A77. A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf

A77. A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf

A78. A Story of Life

Thomas, Peter and Donna

A77.
30.5 x 24 cm (12” x 9 ½”), 31 pages, 195 copies.

Binding: Quarter-bound in leather and light brown paper. Raised relief decoration on cover. "Paper" blind-stamped on spine and cover. Raised bands on spine. End sheets, cover paper, and introductory page handmade from cotton rag half-stuff, cotton liner, and abaca by Peter Thomas at his paper mill in Santa Cruz. Housed in a brown paper wrapper tied with a brown ribbon. Paper: Twenty-seven samples from papermakers folded into folios; bound as individual signatures. Printing: Letterpress. Text printed from polymer plates. Typography: Digitally set Centaur. Illustration: One linocut by Donna Thomas. Notes: Samples and statements were collected by Peter Thomas, who also wrote the introduction. Copies 1-25 contain seven additional samples of handmade paper from the following: The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Paper Mill, Crazy Paper—Mary Lynn Nutting, The Historic Rittenhouse Town Paper Mill, Pyramid Atlantic, Mary Slowinski, Peter Sowinski, and Waterworks Studio.

“Finding that 1993 was officially declared the year of the craft, and, inspired by the beauty of paper sample books from the past, especially Dard Hunter’s work, we decided to create a book to honor contemporary hand papermakers and highlight the variety of visual and textural qualities found in modern handmade paper. Each of the contributors was a production papermaker, rather than paper artist, with a demonstrated history of excellence. They were asked to supply 200 sheets of 11x17 paper, of a consistent quality and weight for the project. We asked them each to write a statement about their relationship to paper. We did not want to create a papermaking manual, but rather a visual artifact that would serve to create a picture of the state of hand papermaking in 1993 for the future historian. As some papermakers we wanted to include could not supply 200 sheets, we asked them for 25 sheets and included their samples in the special copies.

This book was a further exploration into ways we could organize and arrange the page layout so that no matter where the reader opened the book they would find the page spread visually interesting. In this book each paper was folded as a folio, and sewn together in single page sections. The verso was blank and the recto had their statement printed on it. It was an aesthetic success.

The binding is based on the one we made for the miniature book Saroyan, using binder’s board glued to the cover board, but under the cover paper to create raised bands that would refer to the blind tooled lines of a traditional leather binding. We wanted to add a leather spine to the Saroyan binding, but still have the raised bands span from spine to fore edge. To achieve this goal we had to invent a system where the leather was glued inside the covers (rather than on the outside as in a conventional leather spine binding). We were pretty proud of ourselves for figuring out how to do this, and on one trip showed it to the universities binding teacher, who said, ‘Oh, that binding, I teach it to all my first year students…’”

A78.
70 x 51 mm (2 ¾” x 2”), 1 scroll, 37 copies.

Binding: Scroll. Case-bound in cloth over boards. Title printed in gold on parchment label on cover. End sheets off-white. Scroll wound onto dowels between two wooden blocks and operated by two bone knobs on the right side. Paper: Speckled white, handmade by Peter Thomas. Printing: Letterpress. Typography: Handset Paramount. Illustration: Four linocuts by Donna Thomas. Notes: Made for the occasion of Donna’s 37th birthday.

“This was our first scrolling book. The idea to make a case-bound book with a scrolling page came in 1993 when I was sitting in a history of the book class at the University of Alabama. I had been invited to give a talk to the graduate book arts students and was sampling one of their other classes. In passing, the teacher mentioned that there are certain times in history when things can only be defined by what they are not. In the early twentieth century a car was called a horseless buggy, a radio was a wireless, and today we call a computer screen a page. The scroll was the first book format and the computer is the latest. This set me thinking that perhaps there would be some way to connect or combine the oldest and newest to create some new book forms and that inspired me to try and make a book that scrolled like a computer.
We printed the cover’s label on parchment and used bone for the scroll knobs to reference the theme of Muir’s text, which talks of learning about life from experiencing the death of things.”

Santa Cruz, California: Peter & Donna Thomas

1994

English