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.

Papel Texano's Mad Scientist Papermaker

On this trip I visited Yamandu Ploskonka, a hand papermaker living in Austin.  I became aware of his inventive papermaking when I saw him demonstrating at the 2016 Friends of Dard Hunter meeting in Santa Fe. Originally from Bolivia, Yama made his way TO the USA via the YMCA, and then made his way IN the USA by computer programming. He learned letterpress and printmaking at a young age, was more recently drawn to hand papermaking. He wanted make prints on a quality substrate, and so decided to make the paper himself.

But he did not stop there. He has explored making paper-crete. Even the doors to his studio are made from paper, well actually cardboard, but only cardboard, there is no wood.

Yama is a self taught Rube Goldberg/McGiver/mad scientist who has designed and constructed ingenious bits of equipment to aid in his papermaking. The day I visited he was putting finishing touches on a CMC machine he was building from salvaged parts. I was overwhelmed by his inventiveness: even when reinventing the wheel, he found new creative ways to do it.

Among other things, he has constructed a loom for weaving laid wire using a modified bicycle to twist the wire. And then he used his CMC and laser printers to make the mould that wire was mounted to.

He has modified a washing machine to digest sheet pulp.

This digester also pumps the liquid pulp into a pulper he devised from a garbage disposal and a trashcan.

Then a series of pipes and buckets, modeled after a toilet tank assembly, feeds the pulp into the vat at regulated intervals, keeping the vat’s water to pulp ratio constant.

Then to complete the process, since his moulds do not have backing so cannot easily be couched, he invented an alternate way to get the sheet off the mould. After dipping the mould he sets it on a platform to the left of the vat, with the wet sheet facing up. He then places a pellon on top of the wet sheet, flips over a vacuum box on top of the pellon, and turns it on. That sucks the out the water out of the sheet and draws iff off the mould and onto the pellon. He then places the pellons with paper in a stack to go into a hydraulic press, and then to the stack dryer.

As you can tell. I was impressed. Visit him on Facebook or as Papel Texano.