¡Colores!; 1928; Suzanne Vilmain, Bookmaker, Disc 1

was really hoping we'd film outside and I would be completely in water and you wouldn't notice me. That was how that's gonna happen. You know we can do a lot of that and you know this will be part of it and I'd like to put a mic on you and go out there and look at that stuff too and get a b-roll in that way and then if you say anything that will also be loaded. You're ready. So, Susan? Susan. Susan. I know that's what I thought. What is a book? You know I a book to me is what I remember some of the first books I ever saw and it's a great story because it really shows generationally how we pick up things but I had a great grandmother and when I was like two three four years old when we would go to visit her she lived in a very small town in Iowa. She had a house filled with things and she was in a wheelchair or a walker kind of thing

and she was a German and she saved everything and she was a woman who received people in on social gatherings and they would give cards. They would send cards each other. They would leave their cards. It was a very kind of I don't know what but then because she would not throw those away she cut off the message section of the card and would take my mother who was her granddaughter her old high school books her old high school notebooks and paste the picture part of the cards over the writing fill these notebooks with these cards and when my sister and I would arrive because she did not want us to move we would sit in a chair and she would give us these books to look at and I was totally transported. It was like I don't know I I forever since I've been told in other books and I then made one of my very first books was I took a great great paper poetry

book from somebody I didn't even know and pasted over that was one of my very first books where I just pasted over things that I wanted to look at and that's kind of where I began making my own books. At the time I was a graphic designer so you know I was designing books in the trade business but to make a book from somebody else's book and just pasted over was a hugely it was a great way to begin especially when you're working on computers all the time I mean you know this is like a you know imagine you need some kind of balance out of that digital world if you're in love with paper and the whole piece of a book yeah the reason you start doing it in the first place of the digital part of it and all of that so if you had to describe to somebody who has never doesn't know what book it's like they've never seen what would you describe it can we just be can you move over it all to your right it's just a list yeah just cheat in a little bit yeah because of where I'm looking yeah it's like we want you

looking off camera but not too far off okay yeah but you know I also have a wandering eye so yeah okay so a book somebody who well think about it Native Americans I taught a couple years at IAA and even language is when you think about Cherokee being one of the few languages or actually it's a syllabary which means it goes to the phonics of it all the sound of it all is opposed to the letter but yeah what would I say to somebody hmm when I taught and these were all college students who were working on fine art degrees and writing degrees and the class I was teaching was called text image collaboration and I I made them all make a book an edition of a book by the end of the term because it was the medium of which I mostly wanted to turn them on to but also they were writers and they were fine artists and

to bring those two sensibilities because as writers they didn't really think they could draw or illustrate and as fine art they had their mediums but it wasn't book in that way so very interesting books so what were made but I'm not answering the question yeah okay we can have a conversation about it um so my question from that is like why why have books you know I'm sure there are other objects that could transform and transport a person I just happened to find it in the book um I guess I'm not going to hold it up as the only way to move into that place that I love about how books transport just almost transform you I mean

you can remember the books that influenced you and um I'm still not answering the question I don't know but a book is right I just don't know what you're trying to do yeah yeah it's a container that's why I loved finding the knee board it was like wow now here is a container with a very specific intent to can hold something to your body so you can use it while flying a jet so I love that container aspect of it also so maybe maybe you describe to me just in the instance of the alma to not be street book but maybe describe what what a book is in that so when I when the call for entry came out for Alma to not be street it was first for a broadside and then for books but it was a call for people to respond to the bombing of a of a of the booksellers in

Baghdad and so to respond in kind with another book was I didn't really need to make another book in that way so when I found the container that could hold maps and that maps can be filled with anything and you don't have to read it sequentially I mean there are all kinds of what you think of as rules of the book that I break all the time I don't really feel like I have to play by the beginning mill and end numbering of pages filling it with words um my books are non sequential that whole series is non sequentially you could open it up anywhere and get the same or not the same but you would get the effect that I wanted which was to notice what what's what you're bombing notice what happened here yeah um can you could you describe um what it is oh the kneeboard all of the yeah yeah describe it like through what the kneeboard is and how you

you don't want me to show it um well we will later okay let's just talk a little bit um so the the kneeboard is this metal it's like a metal clipboard that has a curvature and straps that you can tie it to your upper knee and it was for jet pilots because they have a limited amount of space and they have a limited amount of ability to you know check out a map and find out where they're flying so this contained all the maps completely folded up in a great way I love that it's called the Turkish map fold um so you can read it from any direction and while you're flying a jet which I just kind of love the idea of like motion you know a lot of books used to be carried by monks on there they called them they call those girl girdle books and they strapped them onto their belts and had them so they could always refer to they were

probably prayer books of some kind so so books have common obviously various containers I mean we think of the book as the codex the open it up with a cover and such but scrolls um papyrus which was really a difficult surface to work on but still you know flat sheets that fall down what do you think that we put in books or why do you think the information so there's a huge tradition in the world of artists books which makes me uh which I think is why I don't think the book's gonna die I don't think we're gonna lose it I don't think it's gonna go anywhere I don't think amazon or candle or any of that is really going to affect because the book holds the possibility of just about anything and I've seen books made about and of unbelievable things so yeah it's not so you did a project called i fear actually that was part of the sketchbook series and um i fear the loss of of italic but now I really realize italic is

more of a type term and cursive is more of a script term but with that series I wanted to I wanted someone to notice what happens in their thinking when they make marks whether it's a an enzo with a brush and ink or it's a quill pen or it's you're taking shorthand or your sketching and idea but that process of moving from what you are thinking and how you put that down to me is the most interesting thing I mean and I fear that we're going to lose that form of thinking that we're gonna be you know we're gonna be these robotic you know we're not even typing anymore in that sense of you know this one finger thing I never thought we would be reduced to going backwards in one finger typing that to me is just like wow who could convince us to do that

and yet you know we're all doing it so i'm not even me yeah yeah it's like the ease of it the convenience somehow having it that small and having it with you all the time it's like kind of keeping it and you realize it so is the is the color book the color book that you have there on is that part of i-feet the i-fears no that was a show and when I took the show down then I bound it was all on walls and so then I bound it into a book so that you could just leaf through the book and get the experience of the color book but it's also about the mark making too no oh that's a that's a that's a sketchbook it's a sketchbook but it's uh it was a filled sketchbook I did a whole series I did like 25 books and they were all called sketchbooks they were all sewn exactly the same in the sense of a sketchbook very useful they all open flat

no there's a tradition in classic bookbinding that you want the book to stay closed I mean it's like a object that you don't want and so that if you notice classic binding they actually cinch it up at the spine so that it stays closed but so you can't open it up and the purpose of a sketchbook is to be able to have this huge surface flat so that's how I bound all these books they're very useful as well as being perfectly bound so is the one it's called Sumi I think on the front so that's a sketchbook also and that one is geared specifically to writing mark making and that yeah that came out of the second half of that series was where I started thinking oh I should just give them space but also give them suggestions for what to do in the blank book so even though I call sketchbooks blank books they're not blank they're filled with the possibility of what you will do with your own mark making

why do you choose to try to do it I fear the loss of italic or summer oh brave new world I just wanted to suggest powers and summer even though I had a very negative use I think of summer is what comes out of a book that's interesting and just again not to repeat but asking you repeat what the book is oh summer is a sketchbook and it has a great little stash box on the front of it with suggestions of possibilities for summer including eyeliner charcoal pastel there's a pencil yeah and then you open it up yeah what do you see kind of tell me about the book a little bit again

well you know there's a huge resistance to people marking in books so I have to sort of move them through when you think about a sketchbook and you think about making marks so during the summer that I made all these books I taught a couple people every time I every week I taught a couple people because it's usually a tedious process just so a book so it's good to have sort of like a sewing circle you know you have people to talk to and you're all doing this very tedious thing but you get it done um sorry I went off on another time to do sorry um um so what was the question well I was I wanted you to scribe so I can because when I want to go look at summer yeah but I kind of want to hear what you were trained to do oh oh I know and so I was so I tried to move people into the book by making marks where I make the marks so that they

recognize that this is a space where you can write over pages I have been writing over printing over doing things polimpsis it's what it's a term which means actually it's when they used to scrape the hides the vellum and turn the page and reprint over it or re script over it that was polimpsis or polimpsis I'm not sure how you say that word so that's what I do I take books apart I put them back together I give you other spaces I'm that summer is a book of possibilities of mark making and I probably took apart a dozen books and then reconfigured them into several sketchbooks classical penmanship classical um yeah but some of them are just mark making so it's not that you have to do cursive or italic so what do you when you put a book out on a table tell me about

like what the what you make a book and you put something together and you put it out there what is the why do you do that why do I make books wow I do want to break out of the book so I don't want to be contained just to that form and now that I'm making paper which takes me back as just to the primary source of making papers like wow so what else I'm making list now of what you can do with paper and so the book is like not even on that list because I already know how to do that kind of thing and I'm I'm wanting to move off the page so to speak so I'm not presenting the book as the holy grail or you know they'd be all in and all of my process it's just been a very convenient container for me to express the things that I know and love which is the way I gather and print and put things together I'm

I'm kind of really obviously I collect books but I I want to collect in a book the possibility of putting two things next to each other you would never see and that could just be two colors it could be you know Joseph Elber study or it could be you know even more symbolic in that way why do you like to put things in books or on paper or what what is that thing that you're so this is the latest thing with abacus which is this translucent sheer thin banana plant pulp and you put two layers of that and you can put things inside and it's like you can see them as if they were a single sheet as if you are looking at it I'll show you the examples of it so suddenly the page becomes a container I mean I've just I just sort of think oh my god so I

now have a single two sheets of paper just scooch together with something inside and you'll see I've been putting everything you can imagine inside of my pages just trying to well hiding places is another huge part of my obsession hiding places and hiding people have been hiding things in books forever and hiding doesn't have to be a negative thing you know I I was telling you about a whole collection I've been collecting the ephemera that comes out of books that people put things in books all the time bookmarks airplane tickets photographs their mail love letters uh or not so love letters I mean I just have this huge collection of the stuff that people put in books it's like it is one of our most classic containers when you think about it it is um so staying like intellectually or like feeling or like something that you enjoy when you

are discovering a container like is there something about that you enjoy discovering in and I'm calling a book a container because it doesn't have to be just a book it can be millions of things that you're saying so I was telling you the story of how I first saw that need board and that was a container immediately to me it held maps and as soon as I recognized what it was and that this was like something usable although we don't use it anymore yeah that totally changes the way I think about what's what I'm going to do it's like designing towards that object it's like putting together a book that says what that object says to me that's what I'm curious about I'm curious about because you're the process of how you go from no what's inside like what does it mean

like you know the me part is maps you know and the maps is the meaning it's the reason to have it so there's like almost a reason to keep these containers and we make books but also think about what I wanted to trigger in people was get in the mind of a jet pilot you're flying over your site you're about to drop a bomb what's below you and I wanted that to be included with the maps so it's like you're not just looking at maps here you're looking at what you're going to destroy in that way so I wanted the maps and I wanted the images from historical images to Baghdad so the whole piece was just this time no time and the same spot yeah that's beautiful like it's like without hammering it over the head you know what I mean on some levels not a political

book I'm not making any political statements I'm just saying wow no it made me think like okay what would I want on my keyboard so I could have it hands-free you know we're talking about yeah function really and that's a timeless thing that you brought into that too it's like bringing something it's more important than what that bomb means yeah so that's really beautiful you know so so that's what I'm kind of curious about like so what in the I fear book or in the Soma book what is in that that you're trying to show or that you want to share or that you is there like a um you know I hang with a very serious crowd of bookbinders these people are dedicated to the art of

the book and I came in it kind of through the back door as a graphic designer doing stuff on max you know it's like there's I mean it's factory almost in that sense of how we do books in that tradebook way so to be over in the book world and learning the trade it's not a trade really but learning the art of making a book once I learned that it was totally you know I don't need to reproduce what is being done by others I really want to keep the book as this place where anybody can come to it and and the more people I can seduce into that form the happier I am I mean I love showing books I love showing books well you know it just it's a better language than my own voice actually I can say more in a book and I'm not talking

the language I'm talking the feel of my books are they just are another voice that I that I love using oh this is art really want to try to show it um it's really hard to show the feel of a book you know I'm making a book right now where um it's an old uh mac um lapbook and we go through computers here a lot because so he got it one so I just have the very sleek aluminum cover back in front and inside is completely stripped out and I'm putting a scroll that opens a single sheet scroll that when you pull it out gives you all this space and the keyboard I'm attaching all these like

fetish almost like cosharis like metals like quilt pens like all these instead of hitting the key to get that you the object is there in miniature form so the keyboard will be the cover and then you'll open it up and out will come this scroll folded down to fit into the laptop that's amazing that will be uh we can we look at that oh yeah oh I have it in form but I I can't really show to you nothing that's not ready okay for a prime time okay so I won't I won't put that in okay that's awesome no it is I can't I mean how where do you show these like how I just had a show at sight um you put I did a circus a Chinese circus act with ladders you that ladders and boards and I put out 20 sketchbooks outside of their bookstore they have a bookstore inside of sight and so I put it

outside the bookstore because my books are not really a bookstore item well they are now but which is great but yeah so when you're so you have books and you do you want people to yes can you kind of talk about what that experience is well can I just get a book and just show you in my lap sure of three of them so it there was a call for a show it was called oh it's a black and white show um at riff gallery it was the the call for entry was black and white so I took that to a place of toast black and white and I got three different toasters and my father had just he was in late stages Alzheimer's it was a physics professor so I made this book as a toast to him

and it's all um physics illustrations from old physics books done on um and a little French people and I had this book in the show and because I know how museums this was the Albuquerque Museum you know they just don't want to they just don't want to do anything with books so I set it up under a plexiglass so that these could all be opened out and people could see them even though they couldn't touch them um and I took out the heating element but this was actually a functioning um toaster with the plug-in and everything do you want to do you want to hit this time-end to me get some um cutaways at her point yeah can I um have you open it up again uh-huh hold on just sick okay now you're gonna pull the yeah

can you see me the drawings and to me yeah so on your your right hand can you pull that one out again and I'll try and do it to see some of that I love how it's a toast yeah that's what I call it a toast it's a toast to my dad so for me with that in your lap let's go backwards just a little bit leave it there so I still want you to kind of feel like you're referring to it but um can you tell us back up to like what this book was it was for your father or can you just yeah it was a toast to my father

who uh was in late-stage Alzheimer's at the time and he was a physics professor so these were all just very sweet drawings um from all physics books and at that point he couldn't really even notice this part so yeah why would you um probably okay there's but yeah because you talked about how people hidden things yeah well that's why I love this advocate because now I have a brand new hiding place between the sheets the other thing I another book that I've been working on for years is called the periodic chart of hiding places and um so now I feel like I'll be able to illustrate that between the pages that will be like I've just discovered how to move forward in that book and I've been carrying this idea on forever and so that that's another thing that just sort of happened in the process of making one thing that I made the connection of like

oh so here wow so there's this new you know thing digital can we um lose the testing of just sort of hear it yeah are you good sir so if you could impart some kind of wisdom about books to maybe a generation of people that might lose you might not oh wow that's a I'm sorry I know that's a wisdom yikes um but it's not my forte um you know I I feel like Johnny Appleseed I just feel like I want to pass on the love of books to kids especially because they're the ones who are going to move through this digital process as if

they don't need them they don't have to have them they don't have to know how to write cursive they don't have to um do they know have do they have to know how to read I know this it's also one of those scary areas where you just want to go okay well can I oh yeah I don't want to go off on that tangy maybe tell you maybe tell what how you don't think the books will disappear yeah yeah but I think it's just all my own private delusion a lot of people are probably thinking about that and so it's even your own opinion on that is kind of valid I think okay I'm feeling very like I just um you know by by even saying fear you are putting that out and I kind of wouldn't want to put I fear the loss of books I fear the loss of

cursive because I just feel like that's a method of thinking that we might lose in all of our digital abilities but I don't fear the loss of books although I want to just approach it with there is so much as far as connecting to individual people that a book can do that it's just it's like water you know rising above all of the obstacles of our differences if you want to call that we have obstacles of differences but you know um people can read the same thing and come at it from as many ways as there are people and it just seems like the most egalitarian space now you have to be able to pick the right books and that's the whole another land mind of like oh my god and yeah don't get me started on that either because that's more towards the fear part of it but

so talk then because what you're doing is your people will be okay they will come to so maybe end it by oh that's so end statement um yeah wrap this up um I should have thought about this before you can sorry um um the blank slate sometimes like my books hmm you talked about you know like you know you're talking about you know picking that book you're talking about how do you you know get people to choose they're the book that imparts some kind of you know thing that everyone could come to in some way and there's all of these books and perhaps they all look exactly the same so how do you get somebody to pick up a certain book and it seems like your books are created in a way that like if I saw one of your books

in a setting with like a bunch of books I would go right to yours so there's something that you're trying to do there like um because you use the word seduce yeah I do um um okay let's think of a good line um yeah no just it's just like a I don't know if I want to have a final word about it it doesn't have to be a final word yeah I just I feel like if you saw my books it this would be so self-explanatory I mean I I almost feel like I I'm handicapped by not being able to just say no just look at this you will you will get it

right away but I'll tell you a story this like this sort of I had a bookstore once called hunting gather and uh I decided I'd been to San Francisco the year before that and somebody had done this at a bookstore and I heard about it so this is not my idea but I had my own bookstore so I could do this where I arranged all the books by the color of the spine and then I sent out a call for entry to both artists book artists artists and poets I know a lot of poets in town so it was like that was an easy group they could pick a color and either produce a book or a poem and then I hung the show in the bookstore in a color or interest so I have obviously been doing this color walk for a while now and I didn't really make that connection but yeah so that was um so you know that most spines are black or white or gray I mean this is a sad thing I mean there's no selection there I mean it's you know it's just if I put that in the front of

the store and then the whole rest of the space was all color coded so to speak it really made people stop and notice that they don't notice that selection of the spine so now I think about the spine almost as its own presentation for I mean yeah it's uh that's what most people see in bookstores is the spine we're not picking up books because of the seduction elements that I'm working with um is there in the seduction of books that um impels people to pick it up because there's something that you're trying to do that do you want people to touch the books do you want people to grasp it? I think about how we merchandise everything it's got to be shiny it's got to be bright it's got to be I mean there are obviously very sophisticated techniques

to get you to want something in the book world you know we are working with what I think of is the most seductive I mean it's got I mean you know we're trying to get in and influence people that's a hugely what a fabulous platform to be working in to begin with and then to have what I think of is the love of the paper the love of the design the love of the type the love of the space that you can give someone when you think about it we have a lot of books that are really just cramming it into the space and as a book artist we really get to open that up and that is a seduction it's like people can feel like they can yeah move into a book move into it yeah and just live there for a while yeah what's it I do yeah I do love putt don't you feel a certain sadness when you finished a book and it's just like man that was a great space to be in yeah can I forget that I

read it and just do it all over again because it was such an experience yeah yeah so that's going back to my great grandmother you know putting a book in my lap that only had pictures because that's what I was reading at that moment was this the seduction into I then had books that I started to copy the I wrote in books as a kid to copy the letters and I still have those books somewhere so you can see my original mark making yeah I felt no boundaries from the very beginning which I think is really interesting because I watch people in their reactions sometimes to taking apart books and printing over and that's like almost sacrilegious to write in a book is another sacrileg you know so I've broken down so many of the rules that it just feels more comfortable like you don't have to worry a lot about cracking the spine or you know think about how when I was in grade school we were taught a very reverence for the book and we covered our books

because they were used year after year and and we were taught with a pen and ink and ink well set at the teacher's desk and so I came from that very wonderful experience I'm not going to paint the rest of it as wonderful but that experience for me was fabulous that we had books I had books all the time around me and you cared about them yeah it wasn't just a throw away thing it is now I'm I now view books as construction material I mean they are we're throwing them away it's a commodity of now bricks in my mind I don't know how I'm going to build but I am going to build with books something use them structurally cool yeah um I think that we could probably move now then that's the one I'll show when you're I'll have you go ahead and keep it

have it closed first okay and then once he's ready we can open it up because you said you said that you know you want the pilot to be able to understand what it is is actually below him like in real life perhaps then in military like yeah so that you can see how it's yeah I'm gonna need no rolling all right so this is the knee board see how it touches to the knee and then snaps on and it has a variety of snaps so I should be doing it this way can you show the one picture that had that yeah oh there's a great map this is a map of everybody that had been confirmed fatalities by providence yeah that picture

right there that's actually I think that's the New York Times image of the day that the bombing happened there's that one picture of the Sumerian oh yeah ishtar right here yeah the gates gate of ishtar the Babylonian goddess of love I'm sorry I'm sorry is that on minabi is that the gates of ishtar no it's on the outskirts yeah bag that has actually moved over the years so back to the time yeah similar yeah okay which are turn your kind of leaving through it but then also um to tear uh just to explain and say you know here's this is what book it is the knee board or the what's what you were kind of doing there so almost for me yeah a little bit different stuff yeah to

talk about the as if we're doing it again oh yeah so I already start with the knee board because now I saw your hands doing it now I want to see you oh okay yeah um so the knee board which you can see this is clipped on the clipboard and then it opens with map folds of other times in Baghdad that city has always been in the path of civilizations changing and there's a front page of the york times after the Babylonian mountain out of the street well you know I'm now seeing newspapers they really do yellow I mean it's uh yeah is there a kind three years old this is a Turkish map fold

yeah you'll see maps today too because it's just opening close so it's like technology it's like this technique yeah yeah yeah did you get a picture of the cover non sequential here can let's turn up we open oh yes