A69. Bikupan

A69. Bikupan

Thomas, Peter and Donna

26.5 x 19 cm (10 ½” x 7 ½”), 31 pages, 119 copies.

Binding: Quarter-bound in leather and blue marbled paper. Title in gold on spine. End sheets dark blue. Paper: Blue, handmade by Peter Thomas in 1983 using white and black rags and blue pigment. Printing: Letterpress. Typography: Monotype Centaur and Arrighi. Illustration: Six samples of paper made at the Lessobo Paper Mill tipped in.

“Lessobo has one of the few remaining traditional handmade paper mills in the world. The handmade paper mill is open to visitors during the summer months, and there are daily guided tours. We arrived after the end of the season. They still allowed visitors, but there were no tours. The day I visited there were two men working at the vat, making a medium size sheet of paper. I asked them questions, but they did not speak English. I spent an hour taking slides and made the video recording of them at the vat, then went upstairs to the gift shop. I asked if there was any old paper for sale. They took me up into the loft of the mill. There I was shown a shelf full of old paper. Most of it was packed in reams made up of sets of five sheets folded in half. It was a thrill to be able to feel that wonderful old gelatin sized paper, to pull it out of its ream wrappers and see the work of skilled craftsmen from the past. Most sheets were not watermarked. Two were dated 1907 and 1908, not old when compared to the mill itself, but old enough for me. I was told that in the 1950s the mill had sold off much of its old paper, and since this paper was dated it was not available for sale. There were several smaller sheets with watermarks and no dates for sale, so I bought them to include in this book. The first of the sample papers tipped in was made in 1990 and the rest were made some time in the mid-twentieth century, although exactly when is unknown. When I got back to the gift shop the mill manager was there and, excited by my interest, he took me back into the break room to meet the papermakers. In perfect English, they greeted me and asked why I was so interested in watching them make paper. Go figure.

The book is titled Bikupan, which means bee hive, a reference to the shape of the buildings (which is depicted in the illustration across from the title page), and a reference to the bee hive watermark in the new sheet of paper we bought to include as a sample. To further this theme, rather than a traditional half-title we printed a quote taken from Tycho Brahe’s gravestone (and found again later in the text) ‘let us work while we have time…’ to again reference the bee hive, and in recognition of how much work it takes to make paper and make fine press books.

At the time we were striving to figure how to make our books more of an art work than a beautiful literary work. One way we thought to achieve that goal was to make sure each page spread was visually interesting. In this book, rather than having pages and pages of uninterrupted text, as in a classic fine press book, we alternated a page spread of text with a page spread featuring the paper samples. On the text sheet behind the paper samples we printed the watermarks from the sample sheets, right reading on the verso and wrong reading on the recto. We think of this as our first fine press artists’ book.”

Santa Cruz, California: Peter & Donna Thomas

1992

English