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"!!