has given 100s of talks and is hardly ever thrown off his stride, but when the tech person turned off the powerpoint and filled the screen with a huge detail of the book Peter was showing he couldn't stop looking over his shoulder to see who was behind him. He is showing "Sometimes I Pretend", a scrolling book with a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye. Find it on our website: Sometimes I Pretend.

Now we are in Indiana, at Hook Paper and Pottery. Andrea Peterson and Jon Hook are having their fall sale next weekend. If you are anywhere near stop by. They will have homemade treats and libation to induce you to buy their ceramics, hot sauce, body balm, candles and more. It has rained all day. LaPorte got several inches of rain yesterday and over 10 inches since last week. But we are nice and dry in the caravan. Even though it is tiny, it is cozy and comfortable.

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Gipsy Life in the Providence Athenaeum*

The Providence Athenaeum was "just what I imagine the library at Hogwarts was like." That was what the guy standing next to me said, as I took my panorama picture.

And it sort of was. There was still a card catalog.

Donna started look through it and found that the 397s had books under the heading in the catalog: "Gypsies".

After searching around she found the 300 section and then an interesting book.

It was full of really wonderful line drawings.

*"Gipsy" is the spelling that was used in 19th century England. Kenneth Grahame in "the Wind in the Willows" uses this spelling. 

Caravan is the English word for what we in the USA call a trailer. Some other words that have been to describe the same vehicles are "wagon, waggon, van, caravan and living wagon" We describe our trailer as a tiny home on wheels, or  as a caravan designed after the 19th century wagons built in Reading, England. Such caravans were primarily built for the English Romani (sometimes spelled Romany or written as Roma) people. The Romani word for a horse drawn living wagon is 'vardo'. This word is sometimes used to describe any trailer with a curved roof.

From Swarthmore to Vassar

Last week we visited the Cathedral of Books (in the Peabody Library at John Hopkins University) and this week we visited the library at Vassar that really did look like a castle.

This week we saw some book related things we want to share with you:

The Philadelphia Free Library

We saw part of their collection of “horn books”. For those unfamiliar with the genre, a horn book is more like a chalk board than a book, a hand held object with written or printed text under a flattened layer of transparent animal horn. The PFL has hundreds of interestingly shaped horn books in their collection and had a few on display in the special collections.

University of Pennsylvania

We saw an engaging show of books from the Mid East and Asia. The use of color and the placement of text on a page differs wildly from our modern fine press aesthetic and inspired visions of possible books we could make in the future

Cornell and Vassar

Between Ithaca and Poughkeepsie we saw some incredible leaf books and some very colorful leaves.

Surprise! And finally....

We want to thank all the folks at Swarthmore for hosting a show of our books in their library as part of our 40 year celebration. We visited on Monday October 2, 2017, both to see the show and give a papermaking demonstration. The demonstration is worth mentioning because was the first time we used the new mould and deckle made for us by Brian Queen. Brian used a CMC machine to make the mould and deckles, and a 3d printer to make the watermarked screen.

Some of the best days are finished off with the best nights spent in leafy campsites. This one is in Lackawanna State Park in Pennsylvania.

From Book Lair to Book Cathedral

This was a week full of wandering and full of wandering book artists' style adventures. It started with a visit to the lair of book beasts, the workshop of Daniel Essig, one of the rock stars of the book arts world. His art is rich and complex, with earth-made vitality imbued by his signature use of mica and metal. His works are held together with bone, leather and linen, and are full of myth and fairy tale metaphor. You probably have seen his work and maybe even tried to copy it too. It just is so appealing. Look for a class with him at Penland or really anywhere around the country. He wanders almost as often as we do!

Peter and Daniel share stories in the studio...

Some super nice old presses in the Essig studio.

Anyone know anything about the small one on the right?

Library visits, book arts students, hauling the rolling suitcases full of books: these are a few of my favorite things this week. We visited librarians at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and Greensboro, Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia, Goucher College, Johns Hopkins University and Maryland Institute of the Arts in Baltimore. We are getting better at the bookish smart talk about our art... It's fun to find new ways of talking about the uniqueness of each book and to find the obvious reasons that it would fit perfectly in a library's special collection.

In this photo faculty and students join us for lunch in the gazebo next to our sweet camping spot, where we spent two nights in the very center of Goucher College in Baltimore. If our door was open passing students would stop to look and talk. We appreciate our renaissance book as art scholar host April Oettinger, who arranged for us to give a lecture as part of our 40 year celebration, a stuffed to the gills bookbinding workshop in the library, and lunch, dinner, and an appointment with the librarian as well!

The Cathedral of Books! This was Baltimore's first public library, built by George Peabody in the mid-1800s. It is now part of Johns Hopkins University. The fantastic architecture creates an impressive cathedral-like ambience. We were thrilled to have our books spread out over a table in one of the alcoves on the first floor, surrounded by Mr. Peabody's well-used books, many with broken bindings only held together by wrappings of linen tape, as the special collections librarian studied them.

In the "Cathedral of Books," we saw this great engraving in a book on display titled, "Death by Library." I start to feel like this after too many hours inside of too many libraries, so I try to get outside when I can, and so as often as possible we spend the weekends camping in a state park so we canwalk through the trees and by the bays found on the eastern coast of our USA.

We are impressed by the level of engagement and commitment we have found in the book arts students we have talked to. They understand the complexity of the art form, and don't doubt Peter when he says that artists' books will be the dominate art form by the end of the 21st century! Now we just have to work at getting more collectors on board!