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.

Vardos and tiny homes we passed along the way.....

We are back in Santa Cruz for the summer. The truck and trailer are  happily sheltered in Murphy, North Carolina, waiting for our late September return, when we will visit libraries across the mid-west as we head our way home.

On the current book arts front the University of Utah's Marriott Library is hosting a show of our work as part of our 40 year celebration, titled "40 years of books to go." It can be seen on the level 1 Lobby Gallery from May 24th through September 1st, 2018. (https://newsletter.lib.utah.edu/current-exhibitions/). We will be giving a talk there on June 21st at 5:30.

 

We have never actually passed (or been passed by) another tiny home or vardo while driving (and we have pulled our  little tiny home on wheels over 60,000 miles now...) But we have found a few that were parked, and at the end of a trip we like to share photos of what we found:

 

 

Outside of Orlando in the Wekiva Springs campground we sited the first actual curved roof vardo we have encountered in the wild (meaning other than the ones we have seen at SCA events). It was owned and built by the camp host, (sorry we forget his name).

 

 

  

 

In a parking lot, overlooking the ocean, we found this pickup truck with a vardo-like camper.

At a show ground in St. Augustine we found this cotton candy looking wagon. It is currently being used by a food vendor.

In St. Petersburg we found this "tiny home" still on display in the central park, even though the tiny home show had been the week before. (We were not yet in town, so happy to see this one.) For those of you who do not know, the tiny home movement defines a tiny home being under 400 square feet. Our wagon, at 7.5 by 14.5 is about 110 square feet. What makes it different than a single wide trailer? Well for one it is a bit smaller (a single wide is usually not less than 600 sq. ft.) But really it is the materials used and the mind set behind its construction. The tiny house movement promotes financial prudence, eco-friendly choices, shared community experiences, and a shift in consumerism-driven mindsets.

Well, as we said at the start of the blog, our truck and wagon are happily ensconced under shelters in Murphy, NC in our friend Dave Peters yard, and by now are probably completely covered by kudzu. Dave wrote a great song about kudzu, and you can see it on youtube. Well I thought you could, but it doesn't seem to be there... Here is another one of his song though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-oxyjQt0wo