Where do you get your ideas?

One of the things students always ask is, “Where do you get your ideas for your books?” They also are often curious about which comes first: the idea for the structure or the idea for the text. In Kansas City, we saw an art installation by Nick Cave, displayed inside an abandoned church, which had us wondering the same thing. This multimedia installation is part of a Kansas City-wide art exhibit entitled, "Open Spaces."

We usually answer student’s questions with examples: in “Piute Creek” it was the structure. We wanted to make a larger scrolling book, and Gary Snyder’s association with Japan and Jack Kerouac made one of his poems a logical pairing.

Piute Creek

In the book made previous to Piute Creek, “Rock after Rock,” the paintings led the way, demanding a text to support them. In this case, Donna’s journal accounts juxtaposed with complementary writings gleaned from early Sierra Club Bulletins. The binding further developed the thematic treatment, with wood covers and a backpack as the slipcase.

Rock After Rock

Sometimes the text directs the binding structure and illustration. In the book, “Memento Mori,” the theme led to our choice of a long, narrow format as an allusion to a coffin or grave and also suggested the idea for pages that lifted up, as a body rising out of the ground, and both of these then offered constraints for typography and illustration.

Memento Mori

Other times the subject leads us to write our own text. Many of our books have been about hand papermaking, featuring texts we have written, for example, our 2016 book, “Tuckenhay Mill: People and Paper.”

Tuckenhay Mill: People and Paper

Currently I am considering how to make a book about the kazoo. I don’t imagine it will be like the series of books we made out of ukuleles back around 2000. Still, like the ukulele before the 2000s, the kazoo is not considered a musical instrument and is not even listed in most encyclopedias of musical instruments. But, as an integral part of Jug Band Music (which we are currently exploring musically), it has a place in the world of music. We are exploring ways we might feature it in an artist book…and as part of that exploration, last week we made a pilgrimage to Warrensburg, MO, to view one of the world’s largest collections of kazoos, "Knobtown Kazoos."

Knobtown Kazoos, photo by Chris Azevedo
 

We are not yet sure how the information we find will manifest as an artists’ book. Our next step will be to gather more written information and search sound archives around the country to see what has been recorded.

So where do we get our ideas? As many different ways as there are different ways. Some ideas come as a whole package, as they did with Memento Mori. Some develop step by step, as they did for Rock after Rock. And some ideas, though they seem promising, and we start to work on them, never go anywhere. We will see what happens with kazoos.

Autumn beauty in a Missouri campsite

Loop the Loop Wanderings

In 1997 we printed a quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five as a scrolling book titled Pandora’s Box.

Who would have guessed that when we visited the Lilly Library at Indiana University Bloomington last week….

…we would find Vonnegut either wrote, or stored, his original manuscripts as scrolls?

And that in the woods of a nearby campground we would find another kind of scrolling book?

So here we are, just about to the end of week three of our trip, and we have seen lots.
You can tell that until just a few days ago the weather was HOT and humid too. For those of you who are curious: we made the caravan with west coast weather in mind, and with the copper roof, it is really hard to keep cool with the heat. In fact, we had to buy an in-room air conditioner to make this sort of midwest fall weather bearable..

As Peter often read in his favorite Dr Seuss book: On Beyond Zebra: 
“Most people stop with a Z but not me, the places I go and the things that I see could never be spelled if I stopped with a Z ….” 
And wow have we seen some things on this trip:

In Louisville we saw what must be the shallowest house in the world:

And, we saw a bicycle-powered printing press while attending the Ladies of Letterpress gathering at Central Print in St. Louis.

We learned to print from found objects like dominoes and legos...

And we saw beautiful colors in all sorts of places.

Nearby, in the Julian Edison Department of Special Collections Library at Washington University, St. Louis, they were hosting a show of our work.

As was the library at IUPUI’s Herron School of Art and Design.

We visited classes and held open house during our visit in Indianapolis.

In Marshall, Illinois we spent the rainy and cold day in the public library catching up on business. Donna helped the local “Saturday Ladies” complete their weekly jig saw puzzle and learned the lore of a local hero whose blessing protected the town from tornados.

A little further down the road we found the Gateway Arch Replica, a little smaller than the arch in St. Louis, and so much more approachable.

The Gateway Arch Replica in Vandalia, IL

The Gateway Arch in St Louis

What we found at the University of Illinois, Urbana, was really past Z: the handprint of a seventeenth century papermaker revealed as a "watermark" on a page in a book they had on display:

Check out this crazy "loop the loop" route we have taken! It is like one of those letters from beyond Z. Truly we are "wandering"!!

Wandering Near A Hurricane

Back in May we left the truck and caravan in Murphy, NC, parked under tarp shelters in a friend’s backyard, and flew home. We spent the summer in California making books, as well as enjoying some time surfing and hiking in the Sierra Nevada. On September 25, 2018 we flew back to NC to start what will be the final leg of our Wandering Book Artist “Work of 40 Years” tour. 

Natural disasters seem the new norm, and we flew into the storm so to say when we flew into Atlanta. We are unfamiliar with hurricanes and you from the west may be too, so here is a handy guide:

How to survive a hurricane in a caravan on the East Coast:

1) Plan to go to where they have hurricanes in a non-hurricane season. Oh well, did that wrong.

2) Stay far from the coast, where the rain may be relentless drizzle, not a torrential flood. We got that right!

3) Don’t park off the pavement. Oops, got stuck bad.

4) Bribe the AAA guy. He stayed overtime to pull us out.

Are you starting to wonder if we had a little personal tragedy? When we got back to North Carolina we found our truck and trailer were saturated with Smokey Mountain mold. It took washing everything with vinegar to get rid of the musty smell.

Then as we tried to pull out of the yard it started raining cats and dogs and the truck got stuck in mud. We had to call AAA to get us unstuck, and then because we couldn’t go forward, we had to back truck and trailer down a long steep driveway to get to the street. I really hope to never do that again.

But besides our news of natural disaster we have good news to report from this side of the country too: The people we have met have all been great! Folks in Knoxville, Nashville and Louisville have fed us, let us park in their driveways, and assured us that right livelihood and the arts are thriving in their communities! Then too, we may be biased: Libraries in Tennessee bought nice selections of our books!

This is the library at UT Knoxville

Nashville used to have a Printers Alley, with iconic businesses like Hatch Show Print, but as is happening around the country, Nashville’s small and older buildings are regularly being torn down and replaced by larger ones. Now its just a street with beautifully restored historic hotels alongside big anonymous business buildings.

In the Noelle Hotel on Printers Alley we found that besides being the capital of Country Music, there is lots of interest in the other arts. In the lobby there was a crazy kaleidoscope invention being made:

And on the 8th floor we enjoyed art work by Lesley Patterson-Marx (who is a superb book artist!). I love that song "Sunny", by Bobby Hebb.

And we even had the chance to give a few talks to high school students at the Nashville School of the Arts High School.

And one at LetterSong Gallery in Louisville.

Which is the home of Jug Band Music.

Back on the road, wandering the midwest

We are back on the road, currently posting daily to our Wandering Book Artists' Facebook page. We will have a post up soon, but until then you can see what is up on our Wandering Book Artists Facebook page.