Wandering Alone: Colorado, Utah, and Idaho

In July 2019, as Donna was wandering the wilderness of California’s Sierra Nevada (backpacking and painting new books), I wandered the roads of America’s west,. I drove alone, taking the truck and caravan from Denver to Moscow, Idaho, in preparation for our fall trip through the Pacific Northwest, which is to begin in the first of October with a reception for a show of our work at the University of Idaho’s Special Collections Library. https://www.lib.uidaho.edu/special-collections/

What did I learn on the trip?

That there are lots of people, everywhere across the country, who love books, and there are lots of books everywhere across the country…..

Ray Tomasso's house

Ken Sanders Book Shop

That there are lots of incredibly interesting artists, everywhere across the country.... Like print and papermaker Susan Mackin Dolan, who lives near Vail, Colorado.

Susan's laser cut block, and wood block print on her handmade paper

Like graphic and installation artist Bob Bissland, who I stayed with near Logan, Utah.

Like Jim Croft who puts on the Traditional Old Ways Workshop in Santa, Idaho.

That it is a long drive from Denver to Moscow (not the one in Russia.)

And that the drive from Denver to Provo Utah is probably one of the most beautiful drives in the country, but I would have to be an Ansel Adams to be able to capture that beauty in a photograph.

And by the way, we will be traveling through the Pacific Northwest in October 2019, with stops in Moscow from Oct 6-10, in Seattle Oct 11-15, in Olympia Oct 16, in Portland Oct 17-18, in Eugene Oct 19-23, and in Arcata Oct 26-7. We will be back in Santa Cruz in time for Halloween.

The caravan, tucked away for a few months in Potlatch, Idaho, until we return in the fall.

What Captures the Attention of a Wandering Book Artist?

When we wander our attention has been captured by seemingly random things, (as those of you who have read our blog carefully can attest to.) And we often wonder which of those topics have interested you the most? How about Typography?

A page from the book that Tom and James printed in 2018 at the Palace of the Governors Print shop, featuring prints from Gustave Baumann's original woodcut blocks

Sheet music from a display at the New Mexico Museum of Art

Sheet music again

Our friend Mark has an exceptional ephemera collection, these are old almanacs. But not just any kind of almanac, they are ones published by what he calls "quack medicine" companies. You know, snake oil, magic elixirs and the like. 

Just how many type faces belong in one advertisement?

Or how about the printers and papermakers, university librarians, book arts classes, etc. that we visited:

Tom Leech, from The Print Shop at the Palace of the Governors,
in Santa Fe, NM

What happens in Las VEGAS, NM, stays in Vegas!
Peter in the plaza with a very tall guy

Peter talking to a class in the library at Colorado College,
which includes playing the ukulele book.

Mark and Peter outside the caravan door, talking printing and type, etc. in Sheridan, CO 

Peter talking with Ray Tomasso, who has been our papermaking and printing friend since the 1980s. He is the proprietor of Inter-Ocean Curiosity  Studio in Englewood, CO. He is currently experimenting with CMC-ing wood type.

Or how about pretty stuff we have come across:

Tin work, Las Vegas, NM

Painting inspirations, NM

Super nice landscape painting in Fine Arts Center at Colorado College

Donna looking at a different series of paintings at the Fine Arts Center

Or how about pictures of the caravan out enjoying nature:

Our campsite beside a beautiful rocky bluff to take walks on at the campground at Pueblo Lake State Park, CO

The Rocky Mountains beside us where we parked for the night on the Colorado College campus in Colorado Springs, CO

More like 15 hours

Now tucked in for a few months in Sheridan, CO, thanks to Mark 

And it snowed the day after we tucked it in. The tarp worked perfectly. 

We will be flying back to California tomorrow to make more books and arrange the next trip in October 2019. We will visit Jim and Melody of Old Ways Workshops in Santa, Idaho, visit a 40 year show of our work at the University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho, and stop in Seattle, Portland and Eugene.

As a sort of afterword to this final post before flying home, for those of you who were waiting to see the pictures of the interesting or curious vehicles we passed on the way, we don't have any because we didn't see any. But luckily, Mark's collection of Quackery ephemera saved the day, as we found this nice illustration of a medicine show wagon in one of the advertisements.

Home again, and again and again. You’ve heard this before…

Leaving Austin, I drove to Dallas, where I spent Friday night playing some great music with one of Dallas’ many ukulele clubs. Then, on Saturday I taught a bookbinding class for a community based art center called Oil and Cotton.

O and C's neighbor, Davis St. Espresso, does not offer Internet so that people will use it as a social gathering place. The idea worked; the place was as lively as a brewpub. I guess a picture would be worth a thousand words.

Dallas is east Texas, but really it is just about exactly mid-ways across the USA, half-way between the Atlantic and the Pacific. (For reference TX is bigger than CA: Texas is 790 miles from north to south and California is 770. Texas is 660 miles east to west while California is only 250. So I had a long drive ahead of me to get to Albuquerque, NM. I soon left behind and . I drove endless hours, bucking headwinds, watching the water and pines of east Texas disappear as I entered entered the flat and dry windblown farmland of central Texas, and then there was only the high desert of west Texas.

I stopped in Clovis to visit the Norman Petty Studios, where Buddy Holly recorded his hits. Clovis is a tiny town in the middle of nowhere. It is really nowhere (did I say that before?) so hard to imagine that the music recorded there (and mostly I mean Buddy Holly’s songs) was played round the globe and influence so many budding musicians in the 1960s (like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.) I was shown thru the studio by David Bigham, who was one of The Roses, the studio band. David actually sang backup on some of Buddy's records. Buddy died at 22 and David was not much older at the time. He told me he spend most of his working life at Walmart, and pretty much never mentioned his musical career because who would believe that he actually sang with Buddy Holley on “Its so Easy to Fall in Love.” He played me the song in the control room, through the original studio monitor speakers.  It was pretty amazing to meet someone like that, but what really sticks with me about the visit was hearing the music through those studio monitor speakers. It was so rich. I am so used to hearing music sound crummy coming out of a little iPhone speaker or its equivalent.

After teaching a bookbinding class in Albuquerque for their book arts group LIBROS, I left the truck and trailer in long term parking at the airport and flew home.

On March 22, 2019 Donna and I fly back to Albuquerque and then we will drive to Colorado visiting Colorado Springs 3/26, Denver 3/27, and Boulder 3/28. We will park the truck and trailer in Denver till the end of June, then drive to Santa, Idaho for Jim Croft's Old Ways Workshop. In October we will return to Idaho for a show of our work at The University of Idaho, then drive home through Seattle, Portland, and Eugene. That’s our story and we are sticking to it. To end this post, here are a few interesting vehicles I encountered on this leg of our trip: The first is Donn’s Depot in Austin. It is a piano bar made out of  3 or 4 train cars that were cobbled together.

The second is the shell of an old bus that is used as sun/rain sheltered outdoor seating for the Davis St. Espresso cafe next to Oil and Cotton.