A11. Yotan's Vision

A11. Peter Thomas. Yotan's Vision. Santa Cruz, California: Peter & Donna Thomas, 1980.

89 x 73 mm (3 ½” x 2 7/8”), 32 pages, 150 copies.

Binding: Quarter-bound in blue sheepskin and marbled paper made by Kate Christoon. Title in gold on spine. Paper: White, handmade at Hayle Mill. Printing: Letterpress. Typography: Handset Bernhard Modern Roman. Illustration: Five linocuts by Donna Thomas.

“The text is a fairy tale I wrote. This was our first miniature book. It was printed on long skinny scraps of English handmade paper salvaged from the Lime Kiln Press’s Granite and Cypress. Printed six pages up lengthwise across bed of my old Challenge proof press. The entire book was hand inked with a brayer; partly because the Allen’s book said a proof press was not a hand press unless hand inked, and partly because the press had just been obtained from our local high school print shop and was so abused that the rock hard rollers would not turn properly.

I had known Muir Dawson because of his association with William Everson, my interest in papermaking, and the coincidence that his son was in my graduating class at University of California Santa Cruz. When the book was complete I took it to Dawson’s Book Shop to show it to him. Muir was not very interested, but said I should show it to his brother since that he liked little stuff like that. Without much hope I went to look for Glen Dawson. Glen looked at the book, pulled out a ruler, measured it and said, ‘If it were a quarter of an inch shorter I would have bought twenty.’ I was in shock. Luckily we had not bound the whole edition, and although I really didn’t want to trim the perfectly proportioned margins or the deckle edges, I did want to sell some, so went home and made him twenty books. Thus we made our first official miniature book and our artistic lives were redirected, as we spent much of the next 25 years making miniature books.”