Interview of Kitty Maryatt
UCLA Library, Center for Oral History Research, University of California, Los Angeles Interview of Kitty Maryatt

Transcript

SESSION ONE (October 10, 2014)



00:00:04

COLLINGS:

Okay, we are on. Good morning, Kitty.





MARYATT:

Good morning.





COLLINGS:

Today is October 10, 2014, Jane Collings interviewing Kitty Maryatt at her studio in L.A. We’re just going to start right in with your early life. Where and when were you born?





MARYATT:

Well, I was born in Seattle in 1945, and my parents brought me down to California when I was two, so I’ve really been here since 1947, so I’m almost a California native—





COLLINGS:

Yes, indeed.





MARYATT:

—but the blue waters of Seattle still run in my blood, and the green trees, that’s still a big influence on me.





COLLINGS:

How interesting.





MARYATT:

So I’m happiest when I’m in the Northwest or in the Northeast, but on the other hand, I love the warm. So it’s really hard. You can’t find the warm and the green, so here I am in Southern California, where I’ve been since 1947.





COLLINGS:

And what would you like to say about your family for this record?





MARYATT:

Well, I had a wonderful, big family. I was very lucky growing up to have four brothers and sisters—





COLLINGS:

Oh, how lovely.



00:02:05

MARYATT:

—and my parents, you know, intact family, kind of an amazingly prototypical growing-up in South Pasadena. So I was in all of the schools in South Pasadena, from kindergarten to high school, so we all knew each other at school, pretty much. Then we had social activities with church, with Oneonta Congressional Church. So we would do Sunday School and sang in the choir. I lived on Milan Avenue in South Pasadena, so it was near Garfield Park, and so we’d go over to the park and play, or else we played baseball in the street or we had our backyard with our swing set, and all of us would play together.

So it was really—you know, I suppose there was a small amount of arguing, like any family, but we really didn’t. I think it was kind of idyllic, as I look back on it. I had my little baby sisters, so I was the second one, and my baby sisters were my babies, so they were five and six years younger, and my older brother was my best friend, and then I had a youngest brother. So we did a lot of things together, so I was lucky in that way.





COLLINGS:

Very much.





MARYATT:

Again, going through all of the South Pasadena schools, and I suppose in a way I was a little bit cloistered. I compare myself a lot—I’m totally fascinated with my husband’s upbringing, which was so very different from mine, so I’m always mining him for information of what was it really like growing up in a rural part of Upper Michigan. We’re thirty-seven days apart in age, but he went to a one-room schoolhouse, and they had 300 inches of snow average a year, and he didn’t speak any English until he was five years old, and he spoke Finnish, like all of the people around there. His father was a logger, so he’d go out in the summers and bring down the logs and make ice rinks. I loved ice-skating, right? That was the time that ice-skating was really hot because of the Olympics, so of course you go to an already-made rink that’s indoors. So how do you make a rink in Upper Michigan? So someday I’ve got to do a book about this unusual upbringing—





COLLINGS:

Yes, indeed.





MARYATT:

—because I just feel like in contrast, I don’t have the stories that he has and kind of a lot of the angst, too, I think that he grew up with, seven kids in his family in a four-room house in Upper Michigan. So we had a few more rooms, but—



00:04:03

COLLINGS:

A long dark winter.





MARYATT:

And long dark winters. The most poignant story he ever told me was that they’d play with their toys outside in the snow, and he had this snow bank next to his house, and he said that if you either forgot to bring in your little toy truck or lost it, it was gone for the winter.





COLLINGS:

Yeah, for sure. [laughter]





MARYATT:

So anyway, so that’s why I just love hearing his stories, because it would be nice if I had those kinds of stories to mine for the kinds of books that I’d like to do, but I just don’t feel like it’s rich enough in unusual aspects. So I might do a—I don’t really even want to do a compare-and-contrast. I just want to do his life and how he got his perspective on life and how he managed to escape later from the Upper Michigan sort of depressed area and go to UC Berkeley, get his Ph.D. at UCLA, and so on. So it’s an interesting story, and the fact that he also has five brothers, all of whom are engineers. So anyway, for me it’s a really interesting story—





COLLINGS:

Indeed. Indeed it is.





MARYATT:

—and to compare it.





COLLINGS:

And speak to the importance of public education as well.





MARYATT:

Exactly, yeah. So anyway, someday I’m going to have to do that for the family at least.



00:05:27

COLLINGS:

Yeah, absolutely.





MARYATT:

So every once in a while I interview him when we’re on trips, car trips and so on. I just pull out my little recorder or I write notes, and someday I’m going to put that together.





COLLINGS:

That’s a great idea. But I think your story, from the little bit that you’ve hinted at, it has its own trajectory. It’s the story of the postwar boom in Los Angeles.





MARYATT:

Yeah.





COLLINGS:

What brought your parents down here? What kind of work did they do—primarily your father, I’m guessing—at that time?





MARYATT:

Yeah, my mom didn’t work, but she worked actually before she met my dad. No, maybe she worked while she met my dad. Anyway, they got married fairly young. It was wartime.

My father’s father owned an industrial laundry business, and they bought a laundry down in Los Angeles, needed somebody to run it after the war, so that’s what my dad came down to do. He had a bunch of brothers and sisters, too, who went to Portland and places to develop the family laundry business, industrial laundry.





COLLINGS:

So the business community.





MARYATT:

Right. So that’s how he got down here.





COLLINGS:

And what kind of work was your mom doing before she got married?





MARYATT:

She was a singer—





COLLINGS:

How wonderful.





MARYATT:

—and a secretary.



00:06:46

COLLINGS:

Wow.





MARYATT:

She didn’t sing a whole lot, but she had the most beautiful, mellifluous, warm voice. So she always sang around the house—





COLLINGS:

How lovely.





MARYATT:

—and there was always music around the house, and music is an extremely important part of my life. We did a book called Ad Libitum at school, at Scripps, about music, about musical notation, how it developed and how to notate modern music, because I felt that students—that had to be a basic part of their knowledge. If they had never studied music in their life, they’d better learn what that note looks like and how it represents a sound and how that came to be. I’m also interested—just like music, I’m interested in the history of writing and how that came into being too.

So there are certain basic things that I think that students need to know, and every time we do a book in Scripps, I try to mine those basic things, and maybe there’s something in the ether, in the air, something happening in the world that we need to address, but there are things that are basic and fundamental, that if they haven’t had a musical education—and many haven’t these days. They don’t sing like we used to do growing up.





COLLINGS:

That’s true.





MARYATT:

So that’s one thing that has to happen. And I always have music on. Maybe not always, but I have lots of music, lots of music interests. So someday I’ll be doing some books about music. I get really interested in several aspects of music that someday—I started in graduate school, these books, and then I—you know, it’s hard to keep up something when you are forced to work. [laughter]



00:08:30

COLLINGS:

I’ve noticed.





MARYATT:

If you want to try to do your own work, it’s really, really hard.





COLLINGS:

We’ll definitely have to get to the topic of the themes in Scripps, in the Scripps work and how that has evolved. What kinds of things were you interested in when you were growing up and going to school? And in tandem with that, what kinds of things did your parents encourage you to think about?





MARYATT:

You know, again, we were kind of a typical community with Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, Bluebirds, and all of that. So my father was a Scoutmaster, so he took the boys in hand, and they did Scouting, and I went into Camp Fire Girls. We also had Girl Scouts in the area, but my friends went into Camp Fire Girls. So that was pretty significant because we got to do a lot of interesting things, going to camps, going to fix the flowers on the side of the South Pasadena sign, and helping out with people at Christmas, helping give gifts out and so on. And the only thing we did that was just awful—we all hated it—was selling peanuts at the grocery stores, you know. But otherwise, it was a wonderful social group and sort of fundamental to all of the kinds of things that we did, because there’s so many people in my family, we didn’t go out as a family to do much of anything. Occasionally we’d go out to a meal. Sometimes, once or twice, we’d go to the beach. They just couldn’t manage to do much more. Our big outing during the week was going to the grocery store with Dad on Sunday morning if we didn’t go to church.



00:10:16

COLLINGS:

Well, at that time, the family life was more oriented around the home than it is today.





MARYATT:

That’s right. But I did love tap-dancing, so we got to do that. I played piano with my brother, so we did a lot of duets, playing and performing and the usual kind of thing, and I loved that. We had a beautiful Baby Grand in the living room, so there was always music around. My sister Meggy particularly was musical, too, so she got into it as well. But we all sang. Even though my little brother couldn’t sing much, my bigger brother couldn’t sing much, but my little sisters and I, we did three-part harmony. When I was in choir at Scripps—well, when I was in choir anywhere, at church and whatever, at school, I’d teach them things and we’d sing together.





COLLINGS:

That sounds great.





MARYATT:

Yeah. It was very bonding, and they were my babies anyway, and I kind of took care of them, and I’m still very close to them, so I’m very lucky.





COLLINGS:

Yeah, you are.





MARYATT:

Yeah.





COLLINGS:

What kinds of things did your brothers and sisters go on to do?



00:11:57

MARYATT:

Well, that’s interesting. So my little sister Meg, who sang with me, was a musician for many, many years, playing classical guitar, and also, because I taught her calligraphy, she was able to do music copying, which needed an edged tool to be able to mark the notes for the copying. So that was really fabulous that she was able to take on something that I was, luckily, able to teach her and make her living doing music copying. So until recently, she was always in some kind of music. She had a music publishing business and so on.

My little sister Christy went into librarianship, so she’s a librarian at Thousand Oaks Public Library, so she’s the technical services librarian. Of course we all read, and that was booklovers’ world.

My older brother went into the family business and did that for a number of years, and then decided that he wasn’t being promoted as quickly as he felt like he should be, so he left the family business and went into sales manager and did very, very well, and then got rid of—eventually said, “That’s awfully hard work. Let me do something else.” So he took off for a year and did photography, which was really great for him. And then he bought a franchise, and so now he sells window blinds. He’s just the sweetest person in the whole wide world, so anybody would buy blinds from him. So they’ve bought up all of the franchises in Portland area, and he’s doing very well and is married and has two kids who are having kids. So he’s very happy.

And my little brother, my littlest brother, is a truck driver, so he’s been driving these big huge trucks, mostly in L.A., for a long time. So, you know, an interesting variety of—





COLLINGS:

Of adventure, business, and art.





MARYATT:

Yeah, that’s right.





COLLINGS:

That’s great.



00:14:28

MARYATT:

But my mom never really—she had to take care of all of us kids, and so she was never able to pursue her—whatever interests they were. I mean, she sang around the house, but she never—she didn’t actually even sing in the choir at church, that I remember. But she was very talented and smart in English and secretarial kind of work and typing. She was a real fast typer. So that was what she helped me do growing up, basically, besides my love of music, which is the most important thing that she ever did, but she really had a love of words, and the meanings of words, could tell you any meaning without looking in the dictionary and the nuances. And she had beautiful handwriting and was very, very meticulous. She also taught me sewing. Well, I learned sewing at school, too, but she reinforced the sewing, which was important for me.





COLLINGS:

That was the binding.





MARYATT:

That was the era when the boys got to have auto shop and drafting and we got home ec and cooking. So I would have liked to have had auto shop and drafting.





COLLINGS:

That would be handy.





MARYATT:

Drafting particularly would have been really handy. I would have really liked that. But anyway, that’s what we did, and so that was her contribution.

And my dad was really good at math and engineering and figuring things out, and so he always fixed everything around the house, and if ever we had math questions or thought problems and so on, he would be the go-to person for that kind of thing. So we had kind of a nice, well-rounded support system, I guess we should say.



00:15:31

COLLINGS:

Yeah, it sounds like it. So you did go to Scripps for college. How did you come to choose Scripps?





MARYATT:

It’s so interesting, but I didn’t know this until recently, like maybe a year ago. One of my relatives told me that my grandmother chose Scripps for me. My grandmother was my hero. She was my model. She was—I could go on and on about my grandmother.





COLLINGS:

Was she living down here or—





MARYATT:

She was my mother.





COLLINGS:

—was she up there in Washington?





MARYATT:

She lived in Washington, yeah. She was a remarkable person, and I would go stay and live with her from time to time.





COLLINGS:

What was remarkable about her?





MARYATT:

Well, there are so many things. Well, if you really want me to go into my Nana, she was a doer. She would make things. She would make things happen. So she was the matriarch of the family. So we had kind of a big family.





COLLINGS:

This is your mother’s mother?





MARYATT:

This is my father’s mother.





COLLINGS:

Your father’s mother.



00:16:50

MARYATT:

My father’s mother and father. My Pop-Pop was a very strong personality also. They both went to University of Washington, so I thought maybe I might go there. So he was the president of his class, senior class, so he had leadership ability. My grandmother was athletic. She taught athletics. She was a go-getter kind of person. So they got married after college and had, what, five kids.

But I first started going up to visit my grandmother when we were real young and my mom was having yet another baby, and Dickie and I, we went up to stay with them for a month or so in Seattle, which was just a totally seminal moment in my life because I got to be with them in Seattle in the backyard, picking blueberries and—not blueberries, but raspberries and play croquet on the lawn. Everything was just so new. They had these little tiny wood animals that I still treasure that they had, that my brother and I were told not to take upstairs and play with them, but of course we did. So I have little animals right over there in my studio that just, again, remind me of my grandmother.

So she and my grandfather would go out into the desert and pick rocks and geodes, collect them, and they had diamond-cutter and they sliced up the rocks and they made things with them. So they had a whole basement full of all of this rock stuff. So they would make furniture and that kind of thing.

My grandmother also was a woodcarver. So she was very interested in the Native American art in the Seattle area. Northwest has a really strong tradition of different kinds of Native American art. So she learned how to carve masks and totems, and then she carved sides of sideboards, furniture, made the furniture. She didn’t build the furniture, but she carved the panels of lots of furniture. She taught me how to do embroidery and crewel embroidery, and she carved a piece of wood that the embroidery hung from, and every time I would go see her when they lived down in Palm Springs part of the time, I would ask her to pull out that piece of embroidery that she did that was a big wall hanging, which was a piece copied from a Czechoslovakian image in the University of Washington library, I guess, or museum or something. Anyway, so as it went on and on and I kept on asking, “Can I just see that?” she finally gave it to me. She told me she’d leave it to me in her will, but she finally gave it to me before she died. So I have that at home hanging up. That’s a treasured piece. So she made that.

She did all the carving. She made gifts for everybody in wood. She’d make bookends with a “K” on it for my Aunt Kitty, my Great-Aunt Kitty, and all of my dad’s brothers and sisters have a lot of pieces of wood in their homes.



00:19:36

COLLINGS:

And where did she learn all of this?





MARYATT:

You know, it’s a good question. She grew up in Ellensburg, Washington, in kind of a pioneer family. Her father built the first car in Washington.





COLLINGS:

So it was more pioneer than Bohemians.





MARYATT:

It was definitely not Bohemian, yes. It was sort of unusual for a young woman to go to college in the, what, 1890s or early 1900s, right? So to go to University of Washington, that was a big university even then. So she was remarkable. I don’t know how it came to be that she decided she would go, if her family encouraged her, because there they were in Ellensburg, which is a rural area. So I’m sorry that—my brother knows everything about our family history, but I don’t know exactly what promulgated that.

But that’s where she met Grandad, my grandfather, and it went on from there. They became the head of the family and the ones to look up to and also to be fearful of. My grandfather was especially—maybe not stern, but particular with all of the family business.



00:20:48

COLLINGS:

Nice choice of words. [laughs]





MARYATT:

Yeah. So you had to, “Yes, sir.” He was in the navy. “Yes, sir.”

My grandmother was also very particular, and she could be critical, I suppose, but I think I felt like I was a favorite because maybe I liked to make things like she did, and she liked teaching me. So I was just drawn to her, her personality. She was short like me. My mother was taller. My mom was five-foot-six, but my grandmother was maybe five-foot-three. My grandfather was maybe five-foot-four, so small part of the family. So they were my surrogate parents, really.

So when I went to college, I was working in the summers for my dad at the industrial laundry, and one summer between my junior and senior year, I said, “Can I just go work at the laundry up in Seattle, and can I stay with Nana?” And so he made that happen. So I got a job at the laundry up there and worked all summer and took over when people had vacations, and stayed with my Nana. But I couldn’t drive in with my grandfather to work. I had to find my way to work. So I took the bus and then another bus and then walked. That was kind of interesting that I had to be there at a certain time, and he didn’t necessarily want to be there at that time or he was doing other things.

So I just loved living there. I loved their place. I loved looking at the things they had in the house, and I loved Seattle, being with my cousins and millions of other relatives, and it was just my second home.



00:22:31

COLLINGS:

Well, it seems like it would have been a no-brainer to go to college up there.





MARYATT:

Well, I did consider seriously applying to UDub, because it was our family place where practically everybody in the family went, at least in my father’s family went, and I didn’t know this, as I started to say, that my Nana told Dad, apparently, “Have her apply to Scripps.” So I’m sure Dad was clueless as I was about where to apply. You know, I was pretty innocent, I think, and I think maybe most of us were pretty innocent about where to apply to college, how to apply to college. So basically I applied to Scripps, I applied to Oxy, and I can’t remember if applied to UDub or not. I might have done.

Anyway, so when we went to go looking for colleges, I had already seen the UW, but when my dad drove me out on the way back from Nana’s in Palm Springs to stop at Scripps and see it, that was it. I just thought, “Oh, my god, I hope I can get in.” It was, like, beautiful. It felt perfect. It wasn’t so far away that that didn’t—that actually didn’t kind of come into being, because I didn’t imagine that I’d be going back and forth to home, but it was just like another little home for me. I loved the room. The rooms were, like, Scripps green. Everything’s overwhelmingly Scripps green, including all of the flora and fauna, and it was just totally comfortable.

What was really, really perfect about Scripps for me—because eventually I had to figure out what kind of major I might want to do, so this is all connected—Scripps didn’t have a math major, but it had humanities, and I was going to be a math major, and so where was I going to go? Well, because Scripps didn’t have any math at that time, I would have majored at CMC, which was at that time Claremont Men’s College. It’s a men’s college.



00:24:36

COLLINGS:

That’s why it has math.





MARYATT:

So I had the best of both worlds. So at Scripps, I majored at CMC.





COLLINGS:

So excuse my ignorance on this point. Was Scripps a women’s college at that time?





MARYATT:

Yes, it still is.





COLLINGS:

Oh, it still is. I didn’t know that.



00:26:38

MARYATT:

All of the colleges except for Pomona. There are five colleges. All of the colleges were single-sex at that time. Pomona was coed. So CMC was men’s; Harvey Mudd College was men; Pitzer was women. Pitzer didn’t come in until halfway through my time there.

And, you know, I didn’t go to Scripps because it was a women’s college. I went to Scripps, besides the fact that they let me in, because I could take math at the men’s college. I just thought that’s pretty good, you know, to be able to get my liberal arts and humanities. So Scripps at that time was very strong in the humanities. You had to take three years of humanities, a double course every semester. So out of five courses, two of your courses were humanities. It counted as two courses. So you did it every day. And it was the foundation, really, of who I am today, I’m sure, because it gave me the broad viewpoint of how the world works.

There were so many significant things about going to Scripps, but one of the things I would mention is that growing up, going to Oneonta Congressional Church, when I went to Scripps my freshman year, we studied the Bible, Understanding the Old Testament, Understanding the New Testament, and by the end of the year, the Bible’s mystery was removed. Now I knew about the JEDP, the historians who actually had written the Bible, you know, and I no longer believed that I was a Christian. So that was an interesting changeover, although I wasn’t strongly a Christian before, but I’d been brought up that way, and I’d always questioned why do we believe in this or that. “Well, you have to faith.” So I just always kind of wrinkled my nose, like, “What?”

So, anyway, that was really an interesting aspect of going to Scripps, that we looked at everything from lots of points of view, and their purpose in this humanities course wasn’t to remove your religious beliefs from you, but to have you look at it from an intellectual point of view. So that’s why I thought that was the most significant thing maybe that happened to me in my freshman year, at least in humanities, that it gave me a new perspective and a way of trying to, you know, maybe make my own arguments for myself.

But we did that for three years. So we started out with the ancient world, went to the Renaissance—well, went to the Middle Ages and then to the Renaissance in those three years, and in the fourth year, you could do an extra year of humanities in the modern era, but I didn’t choose to do that because I was a math major, French minor. I was full up with lots and lots of courses.





COLLINGS:

Now, with your strong interest in the humanities, why did you choose to be a math major?



00:28:1100:30:21

MARYATT:

Well, I didn’t have a strong interest in the humanities and I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Like most kids, I had no idea. I just knew that I loved Camp Fire Girls and I enjoyed making things and I loved letterforms. I liked drawing letterforms on the papers that you’d turn in to school. So I didn’t really have any particular focus. I was fairly good at most things.

So ninth grade was the pivotal year. So in ninth grade, our—what’s it called—homeroom teacher, Mr. Hollis, I think it was, in ninth grade, all kids in South Pasadena Junior High made a book over the year. Maybe it was over the semester, but I seem to remember that it was a whole year, and you had to write your autobiography at age, what, thirteen or something, fourteen. So every week or two, you would write an essay, and then he would correct it and give it back to you, and then you would take your big piece of paper and fold it and tear it and fold it and tear it until it was the size you wanted. Then you’d take your nice fountain pen or dip ink pen and write your story onto your paper. So you’d have to draw the lines first, and then we had to make imagery to go with that.

When we were done over the year, we literally physically sewed it together ourselves. We glued on the spine lining. We made the covers with wallpaper and wallpaper paste and all of this. I guess I was doing a one-upmanship; I did two volumes. So the second volume had a lot of little pictures and not too many stories. But anyway, that was just so darn fun, you know, and everybody did it and everybody found it—I don’t know that everybody found it fun, but I just thought that was great.

So I didn’t really remember that it went into my bookcase or something, and I just totally forgot about it for a long time, and then my boyfriend, when I was a senior, asked to borrow it to read it, and so he didn’t give it back, and I didn’t remember that he hadn’t given it back. And at our ten-year high school reunion, he came up to me and said, “Do you remember this?” And he handed me my books, and I was just blown away. I thought, “Oh, yeah.”

Let’s see if I can remember. So that would have been—’62 I graduated—so ’72. I had just gotten into calligraphy classes in ’71 and getting into bookmaking. So it was really, really interesting to look back at that and see how I liked handwriting. I wrote in turquoise-blue ink. It was so beautiful. I loved my pen. I always loved my pens that I had growing up with the dip ink, and I got gold ink once, and, oh, my gosh, it was so much fun to write in gold. So that was a significant thing that was buried for a long time. I didn’t think that that—you know, who would go into bookmaking as a career? That was not a career. At my time, what you would do if you were tall enough is you would be a stewardess or a teacher. Those were the two things that you could do. Maybe a nurse. So I thought, “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

So the other thing that happened in ninth grade that, again, I didn’t really realize the significance, I had an algebra class or geometry—I think it was algebra—and one of my friends was having trouble, so I helped her. Well, my ninth-grade teacher said, “You know, Kitty, you should be a math teacher.”

And I said, “Yeah, okay.” [laughs] Because I liked math and I found it easy, and I liked helping people.





COLLINGS:

And you thought that it would be a good—





MARYATT:

Well, it was something you knew you could do.



00:31:49

COLLINGS:

—solid career.





MARYATT:

Yeah, and, of course, it was a career. It wasn’t like—even though those were the days when you were expected to marry and have children, that would be someday, but first you’d have some kind of a career. What else would you do?

So it wasn’t until I was a senior in high school that I figured out that that’s what I wanted to do. So it took me a while processing that, and we had a test in, I don’t know, ninth grade, tenth grade, what are your interests, and it came out that I should be a CPA. “Okay, I’ll be a CPA.” You know, you get pushed around. I have no idea.

So I had lots of kind of really, really good and really, really bad math teachers in high school, but the really, really good one was this curmudgeonly, old, skinny thing who, you know, she wagged her finger at you and she put the fear in you, but everybody loved her, and I thought, “I want to be loved like that. I’ll teach math and I’ll be loved like that.” [laughter]





COLLINGS:

Oh, how interesting.



00:33:3900:35:28

MARYATT:

Yeah. So anyway, she was my model in a way. The ones who were bad math teachers, I thought, “I can do better than that. Oh, my god. They don’t have any understanding of how to help people.” That’s what I’ve always naturally done with my little sisters and my family. You know, I like to help people figure out something. It’s a gratifying thing to see them get it, whatever “it” is. So that’s why I feel like I’ve just always been a natural teacher. When I’m teaching somebody something, whatever it is, I can usually look at them and tell by their body language, by whether or not they’re nodding, give them little tests, whether or not they’re getting whatever it is I’m trying to teach them. So I just always felt that that was a comfortable thing to do.

So when I went off to Scripps, I knew that that’s what I was going to go for, and so I was a math major and I did all my math-major things, and I went on to get my master’s in math. I applied to graduate school to go to Stanford and get the M.A. in math and in teaching, and life intervened and instead I got married and decided to go to Claremont Graduate University, which was right next door to Scripps, right after I graduated. So I did that instead, which was an interesting shift in my life. My life would have been very different if I’d gone up to Stanford, because I got the letter, I got in, but, you know, I went to CGU.

But what was great about CGU was that I could do over a three-summer—in fact, it ended up being four summers because I had to get my teaching credential. Anyway, you could do it in the summers and then work (during the year). So I started working immediately out of college. At age twenty-one, in the summer I was doing summer-school teaching with the kids up at Claremont High School and continued for that year and then moved to West L.A. and got a job at Santa Monica High School. So I taught there for eleven years and at Claremont High School for one year.

So meanwhile, in the summers, I worked on my M.A. and got my master’s eventually, so that was a comfortable thing to be able to do. So that’s why my commute from here—we’re in West L.A. right now. We’re in Playa Vista next to the Marina, and it’s fifty-two miles out to Scripps. When I was going to graduate school, I was working at Santa Monica High School, and in the summers, I would drive from where we were living in West L.A. the forty-eight miles or whatever it was to go to graduate school in the summer.





COLLINGS:

Every day?





MARYATT:

Every day.





COLLINGS:

Wow.





MARYATT:

Yeah. And I’ve been doing this drive—in fact, my home is in Oak Park up in Ventura County, and so that drive is seventy miles one way, each way, so I did that for twenty years, and from here it’s been eight years. So it’s a shorter fifty-two-mile jaunt. So I don’t like it at all, really. I mean, I would love to be next door to Claremont, but that’s the way I can get to go work at Scripps. How lucky for me that I work at Scripps!





COLLINGS:

Yeah. All right. So let’s kind of like figure out where we are here. You’ve graduated from college. You got married. You met your husband. How did you meet your husband?



00:37:49

MARYATT:

Well, my current husband is not the one that I met then. But you know what? I think I ought to go back to what Scripps did for me, for my career, just because I don’t really want to skip to graduation yet because there were a couple of things that Scripps did besides the humanities and, you know, doing my math, and I did French as my minor and art, did a few classes in art when I had some time. I loved language and I did some German.

But anyway, at Grace Scripps Hall, which was my dorm, we did medieval dinners where we wrote out invitations in medieval script and sent them to faculty and friends to come to our medieval dinners for Christmas. So we studied medieval books and things, so that really reinforced my interest in letterforms, and I didn’t realize at that time that I wasn’t doing calligraphy. We were drawing the outlines of letterforms and then filling it in. I didn’t know that there was such a thing as an edged pen. So that was really important. I didn’t even know it at the time. I just knew I loved it. I loved the manuscripts and the gold and the gorgeous blues, and the writing was so amazing, and everything about those medieval books. I don’t remember particularly going into the library a lot to see those medieval books, but they were there, but it was part of our humanities to study that period in the Middle Ages in our second year. So that was significant for what I wanted to do later.

So once I finished my master’s in math, then the very first thing that I did—there were two things I did immediately after I graduated. I started taking a calligraphy class at UCLA Extension. I discovered it, didn’t know it existed.





COLLINGS:

As soon as you graduated your bachelor’s degree?





MARYATT:

No, as soon as I got my master’s.





COLLINGS:

Oh, your master’s. Okay.



00:39:04

MARYATT:

Yeah, and then I went off to Europe every summer for years. When I was a junior at college, we didn’t have summer or junior year abroad or junior semester abroad, and I wanted that to happen but we didn’t have it. So I, being a French minor, and the humanities, you know, where you see all of the monuments from all over civilization, you want to go experience that. So I wanted to go live in France in the summer between my—let’s see—junior and senior year. So I asked my dad if he would help me get there to France, but then I would get a job in France. Well, he, knowing that this isn’t going to happen, said no. [laughter] So I just desperately wanted to go. I wanted to learn to speak French fluently. I wanted to see everything. I loved France. So that was the next thing that I did.

As soon as I—the next summer when I was free, I just went the whole summer for—no, I didn’t. I went away for two weeks, but then after that, I went for three months and then for six weeks and then another three months, every summer. I just couldn’t get enough of the culture and the ancient history of the world, trying to—you know, we’re so young here in California in comparison. There’s nothing old here. And all the monuments and the development of language, the development of everything was fascinating to me. So as soon as I could, I left and went off without my husband at that time, went with my girlfriend. So those are two significant things that kind of had been waiting in the background.





COLLINGS:

So these were your summers when you were teaching math and you had the means. You had your income.





MARYATT:

That’s right. I’d save up all year and I would go. Yeah.





COLLINGS:

That sounds like a lot of fun.





MARYATT:

It was a lot of fun and it was significant, you know, because again, eventually I realized I could study calligraphy over there. So I studied here with Maury Nemoy for many years and we started the Society for Calligraphy in ’73. So in ’71, I started studying with Maury at UCLA Extension and took a lot of classes with him.





COLLINGS:

So you finished your M.A. in ’71 and you started taking these summer trips to Paris.





MARYATT:

Yes, yes. But I actually finished my master’s in 1970, but it didn’t officially say that on my paperwork, it was ’71. So in the summer of ’71 is when I started taking off.



00:40:52

COLLINGS:

Okay. And that led you to the calligraphy work at UCLA.





MARYATT:

Well, no. I did calligraphy before I went off. So summer of ’70, I was done with anything that I had to do and now I could take fun things. Maybe it was in the fall. Maybe I did go to Europe first. Maybe it was the fall of ’71. It could have been the spring of ’71 that I started calligraphy, but it was ’71. It might have been in the spring that I started studying calligraphy. So I studied with—Maury was the only one teaching calligraphy in Los Angeles, and eventually I realized there were other calligraphers in the world, and that as I had been going to visit in Europe every summer, I realized, oh, maybe I could go study with somebody.

So Donald Jackson, who’s the [English] queen’s scribe, came over to Los Angeles to teach a class in ’74, and I studied with him just before I went over to study with David Howells at Knuston Hall in England. So David introduced me to going over to the Klingspor Museum in Frankfort, or in Offenbach, so I just kept on going back to study calligraphy, and then I organized a group of calligraphers through UC Santa Cruz to go study in England for a couple of weeks, took my sister with me, by the way.

So I was off and running in calligraphy, and so that’s what I was doing while I was teaching math. I was having a lot of fun, really just having fun, you know, and I just figured—eventually I learned how to do—I took a bookbinding class and I got some printing done, just to make a short story, and then I had to quit my job because I felt like I wasn’t going to get any better if I didn’t quit my job cold turkey and go back to school. So that’s when I quit my job in 1980 and went back to school at UCLA and got my MFA at UCLA, finished in ’83.



00:42:56

COLLINGS:

So that’s sort of a rebirth then.





MARYATT:

It was a rebirth, you know, and people always assume that I left math because I didn’t like it anymore or that it didn’t hold my interest anymore or that I didn’t enjoy myself while I was doing it, all of which were wrong. I loved doing math. I loved teaching high school kids. They are so receptive and they’re still moldable, and you can still get to them, whereas they’re not hardened criminals, sort of like, when you get to— [laughs]





COLLINGS:

University?





MARYATT:

When they’re a little bit harder to mold. Anyway, so I enjoyed being around the high school students. I ran the Math Club and I ran a Ski Club and took the kids skiing and did lots of social things with them. And I enjoyed the kinds of classes I was teaching. I was teaching more advanced classes, got to teach the Calculus AB and BC classes, so I felt like I was really using my master’s and not—it was hard to teach beginning algebra. I only did it once. That was really tough because those poor kids really are so—they just don’t know very much. They don’t have any confidence, and it’s really hard to find interesting ways to engage them and help them. So it was so much easier to work with the smart students. [laughs]





COLLINGS:

Of course. Always.



00:44:34

MARYATT:

Of course. So that was really what I got moved into, so that’s why I really enjoyed teaching math. But I taught every class that I ever wanted to teach there, and there was nothing more to do there, you know. I did everything.

So I wrote my own little—I didn’t do whole textbooks, but I would throw out the textbook and just give out sheets every week or every day so that it would just be different, to try to reinvent myself and try to figure out how to keep it fresh. But, you know, this other life was taking over. I was having so much fun with calligraphy, and it’s such hard work to get really good at it.

Then the bookbinding, you know, was so much fun and I hadn’t realized it was going to be so much fun, and then I was drawn into printing and buying a printing press, and pretty soon I was teaching calligraphy by this time now in ’76, at Cerritos College at night. Anyway, it was just getting to be too much to do all of that and having enough time to grade papers—we didn’t have papers—grade tests, make up tests, all of that stuff for school. So I just knew that I couldn’t do everything.





COLLINGS:

Right.





MARYATT:

There was also another point in my life when I knew I couldn’t do everything, and that’s when I was doing—right at the beginning of my math career, I was doing a lot of weaving. My girlfriend had shown me how to do finger loom weaving. I loved weaving, so I did a lot of that for a few years, and then I started calligraphy, I guess, and I couldn’t do both of them. I had to kind of come to that conclusion, which was really painful, you know. How do you allocate your time?

So I still am going to get back to weaving. I saw this fabulous loom in Japan. I’m making these like braid-like things that are only like an inch or two wide. The most beautiful loom in the whole wide world, and I’m going to buy one of those one of these days, and there’s these other little kind of looms. I actually got a little one from Japan last time I was there. So I’m going to get into—it’s like when I retire, I’m going to do everything I’ve ever put off.



00:46:35

COLLINGS:

Sure.





MARYATT:

You know? [laughter] I’ve got plenty to do.





COLLINGS:

That’s right.





MARYATT:

So it’s just been hard to bite the bullet and say I’m going to retire, because it sounds like you’re going to stop doing something. Well, all I’m going to do is stop teaching at Scripps. I’ve still got so many things I just have to explore.

So anyway, I finally did bite the bullet and say, “In two years I’m going to retire.” So I will leave Scripps after my thirtieth year there, on our seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Press, so it seemed like a nice round number.





COLLINGS:

That does sound very appropriate.



00:47:5500:50:44

MARYATT:

And we will have done sixty books with my students, sixty limited editions, although I’m very tired and I think I would not be unhappy retiring tomorrow. I am really tired and there’s just really too much to do, but I just feel like I still have to do a catalogue for those sixty books. The exhibit of all of those books has to go around the country. I’ve been planning that for ten, fifteen years. I have the archives that are in 100 boxes, that I’m slowly trying to sift out stuff that doesn’t need to be kept, so that people like you don’t have to go through the finding aids and figure out what does this piece of paper mean. So I’ve been doing that for a few years now.

So there are just all of these things, and also the Scripps College Press is still—for all of these years I’ve been on a one-year contract, so it’s still not on a firm basis. It may never ever be, but I want to make sure that the art department writes up the request for a replacement, that it goes to the Dean, and that she forwards it to the FEC, the Faculty Executive Committee, and that they say, “Yes, we will fund this replacement or accept this replacement,” even if it’s just exactly on the same terms that I have now, which are unusual. So I’m not full faculty; I’m not tenure track. I am three-fifths faculty and two-fifths administrative. So that’s an unusual position. Nobody else is quite like that. I’ve always been unusual on the campus. So it’s always been my goal to make this a tenure-track job, but that hasn’t come to be, and so at least I hope they will replace me on the same terms that it is now. So that’s why I kind of have to hang in there. I have my meeting next Tuesday with the Dean. I’ve already told my department and my department head, so the process is moving forward, and I just really hope after all of these years of just really trying to make the Scripps College Press a going concern, that it happens, because when I was hired, it was about to be closed again, and that’s another long story. So my charge from the people that hired me, they said, “Make the Scripps College Press have a presence on campus.” So I thought the only way that I can do that is for them to be making books, not individually, but as a group, and that we would sell them so that they’d go into collections.

So I didn’t realize it would end up being a behemoth kind of thing. Now we have fifty-eight standing-order patrons, and so we have to make at least fifty-eight plus the number of students, plus one for me. We have to make at least seventy books, whereas before, we didn’t have to make particularly any number, enough for the students and a few to sell. So that’s gotten hard, and so that’s why I think it may be hard to replace me, too, not that I’m such a fabulous teacher, but the position that I’ve created might be complicated for book arts people to consider, because really nobody else anywhere is doing this, a collaborative book with their students in one semester, and so I’m worried that I may be replaced with some other construction, and so that’s why I’m hanging in there just a little bit longer.





COLLINGS:

So I’m interested in your shift into your trips to Europe, getting into the calligraphy, getting into the bookbinding, all of this happening in the mid to late seventies. What was your involvement with the currents of the Women’s Movement at that time?





MARYATT:

Well, you know, I didn’t consider myself a feminist at that time when feminism was in the air, but I did take classes at the Woman’s Building. I didn’t consider myself a feminist because I felt like I was already there, and I didn’t necessarily feel like I needed to be an advocate. My personal life was an advocate for a strong-willed woman wanting to do what they wanted to do. But I wasn’t in art, and so it was the art issue that women were addressing at the Woman’s Building, like they couldn’t get into shows, they weren’t in art books. So I connected with that and I understood that, but I didn’t feel radicalized and the need to burn bras and that kind of thing, but I was supportive.



00:52:01

COLLINGS:

Why is it that you took classes at the Woman’s Building?



00:54:11

MARYATT:

Well, they had classes in bookmaking. I mean, oh, my god. This was so unbelievable. This was another pivotal point because this was in 1980. I had quit my job. I could do things that they would have during the week that I couldn’t have done before.

So there were two classes that I took that were pivotal. There were a lot of pivotal points in my life that I know they changed me, so and I can’t remember the order of them. The first one may have been Nancy Garruba. Nancy Garruba was invited to teach a book structures class at the Woman’s Building, and by this time I had been binding for four years, so I started binding in 1976. So I was doing traditional binding. So when she was invited to teach book structures, that was a shift in the idea of approaching bookbinding. It wasn’t the French way. It was conservators looking at all of these interesting constructions and making models and teaching people the models of these books that had been made that nobody was making for—we didn’t even call our books that we were making “artist books” at that time. They were hybrid books with accordions mixed with single signatures. They were Coptic books from Egypt and they were Ethiopian. They were from all over the world kinds of constructions and invented things too.

So it was just a weekend workshop that Nancy Garruba taught. Maybe it was one day, but I think it was two days. And we were making these little constructions, and I thought, whoa, this is so interesting that you can make books with a different structure than being in signatures always, or you could sew the signatures in a different way than the usual sewing over thongs or tapes or over cords or something. So that was really, really interesting.

There weren’t other book classes in L.A. We had the one bookbinding teacher on Melrose in L.A., who hadn’t been trained classically, so I’m sorry to say that I didn’t get a good education there, which is why I got a grant to go study in Ascona, in Switzerland, when I was in graduate school, to study it properly. Then we had Maury Nemoy teaching calligraphy [and Peggy Lecky at UCLA teaching binding] (added by interviewee). That’s all that was really available in L.A. There might have been something in San Francisco, but that was way up there. And there was Lloyd Reynolds up in Portland.

Anyway, so Nancy Garruba opened my eyes a lot, the fact that conservators—she was a conservator from Washington, D.C.—that conservators were observing these structures and were willing to share their observations, and that you could now explore the subject of a book also through its structure and not just its text and imagery. So that was really interesting.

Then the other thing was Frances Butler, who was a whirlwind. I can do a lot of things and I have a lot of energy, but she just completely whipped around me. I was amazed and shocked.





COLLINGS:

Oh, yes, you called her a dervish.



00:56:23

MARYATT:

Yes, yes, she’s a dervish. Yeah, I have the greatest respect for her, obviously. She was challenging. She knew how to do a lot of things technically. So what we did for a whole week was learn to make very big negatives that we would then make on the big Brown camera, copy camera, to make images that we would then print on the big, huge presses. In other words, the scale was just bigger than I was used to. She also had us take our cameras and go outside in the area around the Woman’s Building, which was fairly iffy, and take pictures and come back and make a book with those pictures, and I was totally at a loss with that and didn’t know that I was.

So I took pictures of beautiful patterns and couldn’t put a story together, to put a narrative together with that pattern, those patterns that were evocative and graffiti patterns and chain-link-fencing patterns and so on. And the other students in the class seemed so facile doing this, and I was so embarrassed that I didn’t know what I was doing, and I thought that I knew a lot about bookmaking, and that clearly showed me that I didn’t know what I was doing, at least about bookmaking. I knew how to make the parts of books, I knew how to do calligraphy, I knew how to do bookbinding, I knew how to print words on paper, but I didn’t know how to put it together.





COLLINGS:

So you were struggling with sort of the conceptual—





MARYATT:

That’s absolutely right.





COLLINGS:

—backbone of—



00:58:25

MARYATT:

I had never had to do that. So that was upsetting and revealing, and I admired how the other students with—their pictures may or may not have been better than mine, but they were able to put them together to make something that was a cohesive whole. So that was really interesting.

And at the end of that week-long session where we did many things, printing imagery on the big 219 presses and just working in a different way than I had been used to, Alistair Johnson, her partner, came down from San Francisco and just gathered around with us, and we were having question-answer sessions, so I asked the question, “So Alistair and Frances, how would you determine what typeface to use for a particular project?” I thought it was a reasonable question.

Alistair said, “Oh, well, you look at type specimen books.”

And Frances reiterated, “Yes, you look a lot at type.”

And silently I said, “I’ve been doing that. I need some help here. There must be more to this answer.”

So I think some of the other people in that class felt the same thing, because Susan King called me the next week and said, “Say, why don’t we get together with a group from that class and whoever else is interested and talk about this,” because she also felt the same as I did. There’s a wealth of information about how to choose a typeface for any particular project. The simplest answer is, what do you have in your metal type cases? That’s what you choose from. That’s easy. But what if you’re in the digital world? But we weren’t digital then.

So that gave rise to Women of Letters, and so we’ve been meeting since 1980, a group of women who are all letterpress printers, supporting each other, helping each other when we have problems with our projects and getting the pat on the back when we finish a project and show it off.





COLLINGS:

So you met for the first time, and what did you and the other women sort of say was the purpose for the group?



01:00:04

MARYATT:

To be able to—I guess there were many things that we wanted to do. The first was type, understanding type, how to choose typefaces. You look in your—if you’re a letterpress printer, you can’t have a huge number of typefaces. How do you kind of look at the style of that particular typeface and decide whether or not it goes with a project? How do you determine the emotional tone and everything about the shape of the letterforms that would lead you to some conclusion?

So, of course, we did decide to do that, but there were just so many other things, like, well, what happens when your rollers are sagging in the middle? There were a lot of practical things, since we were all letterpress printers, that we needed to ask each other. So that was the other big thing.

The third thing that was really important was food. So we brought food. It was potluck and we just always ate over food. We’d have our meeting first and figure out and we’d give assignments to each other. We started reading things like Bruce Rogers’ Paragraphs on Printing to see if we could get a handle on the huge amount of literature about printing in general, about design aesthetics. There were an enormous number of things that we could talk about and that we needed to talk about, and one of the things that didn’t happen right at first, but I remember that it was a significant thing that happened in our group, was that someone finished a project and wondered whether or not she should sign her book, and that was really curious because, well, of course you should sign your book, but that was a consideration. What was that? [laughs] You know? Are we an artist, that we sign our work or is it—we just didn’t know. Really, we were quite new at all of this.





COLLINGS:

Well, I can see how puzzling things would be because you had this vast sort of array of choices. You weren’t operating within a printing tradition which dictates that this is how the printing will go forward, this is the font that you use, this is—





MARYATT:

Well, we were, though.



01:01:58

COLLINGS:

You’re coming up with your own approach.





MARYATT:

Yeah, but we were right smack dab in the middle of the fine-press tradition. Now, the fine-press tradition, of course, is where you publish poetry that has not been published before. That’s the tradition. You pick the appropriate typeface and you print the poem as effectively as you can and bind it as well as you can or you take it to somebody to get it bound. So that was already there. We saw people doing that. But in 1980, here’s Nancy Garruba showing us a different way.





COLLINGS:

Right.





MARYATT:

And at the Woman’s Building, of course, these loud voices are making loud images and having a lot to say that didn’t always fit in normal pages. So these were women from the Woman’s Building, but we had other people, too, in our—do I remember if anybody if was not from the Woman’s Building—because we invited people from time to time, so in our little type world who hadn’t maybe taken these classes at the Woman’s Building. So, yeah, and Susan King was particularly articulate about—she was a writer and so she was our standard-bearer in the sense that she was trying to come up with the structures that would go with her books, and none of us were really making books to the extent that Susan was, but we wanted to. We were trying to.





COLLINGS:

Well, did you feel like you had to avoid anything that would sort of smack of the fine-press movement?





MARYATT:

That’s a good question.



01:03:39

COLLINGS:

Did you feel that that was sort of a no-go area?





MARYATT:

No, it wasn’t. Because we were doing letterpress, it was automatically fine press. In other words, you don’t want to print badly. So if you print well, then it’s already well made, but it was a different focus from maybe poetry or short stories. It was more focused on writing your own stuff if you were a writer or at least putting together something that somebody else said that you could kind of reinvent, so that you could look at this text in a new way, or maybe they were purely visual books. That was kind of startling to have just purely visual books with no text in them. I don’t remember anybody in our group doing that.

But we were trying to find our way within what was happening. Of course, we had places to go to look at books like these and that was Barbara Drucker, Barbara Drucker and Judy Hoffberg’s bookstore gallery of artist books. What was it called? I don’t remember now. Artist Books something. So we’d go there and thumb through the books that were Xeroxed and letterpress and a whole mixed bag of every kind of book under the sun, big and small and shoddily made and gorgeous, so that was what we got to see over those years, those beginning years. But right at the beginning, the reason that we used letterpress is that we could buy letterpress equipment and do it ourselves. That was really the big thing. You could do it yourselves. Before that, anybody—





COLLINGS:

You could buy letterpress equipment because it was being sold off—





MARYATT:

It was being sold off by—





COLLINGS:

—by newspapers and so forth, yeah.



01:06:2401:07:5301:09:21

MARYATT:

—everybody that couldn’t make a commercial go of it. This was actually a little bit late. The equipment had been selling off since the sixties or so, but some of us were still able to find this equipment. So it wasn’t so much the romance of letterpress. It’s just that it was a tool that you could do yourself as opposed to going to Andreessen Typesetting or the typesetters and have them set it for you and make a proof and then have it printed for you at great cost, at great expense, or to go to offset at lesser expense maybe, but still there weren’t all of the typesetting, photo typesetting units out there that were inexpensive yet. There was Continental Typesetting that I used a lot for my commercial work.

But anyway, so that’s why so many women and men, too, got into letterpress printing, because you could buy the presses for a reasonable price. So I got mine for $500 in 1978, I think, my big one, and I got a little baby Pilot Press in ’76 or around there for $500 also, and I got some type from a friend who was a printer, offset printer, and he sold me a cabinet full of Palatino and you just scrounge around and you get your type, and therefore now you have the machine, you have the means, and you can say whatever you want. Buy a little bit of ink and just have to have a good flooring so that these heavy machines can be put there. So a lot of people worked out of their garage or wherever, and it, of course, just kind of naturally was beautiful because you push those little letters into the paper.

But, of course, the aesthetic of letterpress wasn’t always thick paper or even soft-ish paper and pushed in. All of the books that you looked at before the sixties that were printed letterpress, they can be as flat as and planar as offset. So it was really because we could get the equipment and that people were teaching how to use the equipment, teaching each other.

There were no books on how to learn letterpress. You could go visit the junior-high print shop, which I did when I was teaching math. It was right down literally underneath me. I was on the second floor. It was on the first floor. I’d go down there and look and see what they were up to and look at the linotype machine and clickety-clack, and that was pretty evocative and fun. But really, we women taught each other and we didn’t really assiduously teach each other. In fact, my very first lesson, I didn’t really get a lesson until I studied with Andy Horn at UCLA when I was in graduate school, actually just before I was in graduate school.

So my instruction was one afternoon with Paul Bohne. I asked him to print something for me because I was changing my name from Kitty Weber. I had gotten married right out of college, married five years, got divorced, was still Mrs. Weber at school. I wanted my identity back. I wanted to go back to Maryatt. So I was going to send out a notice to all of my friends that I was now going to be back to Kitty Maryatt. I asked Paul if he—I met him in a bookbinding class—asked him if he would print this card for me. I said, “Can I watch you do it?”

And he said, “Sure.”

So I went and watched him do it and I said, “Oh, my god. This is so much easier than calligraphy. I have to get a press. What’s that kind of press?”

“That’s a Sigwalt.”

“Where do you get a Sigwalt?”

He said, “Well, that’s going to be a little hard to find, but maybe you can get a C&P Pilot press, Chandler & Price Pilot press.” So I went out, like, within a week and I found a Chandler & Price Pilot press. I don’t know if it was literally a week, but it felt like that. I just had to have that press because I felt it was a tabletop press. You didn’t really have to have much equipment, some wood furniture, some type, and I put it in my closet that had bifold doors, and I called myself a closet printer. So I started printing. So really the only instruction that I got was observing him, and to make sure that you put quads on the ends of the line. He didn’t talk very much about how much ink to put on or what kind of paper to use. He used just regular commercial paper.

So I did that for quite a long time before I ever got any instruction, and so made lots of mistakes, but I just had to do printing. Made fun things for people and I even did—by this time I had my business that I had started 1974 called À Deux Mains, À, D-e-u-x, M-a-i-n-s, which if you say it too fast, “à deux mains,” you can say, “à demain,” which is “till tomorrow,” which isn’t a good name for a business.





COLLINGS:

Yeah. [laughs]





MARYATT:

Anyway, so once I got my presses—





COLLINGS:

It’s Two Hands.



01:11:22

MARYATT:

—I changed to Two Hands Press. So that was kind of interesting.

But anyway, my first thing I wanted to do with my press was a commercial job. Somebody had come to me wanting to do invitations to a wedding, I think, and I was doing calligraphy for other people by that time, making extra money on the side. I was still teaching math. I couldn’t handwrite the fifty or so invitations that he needed, so I had plates made. I handwrote it and had scanned—well, it wasn’t even a scan at that time. It was a photostat—you take a photograph of it, make a negative, and then it’s a process to get a photo-etching made the old-fashioned way.

So anyway, so I got plates made and I printed his fifty invitations as a commercial project, and then I did other projects just for me and for my friends. I made a fifty-two-week calendar that I gave to all of my Women of Letters friends and did a poem, a very significant poem by Rena Rosenwasser, who had talked about women teaching art and how, by extension, they are making art through their students, and I loved that poem and I used that later as the stepping-off point for one of our books that we did called Livre des Livres.

So anyway, so I just had to have a press and that got me into spending more time trying to learn how to do that, but really we just had to teach each other because there was nobody in Los Angeles that I remember that was teaching any letterpress, except at the Woman’s Building, and Susan King was teaching a little class, but I didn’t take from her.





COLLINGS:

Why is it that the group was Women of Letters? Were there men in—





MARYATT:

Yeah, that’s a really good question.





COLLINGS:

—Los Angeles doing that?



01:12:54

MARYATT:

Yeah, yeah. So we started out with our little group of people from the Woman’s Building and we started—one of my friends, Michael Sheridan, wanted to join our group because I told him what we were doing and he was a type aficionado. He worked at Autologic with Sumner Stone and John Lane and all my other buddies up there, and he wanted to join our group. So I asked my group, “Can Michael come?”

And they said, “Not on your life. No way.” And I was shocked. It just didn’t occur to me, really, that he wouldn’t be welcome, because we were talking these substantive things that we were all interested in. Anyway, so I thought, “Well.” So I thought, “Well, what about all my men friends that are interested in this?” So I said, “Michael, let’s just ask John and Sumner and Bill Bright up at UCLA. Let’s have our own group.” So we had Men of Letters. So I met with them and we did similar things that we did with the women.

The way it came out to be called Women of Letters was that I felt—we all felt maybe at some point that we needed to say we’re going to have a meeting of our group. What’s our group name? So I pulled out good old Roget’s Thesaurus, which is another book that I wrapped a Scripps’ book around, very important tome, and I just was going through letterforms, letters, and came upon the phrase “Men of Letters,” and I said, “That’s it. Women of Letters. We’re Women of Letters.” It has all these nuances, right?





COLLINGS:

Yes.





MARYATT:

So that’s how the name got stuck with us. So we haven’t been the same number of people all of these years. Maybe the same number, approximately eight to twelve people, and people have moved away from time to time.





COLLINGS:

So who were the original Women of Letters?





MARYATT:

So the originals were Susan King and I and Marion Baker and Bonnie Thompson Norman and Kim—was it Kim Abeles?





COLLINGS:

Uh-huh.





MARYATT:

Kim, Kim. Can’t think of her last name right now.





COLLINGS:

Abeles?





MARYATT:

It could be.



01:14:38

COLLINGS:

I think you did mention her last time.





MARYATT:

Kim Bayer. Maybe Kim Bayer. I can’t remember. I think there may have been one or two more that I just didn’t maybe didn’t even know the names.





COLLINGS:

So it was just a very small group to start with.



01:16:13

MARYATT:

Very small group to start with. Then after the first meeting, it was only a subset of that group. Some didn’t come back. That’s when I met Jill Littlewood and invited her into the group after a few months, I think. So maybe we were now five or six. Then sometime later, many years later and so on, so slowly people who became letterpress printers that we thought would add to the group would be invited to come, and then eventually people would move away. So, for example, Susan King moved to Kentucky, and so she was no longer an active member of the group. Then Robin Price graduated from Scripps. Well, she went to Pomona College, but she worked at the Scripps College Press. She took a class from Christine Bertelson at the Scripps College Press. So Robin became a group member and then she eventually moved away. Who else? Bonnie Thompson Norman moved away. Who else was in the group that moved away? But we still invite them to activities, and then we had a big show at the William Andrews Clark Library some years ago where we put all of our work—not all, but—in those little tiny cases—our work up and had a Women of Letters show, and we invited them to show with us. So we have a current group.

Some of our other people: Nancy Bloch moved away and Donna Westerman moved away. So I think now five moved away. We usually keep them still on our mailing list and talk about when we’re going to have meetings. So our next meeting’s November 1st, and I think Nancy’s going to come back from Arizona. Where is she? Tucson [Santa Fe, New Mexico]. She’s in wherever she is. So she’s going to try to come and we’re going to be going up to an event next week in San Francisco, a conference and so on, and so I’ll be seeing Donna Westerman. So one of my girlfriends, Jean Gillingwators, who’s in the group, is going up there for that event, too, so we’re going to all meet at Donna Westerman’s. So we meet wherever people are, but I think we have officially maybe ten active members and five around the world in there.





COLLINGS:

That sounds thriving, actually. So as someone who participated in both Women of Letters and Men of Letters, did you notice any differences between the groups?



01:18:3301:18:33

MARYATT:

Oh, yeah. Well, you know, men don’t talk about their personal lives very much in those kinds of situations, whereas the women, you just can’t get away from it. We’re having food, we’re finding out Bonnie’s pregnant, then I got pregnant, things are happening, so we talk a lot about our personal lives, which is so significant about making decisions on do we have time to make this book when we really have to go on this vacation or we are traveling or something. So that was the biggest difference, was that we really talked about our lives in our women’s group and we really didn’t do that very much in the men’s group. We really stuck to reading books and discussing why is this typeface really good. I remember particularly in the men’s group we wanted to look at Bembo and see what is it that makes it so useful for so many different applications, and let’s look particularly at these shapes and blow them up and discuss them pretty intently.

Both the groups read Paragraphs on Printing by Bruce Rogers, but we discussed that a lot more in the men’s group, more particularly, because these men, I guess, maybe had had more experience in studying letterforms than we had because they were working for Autologic, which was a company that was producing type on these photographic typesetting machines. Sumner Stone had been the head of type design at Adobe. They knew letterforms much more deeply than we did, and so we were really concentrating on letterforms. It was a very exciting time.

Also looking at Sumner’s a calligrapher, I’m a calligrapher, he has a master’s in math, I have a master’s in math, so we bonded. So we would have discussions about calligraphers coming through the area, and all these really interesting people would go to Autologic. They were hired to give workshops at Autologic. So I got to meet these people who were coming through, who were expert calligraphers or type-lettering designers, and they would include me. It didn’t seem odd that I was the only woman in there. We didn’t think about inviting—we just really had our basic five people and we didn’t really expand it, that we were the ones who wanted to do it.

Really interesting how the people in that group went on to do unbelievable things. Sumner Stone is one of the most well-known type designers in the world, and, in fact, I invited him to digitize the Scripps College Old Style when I finally got some money to do that. So that was a great gift that he gave to us to do that. John Lane went on to England to work for a type museum. So he writes me every once in a while, trying to catch up. Bill Bright was at UCLA, teaching literature, I think. I can’t remember what he was doing. Mike Sheridan was working on type. I can’t remember what he went on to do, but he went and continued in the type design area. So they were all really immersed in type design and letterform design, whereas we women were just trying to express ourselves. [laughs] So we had a lot of different kinds of things to talk about and to catch up on and everything.

Okay. So I’m going to have to stop for a second.





COLLINGS:

Okay. [End of October 10, 2014 interview]

SESSION TWO (October 30, 2014)



00:00:10

COLLINGS:

Now we’re on and it is October 30th, 2014, Jane Collings interviewing Kitty Maryatt in her home.





MARYATT:

This is actually my studio.





COLLINGS:

In your studio, okay.





MARYATT:

We live here during the week, but my home, I don’t know. My home is in Oak Park.





COLLINGS:

It seems so homey, though. [laughs]





MARYATT:

It is homey. It is homey.





COLLINGS:

Okay. So were talking just a little bit off the recording about how we were going to start in talking about the founding of the Society of Calligraphy, calligraphy being for you a real jumping-off point for all of what came next.



00:02:25

MARYATT:

Yeah, exactly. Everything I really do attribute to my interest in not just calligraphy, but letterforms in general, but it wasn’t until later that I really started understanding that type came from calligraphy. That was a big moment for me to actually come to that conclusion, and I’ll tell you why in a second.

But to go back to the founding of the Society, I think I mentioned in our previous talks about studying with Maury Nemoy at UCLA Extension, starting in 1971, and in 1973, Donald Jackson, who’s the queen’s scribe, came to UC Santa Cruz and taught a class. So some people from Maury’s class in calligraphy and medieval manuscript illumination, and some people from L.A. went up there. So that was Pat Topping and Mary—no. I can’t remember right at this moment who went up there, but several people went up there and then the San Francisco crowd too. So that was kind of a big moment for calligraphy, because he got a lot of press because he was the queen’s scribe. So, you know, normally, calligraphy doesn’t get any respect in this country, which is quite unfortunate. It’s the highest art form in Asia, for example, but not here, and so it was nice to see that the press was interested in the fact that he was coming to teach a class. So he came down in 1974, also, to Los Angeles, and I took that class with him, so I think it was two weeks long, and it was another magnificent experience in my life.

But in ’73, when Pat Topping and I think it was two others [Miriam Halperin and Chuck Medinnis] took that class and came back down, they were in the class with me with Maury Nemoy at UCLA because all of us took the class over and over and over again because there was nothing else to take in L.A.





COLLINGS:

This is when you were doing your MFA or was this while you were at Extension?





MARYATT:

No, this was way before. This was eight years before, seven years before. So I was teaching math at that time. So Pat Topping and a few others said, “We should get together and start a Society.” Maury Nemoy had done that once years before. He was not interested in being an officer again because there was a professional society maybe ten, fifteen years before that. It kind of died out because the people were professionals. They mostly did movie titles and things like that.





COLLINGS:

Oh, that’s interesting.



00:03:37

MARYATT:

So they just didn’t want to do kind of the administrative part of running an organization. So he said he would be supportive but he wouldn’t want to be one of the organizers.

So Miriam Halperin was one of the ones in the class with me, and she had this big house in Encino with a big lawn, so we had a party up there in, I think, November of 1973, and there were about fifty or sixty people, as I recall, who were just crazy about calligraphy. You know, that’s why it was so unusual for us, because you couldn’t find calligraphy supplies in the stores. It wasn’t on everybody’s tongue like it is today. Back then it was really unusual. People just thought, “Oh, what is that? Is that like pretty writing?”

“Yeah, sure. It’s a little bit more than that.”

And so we wanted to start this organization to show the world that it is worthy of respect, that it can be done professionally, and that it has a lot of artistry in it as well as the craft of calligraphy. So that’s really the reason. We wanted to educate the world and also we wanted to get together all the time.

So we organized ourselves at that meeting. So we partied. Lloyd Reynolds came down from Portland, Oregon. He was the organizer of the Society for Handwriting in Oregon, and that had been going on for a number of years. He had been teaching up at—Lewis & Clark? No. What’s the other one in Portland? A small college.





COLLINGS:

Reed?



00:05:21

MARYATT:

Reed. He had been teaching calligraphy at Reed for a number of years, in fact, which is really unusual. Not very many colleges had calligraphy. I can’t think of any others, except for two-year colleges, for example. So he came down, so he was the guest of honor, and Maury and he knew each other really, really well.

So, some divided into a group who would be writing the constitution and the bylaws, I should say, and figuring out who would be the officers and so on. So I was the treasurer, so that’s why I was one of the cofounders. There were lots of cofounders. So we had Chuck Medinnis write the bylaws. We met as this ad hoc committee, and Chuck Medinnis was selected to be the president, Pat Topping was the vice president, and I was the treasurer, and maybe Miriam was the secretary. So we said that everybody would just have a year’s term, and so Pat Topping was the president the next year and then I was the president the year after that.

So we started meeting officially in February, I’m pretty sure, of 1974, where we had our group approve the bylaws, and we’re nonprofit. We filed for nonprofit status. So we started meeting then and planning exhibits. We had an exhibit at the Pacific Design Center, and we started a journal called The Calligraph, and that was before the Internet, so everything was done by paper and letters and things. So that was really a wonderful thing to be involved in because we were all excited to do that. We were thrilled to be able to look at each other’s work and see who was doing really, really professional work, and helping those who were just beginning, like me, to find classes, again because Maury was the only class.

So, slowly over the years people got trained and started teaching calligraphy. So Marsha and Larry Brady started teaching calligraphy at Cerritos College, and they invited me to teach there in ’76. So at nighttime I taught there from ’76 to about ’80, and I also started teaching at UCLA Extension when Maury Nemoy stopped teaching there, whenever that was, ’79, I think.



00:07:59

COLLINGS:

So you’re sort of pointing to applications of calligraphy. You mentioned people in the film industry and the teaching of calligraphy at two-year colleges. Were there several sort of strains going in the Society for Calligraphy, sort of an arts-oriented strain, calligraphy as a trade strain?





MARYATT:

Yes. Absolutely. So there were a number of needs from the Society for Calligraphy. They were usually fairly low level, where you would do certificates or wedding certificates, maybe, or maybe make wedding invitations and have them printed or envelopes for weddings. Or on the slightly higher end, the movie titles and artwork for bigger corporations, they might want something really special.

So eventually when I went more into business—I started my business in ’74, actually, but that was because I wanted to sell my calligraphy at the Westwood Art Fair, so my girlfriend and I—she had ceramics. So that started my business, but I didn’t really go into business to really sell my work and my skills until 1980 or so, when I quit my job and I needed—well, I needed money. So I, luckily—there was something in the newspaper. L.A. Times made a list of four or five of us calligraphers, and Bullock’s Wilshire called me and said, “We need signs, and you don’t have to be a Picasso, but we want them on a regular basis to announce that some designer is coming into the store, and you can meet that designer on such and such a date,”—





COLLINGS:

Oh, how interesting.





MARYATT:

—or those kinds of things. So they wanted signs for the store. So I thought, “That’s great.” So that really paid for my studio—





COLLINGS:

Really?





MARYATT:

—for many, many years. [laughs] They wanted a lot of handwritten signs.



00:09:39

COLLINGS:

How interesting.





MARYATT:

Yeah. So that was a great source of income.





COLLINGS:

Now, what years was that again?





MARYATT:

That was pretty much right after I opened my studio in 1981 in Westwood. So I had been using my apartment as my studio, and I moved my presses and all of my equipment into a beautiful building on Westwood Boulevard between Santa Monica and Wilshire that used to be an apartment building and now it was turned over to commercial. So I rented a space that was about 500 square feet on the lowest level, with a brick patio outside so I could do wet things outside and have parties outside. So that was my studio, and not only did I get work commercially in calligraphy, I got a lot of letterpress work because I had my printing press there, I had bookbinding work, and I gave workshops. So anything I could do to put myself through graduate school, because that’s what I was doing. So I got a lot of work and it was mostly commercial work.

But the Society for Calligraphy not only helped to connect with people who wanted to hire you to do something; we were very interested in putting on exhibits to maybe show that you don’t always have to do wedding invitations, that you could present some literature on paper as an artistic piece and not something that somebody needs for a commercial concern. So that was really a big effort to have those different kinds of strains in the Society for Calligraphy.



00:11:41

COLLINGS:

It almost seems as if the calligraphy, the calligraphic form, it’s almost like a portal for switching from the notion of the fine-press movement with the focus on literature into bringing the visual arts into printing and finally into artist books.





MARYATT:

Actually, the style of calligraphy morphed. So at the beginning, it was more about literature. It was more about trying to beautifully present words that you appreciate, not usually your own words, but other people’s: maybe a little short story or a poem. That would be the kind of thing that you would prepare for an exhibit. And the artwork was in some cases really high-end, because people come to calligraphy, as they do to book arts, with many different backgrounds. So they could be scientists; they could be artists already or ceramicists. They come from every corner of society. So some of the works had some visual arts in addition to the calligraphy, but the calligraphy itself was, at first, meant to be the visual art. The placement, the style of letterform, and the presentation, how big and so on, was foremost. The words were very important. And so I had a little breakthrough when I decided to do a piece where you weren’t constrained by words, that I loved the calligraphic gesture and the movement.





COLLINGS:

The actual physical gesture.





MARYATT:

The actual physicality. And it’s so hard to learn calligraphy, to do it really, really well, and to try to find the right paper and to get kind of smooth strokes and learn different styles of calligraphy that would express the words that you want to say.

So at one point—I’d have to look it up to see when I did this piece, but it was for an exhibit, and I just thought, “What the heck? I’m not going to do letterforms. I’m just going to let my pen dance on the page.” And so I called it Dances. So I had a series of, I think, five little dances that I put in this show, and it sold, and it was just absolutely amazing. I’m kind of heartbroken that I sold it, because it’s gone. I have an old picture of it. But anyway, that absolutely is the same kind of thing that I was doing with my latest book.



00:13:58

COLLINGS:

Exactly. That’s what I’m thinking, yeah.





MARYATT:

It took thirty years to get to that point, but that was an interest of mine earlier, was what happens if you free yourself from the power of words. You lose that power, but you capture maybe something that you’re trying to do that you can’t do because you’ve got to get to that next letter. So that was kind of an interesting breakthrough. And another one was when I started writing my own words. Because I was a math major, I wasn’t confident about expressing myself in a literary way, and so I thought, “Well, here’s an [opportunity]. We got another exhibit. Let me just see what I’m going to write.” So I wrote something, and whenever I write something, it’s always kind of a surprise what I want to say. You kind of plan maybe what you want to say, but I have to let myself go and see what it is that I want to express.

So I had just met my future husband and so I was all excited about that, and so it was about kind of the—I’m going to cry now.





COLLINGS:

Aw.



00:15:18

MARYATT:

[cries] It’s so moving. Anyway, I do this all the time when I find moving things to talk about. But anyway, it was so wonderful to meet this fellow, and I just knew he was the one, and so I wrote this—it was easy in that sense to start writing about what my future was going to be like, and so that’s what I did. I did a piece.

Then the big leap was really putting it into show because it was fairly personal, but I just thought, well, other people write and let it go, let it go out in the world, and so we’ll see. [laughs] So that was another big step, was to feel like I wrote well enough, that I explained what I wanted to say well enough, and I also wrote well calligraphically and also I had art in it where I had marbled some paper in kind of a new way that left space open for these letters to fill it. So everything seemed to work about that piece, which I still have. So that was another sort of change to all calligraphy groups that we were more trying to maybe not always have to do somebody else’s words, that you own it a little bit more if you can do your own, if you feel confident enough to do that.

So the Society for Calligraphy was the first one that was organized in ’73, slightly ignoring the fact that Lloyd Reynolds had organized the one in Portland as the Society for Handwriting, but this was the first what we called a Calligraphy Society. So immediately thereafter, within months, it’s called the Society for Calligraphy in L.A., and then New York opened up a Society of Scribes, and then they started springing up everywhere, and then we started having national conferences where people would go. Hundreds and hundreds would go to these conferences and study from various people. So it became a nationwide phenomenon, and so lots more classes were being taught everywhere in every city. Calligraphy supplies started populating the art stores—





COLLINGS:

Right. I was just going to ask about that.



00:17:28

MARYATT:

—and people started having more critical comments about calligraphy as an art form in addition to being something that’s commercially useful. So it was quite a phenomenon.

So I taught many classes at UCLA Extension that weren’t just calligraphy classes. I taught every kind of calligraphy, every style of letterform over those years that I did that, but I also taught design classes, color classes, making-books classes, all kinds of classes. Sometimes I taught four nights a week at UCLA Extension while I was going through graduate school. So it was a great thing because I went to school during the day and I had the time at night, and I was still single at that time. So it was great all the way around. It was great for me. I was loving being immersed in calligraphy. It helped me with my graduate work and it was a wonderful thing for the world, really.

It’s shrunk over time. The numbers of Societies for Calligraphy has gotten lower. The number of people in the Society here in L.A. has gotten about half as many as it was at its height, but it’s still there and it will always still be there, and a lot more people know what calligraphy is now, even if they only think of it as pretty writing or beautiful writing, and maybe that’s not bad, you know. There are many, many people, though, who have gone on to use calligraphy with their artwork, so in a sense, sometimes the artwork even takes over the calligraphy, so that you hardly see any words in the calligraphy anymore.

So I was in Japan three years ago to study Japanese calligraphy and do katagami and all kinds of things, and I went to a calligraphy show of calligraphy done by Japanese calligraphers who all wrote in English. I was just stunned at these fifty or so people in this show who had come to America, most of them, or studied with people who had gone over there to teach them calligraphy. I was there to teach them bookbinding, so I worked with two different Calligraphy Societies. I had three different classes to teach this group how to do bookbinding and history of bookbinding and so on. But there’d been many other calligraphers who had been coming over for years teaching Japanese men and women to do Western calligraphy. So there were a lot of words in that show, but the point I was trying to say is that they had paired this show with some people from Holland, and there were some pieces by Yves Leterme, where there were basically no words. That’s what I was meaning, that the artwork tends sometimes to take over the calligraphy, and it’s just the gesture that’s left or maybe a few little meaningful things in there. There was a Japanese calligrapher who had done a very similar kind of thing, not the same colors or anything or size, but her letterforms were hard to decipher within the piece. So it was very interesting to see how all these years how people strive to make a work of art and where the words sometimes maybe get in the way, because words are powerful, because they’re so meaningful because your eye is drawn to them maybe first because they’re readable, and you have a harder time deciphering artwork. It’s very interesting how to keep that balance of the power of words and the power of the artwork. So that’s where we are right now with calligraphy. There’s a lot of beautiful calligraphy going on still all over, and it has spread to—it started really in Europe. I went in nineteen—whenever it was—’74 to Europe to study calligraphy because here we had Maury Nemoy in L.A. You know, I had to go get more, and so I studied with Donald Jackson, but then I went over in the summer of ’74 to study with David Howells, who is my total hero because he was doing work that was so experimental with calligraphy. He was a fabulous calligrapher. The structure of his letterforms were absolutely gorgeous. He had a very distinct personal style, but also he was experimental when there weren’t that many experimental calligraphers out there. So he said that I should go to the Klingspor Museum in Germany, in Offenbach, and go see Karlgeorg Höfer and Hans Schmidt, and later on, I went some more. But anyway, so I went over there, like immediately, the next year. I came back to study with him the next summer, and then I went over there and just opened my eyes. The whole Klingspor Museum is devoted to the letterform because it was founded by a type-foundry family, and so it’s all about letterforms and type. So I met Hans Schmidt, who was just dear, who didn’t speak any English, and I spoke so little German, but Karlgeorg Höfer also didn’t speak any German, but he was so lively that it was really easy to communicate. Hans Schmidt was very quiet, but his work is so dynamic. Both of them just blew me away about how unbelievably gorgeous their work is. I have it all over my home. I have it all over here from European calligraphers, and then I collect American calligraphers, too, have done.





COLLINGS:

What about the influence of Japanese calligraphy? Because I’m just thinking in the eighties how America was so opening up to all things Japanese at that time, and so many of the book art supplies are Japanese paper, Japanese inks—





MARYATT:

Nowadays.





COLLINGS:

Nowadays.





MARYATT:

Back then—





COLLINGS:

Yeah, that was my question.





MARYATT:

—you would have a much harder time finding Japanese paper. The one person who brought it in was Hiromi. Hiromi still is the distributor of beautiful handmade Japanese papers.



00:23:41

COLLINGS:

Here in L.A. or nationwide?





MARYATT:

The one in L.A. She was the one in L.A. She was on Glencoe right around the corner from here, and then she moved up to where she is now in Santa Monica at Bergamont Station. So she was the one. You really couldn’t get very much in art stores of anything like that. But the reason that we calligraphers love Japanese calligraphy is because their strokes—“their”—the characters looked so effortless and so smooth and so perfect and so artistic. Because, of course, we couldn’t read them. All we could do was appreciate the structure of the characters, right?





COLLINGS:

Okay. That’s very interesting, isn’t it?





MARYATT:

We wanted that same kind of liveliness in our Western-style letterforms, which was hard to avoid the fact that we could read those letters, that we know what a “D” looked like.





COLLINGS:

Right.





MARYATT:

So people started stretching and morphing letterforms a lot in order to develop new styles that weren’t always based on historical calligraphic styles. That’s what you always did. When you started calligraphy, you studied from original manuscript facsimiles, if you could, or got a good teacher who could, you know, maybe make some pages that you could trace and copy and do on your own. But we—I lost my train of thought about—



00:25:23

COLLINGS:

We were talking about the sort of intersection between European calligraphy and the Japanese calligraphy, and the fact that you couldn’t read the characters in the Japanese calligraphy.





MARYATT:

Right. That was very significant because there were a lot of different kinds of characters to appreciate, and the cursive versus the very strict character forms in squares, and the shape of the paper was often standardized and the little chop that just gave that bright Chinese red on every single piece that you ever saw that was the ownership or sort of the stamp of approval, in a sense. And everything about it was to be emulated, and also we knew, of course, that the Japanese people gave so much respect to calligraphers. We wanted that respect.





COLLINGS:

Oh, yes.



00:27:02

MARYATT:

We wanted to be like that. So it was a big influence. So I read a number of books on Chinese calligraphy, which, of course, gave rise to Japanese calligraphy, and who were the famous calligraphers. Just like we were reading books about calligraphy. One of the significant books was by Donald Anderson that I read, which actually introduced me to type or made me appreciate type, that type came from calligraphy, which somehow I hadn’t figured out. It made me feel really dumb afterwards when I went, “Oh!” [laughs] But Donald Anderson had a significant chapter showing the changeover from calligraphic hands to Gutenberg, copying a calligraphic hand, and I thought, “Oh! Of course he copied a calligraphic hand. That’s why he has so many characters.” Anyway, it was just really a real eye-opener.

So there weren’t all that many books on calligraphy at that time, certainly not the books on the history of calligraphy as there are today. So today if you want to study calligraphy, you have a whole lot more background. You can really study it as a significant art form in all manifestations, whereas back then, we were really struggling to get information. That’s why we needed each other at these meetings.

We’d bring in people from other places, from Europe. When I started teaching calligraphy at Cerritos, I told Marsha and Larry about studying with David Howells, and I said, “We should bring him over here.” So, bam, we brought him over here—they brought them. They had the power, I didn’t, to bring him over here to teach some classes at Cerritos College, and we nabbed him for the Society for Calligraphy also.

So that started the rush of all these people from all over Europe to come to all of the different Societies. They would make the rounds from one Calligraphy Society to the other in order to afford to be able to teach at all these different places. There were many people that made part of their living by teaching workshops all over the place and coming to teach workshops at the conferences in the summers. So it was hot and heavy, really great, great interaction.





COLLINGS:

Was the fact that computers were sort of starting to come on to the scene, and, of course, now there was Xerox and so on, making it so that calligraphy as sort of as a one-of-a-kind object was becoming more important in its own right?



00:29:14

MARYATT:

Hmm. That’s interesting. I thought you were going in the other direction, that now you could make replicas of the calligraphy, right? I mean, that was even more important. The fact that you could make one-of-a-kind, I mean, you could always make a one-of-a-kind, so I don’t think that the Xeroxing changed that. It’s just that that one-of-a-kind now could be Xeroxed. It wouldn’t necessarily make a pretty copy, but you could send a copy to somebody because, again, we weren’t on the Internet very much then. We didn’t really have computers much then.

I didn’t really get my first computer—my husband and I—we married in ’84—’83, ’84, and so my husband, in February of ’84, got the first Macintosh that came out. So he got that for his son, so that was our first introduction to a home computer, because both of us had had computer work in graduate school. Gary has a Ph.D. in engineering, so he had to do a lot of stuff on those big huge mainframe computers, and I had my master’s in math and I had to do computer programming on those big horrible things. [laughs]

So to bring one home and watch Kevin just completely devote himself to that was really great, but I didn’t get my first computer until right around—well, let’s see. Jason was five years old. He was born in ’85, so in 1990 he went to kindergarten, and there he was sitting in front of a computer teaching himself to find the letters. The teacher wasn’t teaching him. The kids could go up there. And I thought, “Oh, my god. We have to get a computer for him.” He’s five. I’m thinking, “Oh, my god.” So that was our first home computer because Kevin had his computer. We couldn’t touch it. So really it wasn’t until 1990s that the computer had any significance for me in calligraphy, really.



00:30:47

COLLINGS:

Well, how did computing change calligraphy then?



00:33:3600:34:49

MARYATT:

Well, of course, now you can digitize your own type, your own calligraphy into a typeface with Fontographer and other tools, Font Studio and so on. I mean, that really changed, but that wasn’t, again, until later. But those people who really got into computers, say, in 1984, did have the tools to start designing their own typefaces, and now we suddenly had a lot more calligraphic typefaces.

We have always had calligraphic typefaces because Hermann Zapf, who’s one of the greatest calligraphers who also makes type, has always done typefaces based on the skills that he learned from doing his own calligraphy and his wife, Gudrun Zapf, who also does type design, and they started doing that in the fifties. There were always calligraphers who got into type design because they were skilled at drawing letterforms. But now, finally, with your own personal computer, those who had computer skills and were calligraphers could start designing typefaces based on their calligraphy. So there was a big blossoming, Ex Ponto and Galahad and all kinds of typefaces by calligrapher friends of mine who were teaching calligraphy around, but also designing their own typefaces.

So personally how did it affect me? It didn’t really, because I didn’t—I did design my own typeface, in fact, but it wasn’t in 1990. When did I design that? I did a calligraphic typeface. I was commissioned to design a book for—who was it—for Cal State Northridge. Pat Reigh was commissioned to print the book and he wanted me to design these letterforms as intros to the sections, but there were many, many intros that had the same letter, and I thought, “Jeez, I’ve got to design a calligraphic face where I can use five different Ss, cap Ss and cap Ts. I needed at least five cap Ts.” And, you know, going through this whole project, I need to make these.” So I just started sketching a whole bunch of them, and then once I had sketched half the alphabet, I thought, “Well, I might as well finish.” So I did a whole lot of letters. I did all the alphabet. Then I thought, “Okay, I need numbers. Oh, punctuation. What shall I do? Oh, gosh, I’d better do lowercase.” So I did that whole thing. I pasted it up. I made a—in those olden days, we did photostats, and so I made photostats of my letterforms and pasted them up in a big grid and scanned that, so I had that.

Then I worked with Jovica Veljovich, in fact, in a workshop up in San Francisco for some calligraphy conference or maybe it was because of Sumner Stone was working up at Adobe and maybe it was sponsored by Adobe. It might have been. So anyway, Jovica was teaching this workshop on using not Font Studio or Fonographer; it was an in-house program to design type. So you would digitize the type by making the letter big and going around the edges and pinpointing each little place, and then, sort of like taking Illustrator nowadays, and making the outline and then stretching and fitting it. So I started doing that.

But then I didn’t have the program when I came home again, and so there it sat. There it still sits waiting for it to be turned into type. But, you know, that was my effort of doing that. But then I did it with my students. Later on, I had my students design letters and turn them into type using Fontographer. So that’ll be maybe another topic.

But, yeah, so the computer, of course, has been very useful in that way, but also you can go in the reverse, you know, take a font that exists already, and with knowing calligraphic rules, you can revise the font. I don’t like to do that because the font’s already there. You might as well start from scratch, build your letters yourself. But anyway, people do that.





COLLINGS:

So here—





MARYATT:

But just to say something about the Xeroxing, Xeroxing had a huge impact on books because now all of a sudden you could make copies of whatever you made one of a kind, so that was huge. I remember going up to—and you could see them in stores. There was a store called Artworks, the one store in Los Angeles that sold artist books, and many of them were Xeroxed artist books, run by Judy—Judith. I’ll get her last name. She gave her collection to UCLA.





COLLINGS:

Hoffberg?





MARYATT:

Hoffberg. And Barbara [Pascal]—I’ll get her name in a second too. So that was the one store where you could sell your things if you were making artist books, and you could sell fine letterpress books right next to these Xerox books. It was the whole gamut of books, one of a kind, multiples, everything in this little tiny store in Bergamot Station.





COLLINGS:

In Bergamot Station.





MARYATT:

In Bergamot Station back then.





COLLINGS:

What were the years of the store?





MARYATT:

That was at least before ’80, because I know that I organized a Wayzgoose at UCLA in 1980.



00:36:31

COLLINGS:

Right.



00:38:52

MARYATT:

And I had, as part of that three-day Wayzgoose party, that people could go visit Artworks in Bergamot Station. So I know that they existed before 1980 because they’d been there some time. They’d also been downtown in a beautiful store on a second floor. I don’t remember exactly where it was. So they’d been around for some years already, and that only closed maybe ten, fifteen years ago, so that was there for a long time.

But Xeroxing and being able to make multiples, and, of course, when the computer came and when scanners were available—at first they weren’t, but, you know, when you could scan and all of a sudden everything could be done on the computer, so you didn’t have to make five one of a kind and then make five multiples yourself. You could make these other what we call democratic multiples because they were relatively cheap and they weren’t high-end, necessarily, on great paper. They would self-destruct after a few years. But it really did get those people who were wanting to express themselves, often very politically in many ways, they could make their own books just like real fast.

So before Xerox, if you wanted to make a book that was not going to be letterpressed, but let’s say you were a poet and you wanted to get it published, well, you’d have to go to a publisher and hope that they would spend $10,000 to print your book and sell it and give you 1 percent. So you had very few outlets. And same thing for prose writers and anybody who was a writer. But once you had the tools in your hand to make things yourself, then things started changing. Now, of course, the problem was you had to have the $10,000, except that you wouldn’t necessarily use the kinds of tools that required a lot of money. So there was this huge explosion of people making books of all sorts, and so the computer facilitated that enormously when people realized, “Oh!”

So one of the really best books that was done in the world at that time, when people started being good with computers and being able to get a printer that would actually print type well—so the type at first was just horrible, bitmapped and ugly, and all of us were up in arms and saying, “Oh, this will never work.” But it took time. And so over time, of course, type got beautiful and gorgeous.

But meanwhile, Betsy Davids was a letterpress printer. She was an artist who was teaching at CCAC at that time. That was called California College of Arts and Crafts. Now they’ve left off the last “C,” like most places. She was teaching letterpress there. In fact, Johanna Drucker studied with her. But anyway, meanwhile, she was wanting to do something on the computer, and she did a book called Dreaming Aloud and completely done on the computer, on a Macintosh, and completely digitally printed and then bound in a beautiful kind of Kinko’s style of binding, pinch binding, and it’s just an icon of this changeover into the digital world where she was talking about her own dreams, with imagery in it and text and with beautiful layout and black, black, black prints, so it was just really stunning. So we all looked at that and went, “Whoa!” All of these kinds of things, we’re all thinking, “Oh, my gosh, the death of letterpress.” Of course, letterpress had already been prematurely told that it was dead in the sixties when they started going into phototype. All of a sudden, you didn’t need those machines for commercial—





COLLINGS:

That’s why you—





MARYATT:

—and that’s why we got them.





COLLINGS:

—artists were able to buy letterpress.



00:41:4700:43:5700:46:11

MARYATT:

Yeah, that’s exactly how we started getting them. So, you know, all these things are so interconnected because, of course, letterform, at its basic, before even calligraphic shape, is the way that you express yourself, and so that means you’ve got books, you’ve got to have machines for doing all these different kinds of things. They’re all connected. So it’s just sort of the level of artwork balanced with how you fit letterforms in and around that artwork, and that’s what books are all about, too, even the books that don’t have any words in them. You know, they might need a title, so you’ve got to do something about that. Or books that are only completely typographic that don’t have any images, those kinds of things have always—maybe not always, but even in the early 1900s, those kind of typographic experimental books were done in Russia, they were done in Paris, they were done many, many places.

So that continues, but it just explodes when you finally get good type and that you can get programs where you can manage where the letters can go instead of just in lines. So, yeah, it’s just completely a huge change in the book world. Everybody has the capability of writing a book, everybody designs their own things, and hardly anybody gets any training. So it used to be that the kind of training—I guess that was my point that I was trying to make, is that before you could do it yourself, you had to go to other people. So you would have to go to the typesetter, who would be a letterpress typesetter, who would, either by machine, maybe monotype, maybe linotype, but usually monotype, or maybe you had to do it by hand, you had to hire them to set it and make a proof. You could then print your book by offset or you could possibly, if you had plenty of money, print your book by letterpress, but somebody else would have to print it for you, and the typesetter would have to have good enough skills to be able to know how to set and space capitals according to standards.

So when there was this changeover to everybody being able to do it themselves, and you had to go to design school, many times, you know, lettering schools or graphic design schools, whatever, and so you had a lot of people that could help you with looking at things and seeing what historically had been done. And then the big changeover, of course, meant that everybody’s fending for themselves. They don’t know what they’re doing, and all of a sudden you get all kinds of crazy things, some of which are just gorgeous and wonderful new ways of seeing letterforms and books and type and everything, and some that are just downright uncomfortable and ugly, and you think, “Oh, man.” But it’s really true that there are very few people that get training in how to use letterforms.

So when I get my students, they are just so fresh that I call them the tabula rasa. They just know nothing. I had one student who took a letterpress class with somebody once, but in all these years—this is my twenty-ninth year now—I have very rarely had anybody who really had any kind of an experience in any school. Even today, of course, now they’re not even getting training in cursive, many of them. So they really need to try to see things.

It’s really, really hard to get them to think about spacing capitals. It’s not a problem for them that you have words like even “L.A.,” even the letters “L, A,” or let’s say “LAMB,” the word “LAMB,” LAMB. You’ve got that huge gap between the “L” and the “A.” Even though they’re almost touching at the bottom, there’s that huge gap. Then what about the “MB?” You can get those real close together, so that’s what they do. So unless the type designer designed it so that the pairs of capitals, of which there are many, many thousands, go well together, then they just set them solid and they just don’t even consider that there’s anything that might look better.

That’s my standard, though. I think it might look better if they equally space those capitals, but that’s not necessarily the accepted standard today. Today’s standards are “no rules,” so all the rules had to be thrown out so that everybody could experiment, and, of course, there’s a reason that there are rules, mostly for legibility and readability. So that was the very first book that I did with my students at Scripps, like, “Well, are there any rules that we should probably not throw out?” So I said, “How about the rules that aren’t in the typography books? Why do we have a space between words, for example? Why do we start a sentence with a capital letter? Why do we have any punctuation, for that matter?”

So I had them write up all the rules that they could develop that weren’t in typography books that were standards for readability or legibility and try to justify why they were standards, and then they had to break the rules because I knew that they wanted to break the rules, that that was their ethos. So I said, “But you can’t just break the rule. It has to be intelligently broken. It has to be required to be broken to better show the meaning of what you’re trying to present here.”

So that was our first book. It was really hard for them to make up those rules after the first three obvious ones. But anyway, that was my statement to them, is that, “Of course there are rules that are built up for many reasons and there are rules that you ought to break when it’s reasonable, but if you don’t know the rules, you don’t even know if you’re breaking them. You don’t know if you’re staying within the standards or not.”



00:48:00

COLLINGS:

Is this similar to the process that you and the others who were in the Society for Calligraphy and doing all of that, I don’t know, sort of gestative work, is that sort of similar to what you were doing at that time that you were attempting to figure out what the rules of calligraphy were in order to break the rules, because that was the seventies and it was the time when rules were to be broken? Or were you more involved in being out here on the West Coast and trying to sort of figure out what the history of this kind of work really was? I mean, what was the impulse then?





MARYATT:

I was more experimental than most calligraphers, but we always started out with figuring out what all the rules are.





COLLINGS:

That was all of the trips to Europe and consulting what was going on in Japan and bringing in the queen’s scribe? That was all to find out what is really happening with this field?





MARYATT:

Well, that was the larger view, but really we were kind of focused on how to you learn italic, where did italic come from, who did the best italic back in the fifteenth-century and so on.





COLLINGS:

So you really tried to build up a body of knowledge.





MARYATT:

And it was a huge body of knowledge. You could be a specialist and just do italic, like some calligraphers did. They were just really, really good at italic. Some did more of a foundational hand, some did book hands from copying from books and so on, but really the rules were there in history to look at. So that’s what we started with, and there wasn’t so much of an effort to break the rules. That wasn’t even talked about very much. We really—just to be able to copy somebody really well so that you knew the shapes well enough that you could start making our own. I didn’t see that—we didn’t see it as breaking the rules.



00:49:22

COLLINGS:

So this was really just trying to learn to do something really well.





MARYATT:

Not only to do it really well, but to be able to make our own interpretation of that style, so it became—





COLLINGS:

So there was that interpretive—



00:51:4400:53:08

MARYATT:

Absolutely. But it was not a “breaking of the rule” sort of thing; it was a personalizing, having your own gesture that was more important. For me, the breaking of the rules happened with that Dances piece that I did, when I just said, “Okay, let me just see what happens here.” That was breaking the rule of readability or not even readability, but a character shape. That was really only one thing I did back then. I didn’t do very many of those things.

In fact, I used that kind of training myself to let go in designing my own typeface. When I was doing those different letters, I kind of said, “Okay, here we go.” And I’d do it fairly fast, so that the gesture would be dynamic. So, having done that exercise for myself helped me make up some new letterforms that seemed to go together. They still had to go together for that typeface. But again, I feel so strongly that students get that—or people, in general, don’t have this rule-based society that we used to have when I was growing up in school, and there really is this “no rules” kind of mantra, and I just tell the students that I have standards at Scripps, or any students that I teach anywhere, “Here are my standards.” Anybody can do something badly. That’s my standard. That’s the baseline. You can do it better than badly. What does that mean? So, here, what about inking? Inking’s just sort of basic. You can do bad inking really easily just because you don’t know what you’re doing when you start out. You over-ink it, you under-ink isn’t so bad, but it’s a sin to over-ink it. Now all of a sudden, you have bold letterforms instead of the typeface that you thought you had.

So there are certain basic standards, keeping the paper clean, that they have to have in my classes, and they struggle against that because there are a lot of rules and we are making books that we sell. We’re not just giving these away, and so they can’t make all of the mistakes that you—I mean, they have to make the mistakes, but then we have to throw out that piece of paper. So I give them 10, sometimes 20 percent extra paper. Because we’re human, we have to make our mistakes. We learn best from our mistakes. But I have this kind of thing I always say, even just two days ago at my class. “You know there are twenty-five things that can go wrong, and you just have to learn how to fix every single one of them. You may not hit every single one of those twenty-five, but you’ll hit most of them.”

When you’re learning, there’s just so much to learn about letterpress printing or just bookmaking in general and about binding. It’s very particular. Easy to get glue on everything. So it was brilliant when non-adhesive books were very popular, because non-adhesive means you don’t get glue everywhere. You don’t have to worry about working and so on. So I really do have a lot of standards and rules, but I also ask them, “What would it mean to break the rules? Why would we do it?”





COLLINGS:

I think the analogy that’s coming to me is figure-skating, where the technique has to be absolutely perfect or you’re going to fall over, and then you bring so much interpretation and artistry—





MARYATT:

Exactly.





COLLINGS:

—into the technique.





MARYATT:

Yeah, and you can say it for anything that ends up being kind of an art form, right? Or anything that’s attempting to be an art form.





COLLINGS:

Yeah. Right. You’ve got this incredible tension between the techniques and the expressive aspect of it.





MARYATT:

But again, people aren’t being trained in school as a matter of course in the lower grades to have certain rules for letterforms and design on a page. Even when they get on the computer, does any teacher really know about the margins, the need for margins or not the need? Why would you do a margin this way or that way? Things are kind of a little bit standardized. You’ve got these templates that you can go into. It’s better than nothing. It’s better than having nothing to start with. But anyway, so there’s always an uphill road to teach people.





COLLINGS:

It certainly sounds like it, because you bring so much of sort of the pre-computer work that was necessary to do into the situation, and, of course, that’s like a whole lifetime of learning and experience, and it must be quite a challenge to try to impart that perspective. So when did you begin your MFA at UCLA?






MARYATT:

Well, I did that in 1980. So I had been teaching math. I had been teaching at Cerritos College for four years. I was doing Ski Club with the kids, and Math Club, and I was just totally overwhelmed. I couldn’t do everything. It was really—I just had to give up, had to stop, just say, “I’ve got to go to school because I’ll never get any better if I’m doing this part-time. I have to do it full-time.”

And I was going to do my MFA in calligraphy. That’s what I applied for. All you could do is send in twenty slides to those who decide whether or not to let you into graduate school, and I just, “Whoa! What am I going to send them?” I had a lot of calligraphy slides, calligraphy work that I could send in, but I thought, “Gosh. What else?” But I sent in my twenty slides and they let me in, and I was just amazed. So that was my intention, was to figure out how calligraphy becomes an art form. That was my effort.





COLLINGS:

We’ll get to this, but just sort of foreshadowing, what did you see as sort of the big differences between what you had been doing with your groups and so on and what you found in the academic realm, in the context of the MFA program? Were they separate worlds or not?



00:57:19

MARYATT:

Well, I’m not exactly sure how to answer that, but what happened to me was that when I went there, it was just totally amazing to me that they let me in with the focus that I had because nobody on my committee knew anything about what I was doing, except for John Neuhart. They were graphic designers. I was in the graphic design department, not in the fine arts department. I was getting my MFA in graphic design. But I thought, “Fine. They are graphic designers. They know about the space of the page. They have seen books and they’ve seen book design.” But those people were teaching design for the commercial ends, for people to get jobs in graphic design.





COLLINGS:

So that it wasn’t actually called an MFA in calligraphy.





MARYATT:

Oh, no. In fact, there wasn’t one.





COLLINGS:

That’s what I was curious about.





MARYATT:

No. Of course, I went to UCLA because it was a mile up from where I was living, so I didn’t have to change my situation, but there was no other MFAs in book arts. I think Gabriel Rummonds in Alabama had just started an MFA in book arts, maybe in ’83 or ’84. So I started in ’80. I’m not sure if he—I’ll have to look that up. So anyway, that was the only one, if there was one.

The only other place that I really, really, really wanted to go, I wanted to go live in Europe. That’s where my heart was. I wanted to study with all of those calligraphers. I wanted to study with the French bookbinders. I wanted to live there and perfect my French. I really wanted that, so I looked for schools over there. I looked for all the kinds of schools. How could I possibly afford it? I wanted to go study there.



00:58:30

COLLINGS:

It would be fabulous.





MARYATT:

I just thought, “I can’t do it.” Because I had been going to Europe for every summer from 1971. Now it’s 1980. I’d been going every summer, except for one summer I went back east, and one year, 1980, I went to Japan.





COLLINGS:

So that’s an education all in itself.



01:00:32

MARYATT:

So that was my education, right? I could see all of these things. So I really wanted to go to Europe. I still want to go live in Europe. [laughs] Every calligrapher that I met was so incredibly skilled. They were artistic. They knew how to teach drawing of letterforms as well as the edged tool. They knew how to teach brushwork. They were doing type design. They had museums over there. They had schools for teaching type design. I wanted to go to the school there, but I just couldn’t see how I could afford to do that. So I thought, “Well, okay. Let’s see if they let me in here.” So that’s what happened.

So I knew that they knew nothing about book arts. They didn’t know the word “calligraphy.” John Neuhart was really the only one who knew what calligraphy was, what letterpress was. He had a letterpress machine and he was an exhibit designer. But I wanted to know graphic design anyway because I had had math training. I hadn’t had very many—I had had one graphic design course at Scripps. It wasn’t really even graphic design; it was a design course. I had ceramics at Scripps and I took some painting classes at places and so on, but I really hadn’t had an art education. So I wanted an art education, so I wanted to do other things. I wanted to study photography and so on, which I did for my MFA and so on.

But I guess I didn’t realize the depth of not knowing that my committee had, so they really couldn’t help me very much with what I was doing. But John was very supportive, and that’s why seeing his exhibit at UCLA when I went there a few weeks ago was so beautiful to be able to see his work on display there and with Marilyn. So he was my light at the end of the tunnel. He kept me going. He helped me get a grant. I said, “I’ve got to apply for a grant to go—I’ve got to go to Europe. I’ve got to go study there.”

And he said, “Okay.” So I applied for a grant, which he sent a letter for that, and I got the grant so I was able to study for a summer. It was only a summer, but that was what I could do and go study at Ascona at Centro del Libro, which was bookbinding.

So at that time I realized that nobody could help me with what I was searching for in calligraphy, and what I was searching for was where is the edge. The edge is the boundary between the destruction of the letterforms in order to make art, the losing of the shapes and readability to be able to be expressive, and I was trying to find that edge with doing my calligraphy, and I found it on my own, basically, after graduate school. But that’s what I was really searching for, and I just realized nobody could help me there. They didn’t have any appreciation of calligraphy in the first place, except for John.

So we’d have these meetings, I’d show them my work, and they’d make graphic design sort of comments, but they didn’t know anything about bookbinding or shapes. The big mantra was “Innovate. Do something new.”

“Okay. Yes, sir.” [laughter]



01:02:35

COLLINGS:

Yes, sir.





MARYATT:

“Yes, sir. Okay.”

But anyway, so I was supported by John in my effort to go study there and I therefore, because I got that grant, I thought, “I’m going to do my final project in bookbinding. I know I can do that. I know what I want to explore with that. I know that the same mantra is ‘innovate,’ and, of course, here are all these structures that have been around for two thousand years, and now I’m expected to make something new.”

And so I tried and so that was fine. That was challenging, and from the perspective of my committee, they didn’t know whether or not it was new, really. In fact, everything that maybe still might have been historical was new to them because they didn’t know Coptic bindings or these new non-adhesive bindings that were starting to go around based on historical models and so on.

So basically I switched my show to be completely about book shapes, book forms, book structures. So that was a big change because I really wanted to improve my calligraphy, but there was nobody there that could teach me anything about, except from a graphic design standpoint, where to position things, the style of letterforms and so on, but I really honestly didn’t feel that I got much help from the committee on that.





COLLINGS:

Well, one of the books in your show—I’m thinking of this one. What is the title of this work?



01:04:13

MARYATT:

Duchampian Gap.





COLLINGS:

Duchampian Gap. This is obviously playing with form and meaning and artistic references. Is this the kind of thing that came out of your MFA experience?





MARYATT:

Yes, absolutely. There were a couple of books that I did there in my experience, and I took a lot of classes too. Of course, I took all the classes I had to take with Bernard Kestler, discussing what is design, what is art, who’s doing what, and photography, experimental photography, offset printing—we had a class in that, for heaven’s sake—and graphic design classes. I was a T.A. I taught graphic design classes and so on. So I had a lot of different classes giving me lots of perspective.

But again, for my own work, I was trying to do these innovative structures, and I was also doing commercial work at the same time, trying to put myself through school. I needed money, and so I had a project for a person who had had a book printed, and he wanted me to bind the edition of maybe thirty books or something. So I had a guillotine by that time, and so I cut off the edge of the book in part of the binding process, and I picked them up, all of these hundreds of pieces, to throw into the trash, and I picked up this group and it went “flop!” in this interesting way, and I said, “That’s a binding.” My hand is holding this. My hand is the binding. These are the pages. I’m putting words on these pages. I’m binding it in leather. And I made three of them. That was my first edition. [laughs] So that was right in the middle of developing things. I was looking for it. I was trying to figure out what book this is.



01:06:08

COLLINGS:

Bookness.





MARYATT:

Yeah, bookness is something that is talked about all the time now with people in book arts. But at that time, I was on my own. I was trying to figure out what is a book. Of course we know a Codex, we know you move the pages from left to right, and what else is there about books that if you stray from the tried and true, why is it still a book? How can you argue that this thing is still a book? So, for example, there’s a book that an artist made that was completely unopenable and made out of steel, and it was 500 pounds and it sat on a pedestal. It was a book shape, right?





COLLINGS:

That’s fabulous. [laughs]





MARYATT:

So how do you say is that a book. We were all, in my social group, my professional book arts group, we were all, in a way, trying to figure out these things that artists were making who weren’t necessarily in the book arts sort of milieu, but they’re seeing that books are being made, and so they’re starting to make these books that are book shapes, ceramic books, book shapes. So we’re all questioning is this a book. So I’m looking at this thing that I have in my hand, thinking, of course this is a book. Of course it doesn’t look like a traditional book, but it has pages, and, in fact, you can use your fingers to go through these pages, just in a different way from a normal book. But in addition, there’s a time element, a progression. The time element to this book, which made it better than other efforts I had done, was that over time, gravity took the leaves down, so it’s like a flower opening. The parts that you couldn’t read near the type wraparound, you couldn’t read until it slowly opened itself over time on exhibit.



01:08:06

COLLINGS:

That’s wonderful.



01:09:41

MARYATT:

So I felt like I had discovered something there in trying to figure out what is a book that, first of all, it doesn’t look like a book, it doesn’t even open like a book, but I think I can still call this a book. So I needed to be able to construct that argument for my show. Most of my things really did look like books. Maybe the shapes were a little different, but now I can construct the argument a lot better.

And like most people, you know, after you graduate and get your MFA, you really figure it out afterwards. You don’t always figure out everything while you’re in the middle of all that struggle, trying to figure out what you want to say. Why are you choosing books, in fact, to express yourself, or calligraphy? Or why aren’t you in painting or weaving? I loved weaving. Why didn’t I do this in weaving? Loved Sheila Hicks, for example. I really got into weaving. So, you know, again, trying to figure out what it is. Well, books, of course, hold everything. I mean, it holds texture like in weaving. You can weave books, you know. The book is a perfect container for every single material that you could put into it, every single idea or expressive of an idea that you could put in this container that could take on any shape. It’s the perfect vehicle for making a work of art for those who decide not to use some other vehicle.

So that’s why so many people, I think, are making books, that it allows you so much—maybe other painters and so on or sculptors might—certainly would argue this, but it allows you more scope, more ways of expressing yourself through not only the words, but the actual paper (or not paper) itself, the actual materiality of the book, through the actual structure of it, the binding of it, the non-binding of it. The presentation of it is so—even putting in installations, books all over the walls, things that go to the ceiling, stacks of books, you know, all of these kinds of things you can express your way by using this form that’s so malleable. So I think that’s really why book arts has taken off and that so many people from so many parts of life can find their way into expressing themselves through books, and maybe they only stay there for a while and then go on to some other format.





COLLINGS:

Well, I think it’s interesting that you were in your MFA program at a time when the focus was not on doing things well, particularly.





MARYATT:

That’s absolutely true.





COLLINGS:

And where the work seemed to be successful if it would engender complex criticism, perhaps, so it was more about the ideas and less about the actual implementation, the craft, the execution, and, in fact, in many cases, there was an actual refusal of those elements, and you are insisting on doing things well at the same time.



01:12:1001:13:4301:16:17

MARYATT:

Yeah. Of course, I would have to let go of that from time to time, you know. There was a really interesting workshop that I did with—I had Julie Chen down as the Goudy lecturer, and she was teaching people how to make books in this workshop, and, of course, everybody that I invite, I’ve got to be in the workshop too. I’m going to do what they do. I love that. So anyway, she said, “Okay, we’re going to make this book. You’re going to use whatever materials around,” and I had put a million materials around for everybody just to strike out and make their book.

So I thought, “Well, okay. We’ve got, what, an hour.” And I made a really good book in an hour that I felt like it expressed what I wanted to express. I would never have chosen to make the book out of just Davey Board and not paper. It was heavy, but it did exactly what I wanted to do. And I thought, “I need to make some more books quickly,” because it’s so time-consuming to make a book well. And that was really an interesting eye-opener. Although when you experiment when you’re in graduate school or whatever, you’re giving yourself something to do, you have to do things quickly and try to make this idea happen or not, but to do something kind of in a formal situation like that where other people are going to see it, and to think, “Yeah, there it is.”

So it was kind of like the comment Julie made, “Well, of course, you’ve been making books for a long time.” Well, it wasn’t that for me. It wasn’t like “of course.” It was like, “Oh, look what I did.” [laughs] It was really fun. It was really fun. So I thought, “I’ve got to do more of those fun things and just see where it takes me,” where the craftsmanship is whatever and I’m just throwing these things together as quickly I can to get the idea out. Then if I wanted to, I could use that idea to make some multiples if I feel like it or make a better one or just leave it “That was kind of an interesting experiment.”

So that was very interesting, because the craft is so long to learn. The craft is forever to learn, and the art is hard to learn. I don’t know why there isn’t some kind of phrase like that, similarly. Art is so hard to learn. Art is impossible to learn, practically. How do you define art? How do you describe art? How do you say that this work of calligraphy over here is a work of art and this work of calligraphy over here is definitely not? Where does it cross the line into a work of art that was intended to be a work of art as opposed to a work of art that the maker tried to make it a work of art but it didn’t get there? In other words, there are levels of greatness.

So when I have my students going in to see the books and write about them in our library, in our great collection, they’re going to see the entire panoply of greatness. They’ll see books that are just unbelievably fantastic and books that just didn’t quite make it, I don’t know why it was bought for our collection. In my opinion—I shouldn’t ever say this, but, you know, how could that kind of limp thing, that it just didn’t have a really strong idea and it wasn’t well developed, how could that have gotten there? But it had this other thing. Okay. So, okay.

Then the students have to write about it, and then I give them permission to critique the book. I encourage them. I don’t want them to be mean or anything. And I’ve only done that recently because I just felt that, you know, it takes a while to become good enough to be able to feel confident enough to make a good critique. But anyway, so we do talk a lot more nowadays than when I first started out at Scripps, about the levels of expertness that you are seeing in this group of books. And when you make your own work of art, you have no idea what level you’re at. So we’ve made fifty-six books. We’re on the fifty-seventh book. Some of them are great and some of them are, eh, not so great. That’s just what happens. When you’re making something, you just don’t know how people are going to react to them. So that’s just—that’s art. [laughs]





COLLINGS:

Yes, it is, indeed. Let’s pause for a second. [End of October 30, 2014 interview]

SESSION THREE (January 15, 2015)



00:00:37

COLLINGS:

Okay. Now we are on. The day is January 15th, 2015, Jane Collings interviewing Kitty Maryatt in her studio.L

And the year is 1980. We had talked last time about the Society for Calligraphy and your MFA program at UCLA, which was quite fascinating, and now we are in the year 1980, and we’re going to talk a little bit about some of the organizations that you were involved in.





MARYATT:

So this was actually before I started graduate school, and so graduate school, I went to UCLA 1980 to ’83. So back in 1980, I quit my job as a schoolteacher of math, and so I had some time, and I had been teaching for some years at UCLA Extension. In 1979, there was a Wayzgoose offered in San Francisco that I went to that was a Printers Fair, and it got together people involved in the book arts, and it was amazing, and I thought, “Oh, my goodness. We now have to have it down here in L.A.” So I planned with UCLA a Wayzgoose, a three-day Wayzgoose, and invited a number of really interesting people to give talks, including Hans Schmoller and Sumner Stone and so on. So that was in combination with an effort to have a book arts concentration at UCLA Extension also. So I had been teaching calligraphy classes and got up to something like four nights a week in some cases, teaching different kinds of calligraphy classes, different styles of calligraphy and design concepts, and experimental calligraphy class and so on. So there really wasn’t any other venue in L.A. where book arts were being taught for ordinary folks, and I can’t remember that there was anything except a calligraphy class that I was teaching at Cerritos College along with Larry Brady. So those were really the only two places where you could get calligraphy, but also there weren’t any—there was a bookbinding class at UCLA Extension with Margaret Lecky, which I’d mentioned before.



00:02:32

COLLINGS:

There had been stuff at the Woman’s Building.





MARYATT:

At the Woman’s Building that I had taken also, and Susan King was teaching a letterpress class in nineteen—I’m not sure how long she did that. A few years. So, yes, that’s true.





COLLINGS:

But that wasn’t well known to the public, perhaps?



00:03:34

MARYATT:

Yeah. Maybe some were scared off by saying, “Oh, the Woman’s Building.” [laughs] So, yeah, that’s true. Women basically normally came to take those classes. So I just thought it was time to maybe make a bigger effort at UCLA Extension, since it really was very popular at that time to take Extension courses. It was growing and growing.

So we did this Book Arts Concentration with the bookbinding and the calligraphy and tried to throw in some papermaking. We had a whole schedule mostly with—it wasn’t with Jody Greenwald. It was Ruth [Fine] who was at UCLA Extension at the time. But Jody was supportive also. Jody had been overseeing me before Ruth.

Anyway, to make a long story short, it did not grow fast enough for them to keep it, but anyway, the effort was there to sort of gather people around a place to further the book arts. So the party was actually really well received, and a lot of people came and people made a lot of connections.





COLLINGS:

Which party was that?





MARYATT:

The Wayzgoose party at UCLA Extension. So I got Castle Press to print the brochure, and it was a pretty wonderful event.





COLLINGS:

This was sort of parallel to the work that you were doing in your MFA because you were not finding anything that had to do with book arts.



00:05:31

MARYATT:

This was before my MFA. So this is in ’80. I started in fall of ’80, and this was in the summer of ’80 or early summer. So that’s true that in my MFA program they really didn’t know what I was doing—I think I’ve said this before—except for John Neuhart, and I didn’t really know what I was doing either. [laughs] I thought, “You know, I just really need to know how to speak about art. So it’s calligraphy and bookbinding and book arts and so on, but I really need to understand what art is all about.”

So it didn’t bother me too much that they weren’t able to train me in any technical skills. I really wanted to be able to have conversations and read Kandinsky and all kinds of books that would help me understand what other artists, how when they speak or when critics talk about art, that I can also learn that kind of language and therefore understand better what I’m trying to do, because in calligraphy and bookbinding, they’re so oriented towards the practical that it’s hard to flesh out where the art is.

There was a wonderful program that Betty Bright gave for us at Scripps College once with the title—or Goudy Lecture, with the title “Where is the Art in Book Art?” So it’s a question because of the age-old question of craft versus art, but that was really, in a sense, beside the point. It was really that I wanted to know more about art-making and my own art practice, and I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my MFA. I just really didn’t know. So I just had to do that and get better at what I wanted to do. So that was the big effort.

So during those years, I don’t remember, possibly the Guild of Book Workers opened their chapter. I’ll have to look that up to find out when they had their first chapter. But there had been a National Guild of Book Workers all these years, but not a local chapter.





COLLINGS:

And you’ve always had this interest in the artist book as an agent of social change. I see this theme coming up again and again. Is that part of the impulse to have the Wayzgoose, to have the book arts concentration at UNEX, to be doing these things outside of the arena of the more perhaps rarified MFA world?



00:08:1900:09:4200:11:19

MARYATT:

Well, it’s interesting that you say that, because the book as an agent of social change was really not on my radar until maybe ten or fifteen years ago when I suggested that as a course at Scripps. I don’t know how I thought about books when I was back in school. I just knew that I wanted to make them, and I wasn’t very good about figuring out what subject I wanted to address, so I wasn’t interested in activism or social change. So I was just wanting to know how technically to make them, and then slowly it became clearer how to develop a voice, what would be the content of these books. It was so joyful and pleasurable to do all the parts of the book, that I think I didn’t really understand how to make a total book until I started working with my students at Scripps. In 1986, there I was trying to teach the students to make books, and you start with the content. You don’t start with book structure or what kind of type you’re going to use. You have to start with what’s the idea.

So that was kind of interesting trying to see what would be the very first thing that I would task them with, and then I asked them to make their own books by the end of the semester, and that was too much for them that first semester, doing a collaborative book and then trying to also accomplish their own book. They did it, but it meant that they abandoned the front and back matter of the collaborative book, and so I had to end up doing that. But that was okay. I realized that they needed to get on to their own book and develop an idea and see how it would turn out in book form.

So it took a while for me to understand how to give an assignment to students, starting—I always started out with an assignment because it takes a long time to figure out what kind of book you’re going to do with students if you sit around with eight or ten students and, “What do you want to do, Jane?” and, “George, what do you think about—?” And everybody has a different idea. So I’ve done it, but it’s really, really hard to settle down on something that’s specific enough that everybody can get a bite out of it. So that’s why I started just saying, “We’re going to do this subject, and this is how you’re going to do some research. Go research and come back, and we’ll develop a book.”

So, again, it was a struggle for me during my school years, my graduate school years, to figure out what kind of content I wanted to talk about. So the kinds of books that I did, and that I still do, are somewhat sculptural. I’m very interested in the actual structure of the book form and how that gives content. So one of the most unusual books I did while I was in graduate school was—I can’t remember if I talked about this or not, but I was binding a book for a client, an edition of books, to put myself through school, I did a lot of work with clients, and I was just about to throw a bunch of cutoffs into the trash, and I picked them up—they were little narrow things about an inch wide and about nine inches tall, ten inches tall. I picked them up and I was going to throw them in the trash, but they kind of flopped in my hand kind of like this little flower thing, and I thought, “Man, that’s a book. Or is it?”

So that’s what I had been struggling with all of those years because the professors were always saying, “Innovate, innovate.” So what does that mean to innovate when you’re making a book? You can innovate with calligraphic letterforms, but then you jump off the edge and you no longer have meaning if it becomes pure shape. You can innovate with bookbinding, except that there are so many structures that are so very practical and useful, to come up with something new and still a book is difficult.

So when I picked this up, I thought, “Okay, let’s go through the list. Let me make a list of what constitutes a book.” So there are pages here. Is it sequential? Well, it slowly opens out like a flower over time. So I bound it at the bottom. Yes, it has a binding. I put text on the leaves, which were bound together at the bottom in leather, and you could read the text as it slowly opened up, standing up, because gravity would pull down the outer leaves.





COLLINGS:

How beautiful.





MARYATT:

Then I put it in an acrylic box, and the top of the box became its stand and there it opened out. So that was really an interesting experience to come up with something that was really mine and was still really a book, had all the attributes of a book, and that was a little breakthrough. That was near the end.





COLLINGS:

Had an organic form, as you describe it.



00:13:0500:15:1600:16:48

MARYATT:

It had a form. The especially interesting thing for me was that it continued to open, it wasn’t static, that there was something more to discover over time. That was the sequential part for me. So I continued to be interested in what happens when you take bookbinding or calligraphy to the extreme and not go over the edge and lose its bookness or its meaning calligraphically, and that’s why my Figure of Speech really just is right in this line, just, in that sense, abandoning literal meaning, and only metaphorical meaning, and my content also, of course, always, as most people, it becomes personal.

There was one book that I did during graduate school—was it during graduate school; maybe just after—that was about balancing. It was called Balancing Act, and it was about all the—I guess it was after, because now I’m thinking of it, my son had been born. So it was about balancing your family life with your professional life, with doing this and doing that, and so I made it into a very long book that could only be balanced, accordion-fold book with asymmetric folds, that only could be balanced and stand up for display if you pulled out a few things on the sides that kind of tucked in when you folded it all up.

And I’ve done other books. I did a book about the first year of my experience with my son, and so one side of the book was about my reaction to this fabulous thing that had happened to me, and the other side was about the sort of milestones that my son took over that year. It was going to be a hanging accordion-fold book, except it wasn’t pure accordion-fold book. It had little twists and turns in it, like life does, so that it would hang a bit asymmetrically.

So you have to do those kinds of personal books from time to time, but usually the content isn’t about trying to be an activist and change the social order. But I’m very interested in having my students address that, because they tend to make a better book when they think of the greater world out there and how they might change it, instead of their own inner world, because students are encouraged to express themselves in general in college, and they tend to talk about their own personal feelings or experiences, and they don’t always look to see how that might connect to something that they could get passionate about outside themselves, but could still be completely connected. So that’s how I do connect to that social change.

And also reading Eisenstein. Elizabeth Eisenstein wrote about the printing press as an agent of change. So there’s this long list of the social changes because of the rise of the printing press. I even had my students one year in my Core class, my “Artist Book as an Agent of Social Change” class, focus on paper as an agent of social change to see if they could take the lessons that Eisenstein drew out and see if they also applied to paper, because paper, of course, was much longer gestation than printing press in Gutenberg’s day, so starting two thousand years ago, instead of just five hundred or so years ago, except, of course, there’s the printing early on with the—I’m also very interested in reproduction through seals in China, through ink rubbings, through carving on stone and then rubbing and, of course, the woodcarvings in Asia and so on. There are lots of ways, pre-Gutenberg, where information was multiplied. So I’m very interested in that area also. But I wanted to give my students a challenge to see how through making paper themselves, getting their fingers into the vats and pounding the fibers and so on, to see how it might have changed societies as it moved from China to the West.





COLLINGS:

Well, this is sort of jumping ahead, and we definitely want to talk about the journal Abracadabra, because it’s a Southern California publication and would speak to what was going on here, but since we’re talking a bit about the students, I would like to ask the larger question—and perhaps we can come back to it—about how students since the mid-eighties, in the context of the digital revolution, how has their sense of the book and its role changed.





MARYATT:

Well, it’s been pretty dramatic since I started, because that was 1986 and eBooks weren’t even—they were being experimented with, but they weren’t there yet. People still really had a lot of interaction with books. They’d still go to the library. I would take them to the library. We’d go to the “Z” section, and we’d say, “Oh, let’s just look here. Let’s browse.”





COLLINGS:

This was pre-Internet.



00:19:17

MARYATT:

Yeah. So now I bring in twenty to thirty books every semester. They will not go to the library and browse. It’s a long story about why that’s probably true, but I have to force them into opening up the books and flipping through the pages. It’s just so convenient to type in “paper in China invention,” and then they get five hundred links and they start looking for those links. Then maybe they’ll go to a particular book that is referred to a lot and go to the library and find it, but I find that’s not really the case anymore. They really do their research, and pretty in-depth research, through the library, going physically there and getting some help from a librarian or just doing it on their own. So there really has been a dramatic change on the physical use of books, and so that’s one of my goals, is for students to realize how that may have been lost by not just flipping through the pages to see what serendipitous finds they will have. They tend to not spend not very much time with these things.





COLLINGS:

So does that give you a different sense of what the physicality of the books they are making might be for, what the uniqueness of the object might be able to communicate?



00:21:02

MARYATT:

That’s always been my goal from even—of course, in 1986, just having them pick up a piece of type in metal and say, “This is the way it was always done.” Maybe not always, but, you know, that this facility that I’m teaching at is so imbued with really rich history, and that if they come away with not enjoying the book that we do, that we make together, they will at least recognize so many attributes of books that they see, contemporary books, books they’ll see in somebody’s house that may be historical. They’ll understand the construction. They’ll understand the literature behind it, how it might have changed. They’ll have a completely different sense of what a book is. So that hasn’t changed. In fact, it’s probably gotten even stronger because of what we call the “making” society now, the makers, right, that people are so forced into doing their work on a computer because it’s so convenient, and that they don’t make things as much anymore. So I know that students—I always ask them, “Why are you here?”

Many of them say, “I’ve just got to make something with my hands.”

So, “Great. We’re going to make lots of things.”

The other thing that maybe has changed, maybe not, maybe it’s always been so, but they’re always struck about how complicated and difficult it is, and as I think I’ve said before, that it’s really easy to do something badly, whatever the something is, printing, binding, making up a story, that to have the standards to make a book that other people will want to purchase is a lot higher standard than your usual art class. Well, that’s probably not fair to your usual art class, but at least we need to be able to make something that other people will pay for, which is just totally not common at all—





COLLINGS:

No, not at all.



00:23:03

MARYATT:

—and it may raise eyebrows. I don’t really care. That’s what I had to do to keep my program going and make money for the next semester. But the history part is the most important part of the bookmaking.

Then probably I guess essentially equally important is the creative effort that they must make, that they have to engage both with writing words and making images and figuring out how they combine with each other and don’t just repeat each other. That’s really the hardest thing for them to learn, is not to do an image that literally says what the words have just told you, so that we work really hard to make something that is rich and deep in meaning, rather than, let’s say, the usual way of doing a fine press book was to take some beautiful literature, a short story, a poem, even write it yourself and present it beautifully on really well-made paper, with really properly associative type, beautiful design, classical design, print it beautifully, bind it well.

We’re completely in that tradition, but there’s just so much more of an emphasis to make the image and text and construction of the book be one. So that’s why sometimes the books end up not looking like a codex. They may function in a slightly different way in order to bring out the message. So I think that’s why artist books tend to be much more experimental than they were when I started in ’86. So when I did my little flop, my little tree book, for me, that was like, “Whoa! I did something new.” Nobody had ever done anything like that. Then my book recently, my big Duchampian Gap, which stands on two pedestals and opens up like that, and people say, “Oh, I think I’ve seen that before.” No, you haven’t. That’s unique.

But there is this sculptural effect that has come in the last thirty years that’s really dramatic and welcome, too, that there has been for many, many years a blurring of the boundaries in the art practices. So painting becomes sculpture, sculpture becomes painting, ceramics becomes sculpture and so on. So it’s just natural that books become sculpture. It’s three-dimensional anyway. It just needed to be able to take flight.





COLLINGS:

Do you think that perhaps people who are interested in the book arts could only really find resources of practical and also theoretical in MFA programs, might have had some kind of—



00:24:54

MARYATT:

Do you mean recently or—





COLLINGS:

Over the past thirty years, that this is where people need to go, that you don’t really have that robust—





MARYATT:

Exactly.





COLLINGS:

—training outside of the academy.



00:26:45

MARYATT:

Yeah. There weren’t any MFA programs in book arts when I went to school, but now there are. Now there are. There are six or five. It changes from time to time in the different foci. So it just is a fabulous thing that students now can go and concentrate with their MFA in book arts. But again, there are so few of them, really, compared to, let’s say, art schools where you can get an MFA. But there’s the mecca. You can go there. Let’s say Alabama in Tuscaloosa was one of the first—was the first. Then Mills College has revamped their MFA program. There was one at Columbia College Chicago and SUNY Purchase New York, but that’s no longer, and in Iowa they’ve got an MFA program. Who am I not listing [University of Arts in Philadelphia]?

So anyway, if you are really engaged with book arts and feel like you need to get more instruction, now they have places where you’ll learn how to make paper, where you have professional bookbinders teaching you how to bind. And, again, they’re integrated programs, so that you’re not just being trained to be a bookbinder or a letterpress printer, you are becoming an integrated book artist, because that’s the mantra, everything’s integrated. You may specialize as a bookbinder when you graduate, but during your program, you really get the whole gamut of making books, and it’s just fabulous.

There are three places where you can go get instruction in cities through nonprofits, like the San Francisco Center for the Book, the New York Center for Book Arts in New York and Minneapolis, Minnesota Center for the Book. But for all those little places where they don’t have book arts programs, many, many, many have sprung up, so there’s a lot more—just like when the Calligraphy Society started and all of a sudden a lot of little societies grew up, so happened with the book arts societies and groups, and they continue to spring up and be mentored by groups.

For example, we had our College Book Art Association event this last weekend [at Scripps], where teachers and students and people who are interested in the book arts can come together and discuss what’s happening now and what happened before and what’s going to happen in the future, and where’s my role in that. So the resources are so much better than thirty years ago when I started at Scripps. We were so much in a transition in 1986 and before, with going from commercial letterpress printing being viable to just totally not being viable, so we were the beneficiaries of being able to get the machines and use them ourselves.





COLLINGS:

Right. That’s so important.



00:28:58

MARYATT:

Well, what do kids do today? It’s $8,000 for the latest little SP-15 Vandercook with a little hand crank that I saw advertised. I mean, $8,000, not like the $500 I paid for my SP-15 in 1978 or somewhere around there. So it’s a lot harder for young people to have their own letterpress equipment, but it’s a lot easier for them to go places where they can use the equipment on a regular basis, either at the Centers or they have Haystack and a number of places with really strong programs where you can go take classes. Again, really different from when I started in my trying to figure out what I was going to do in this field.

So it’s really very exciting, and also all of the organizations are completely aware of each other, the College Book Arts, the Society for Calligraphy, the Guild of Book Workers, SHARP, Society for—S-H-A—I can’t remember what it stands for. Anyway, there are just a number of groups that encourage further interest in not only bookmaking, but printmaking is also a really strong component. So it’s pretty exciting today for people wanting to further their skills and their interests and getting together with other people who are crazy about what we’re all doing. So it’s a very exciting time right now.





COLLINGS:

Yes. It sounds like it. It sounds like you and people like you have really been sort of important, carrying the knowledge forward and being a part of this explosion of knowledge. And I guess that sort of brings us to Abracadabra as an example of sort of bringing things out. What is Abracadabra? Why was it founded? What was the goal of founding the journal?



00:30:4600:32:35

MARYATT:

So I had just had Jason when they were forming that, and they would be Gerald Lange and Carolee Campbell and Susan King and Robin Price and several others, and it was really to talk about contemporary book art, have discussion groups to meet and see what was happening, what they could do to make events happen and so on. So I wasn’t in on the beginning because I didn’t have any time for that.

They started a journal called Abracadabra and solicited articles. Gerry Lange was also really great at writing, so he would write for it. I eventually got involved by being the calendar person because so many different organizations were having events, we were having conflicts, and I said, “I will volunteer to find out what events are happening, both locally and nationally, if I can, and we’ll just put out this calendar every time we put out our journal,” I think. Or I don’t know, I can’t remember now how often we put it out, but periodically we would try to gather information, put it on the calendar so people could know how to schedule things for the future, if at all possible. So that was my involvement.

It was a very loose organization, sort of with a structure of people saying that they were president and secretary and treasurer, like the usual, but not exactly very strict. So it was really to get together, get together with like-minded folks, and, again, not just talk about traditional book arts, but contemporary book arts and who’s doing what and can we bring them in to give a talk and so on.

So it finally disbanded after many years because, you know, an organization is really hard to keep ongoing for many, many years if you don’t get volunteers. You just need a lot of volunteers to do things. So it just eventually was too much for the people who were always doing the same old thing, trying to keep it going, so it just slowly wound down.

One of the big things was doing that journal. That was a big effort to produce that, and I had the pleasure of being the editor on one of the issues, and I wanted it to be about calligraphy because it hadn’t been addressed in a journal before. So I invited people like Suzanne Moore and a number of people, Donald [Jackson]—my dear Donald, queen’s scribe. I can’t think of his name right now.





COLLINGS:

Yes, you had mentioned him.





MARYATT:

Yes. Donald. Anyway, so I had him write an article too. And it took a long time to get all those articles squeezed out of those people, but I felt like it was really important for the book arts people to see calligraphy as really part of the book arts effort and not kind of a separate thing of people writing poetry beautifully, that really wanted it to be seen as a contemporary art practice just like contemporary bookbinding or contemporary printing or contemporary bookmaking. So that was a pleasure to put together that journal. I’m still proud of that journal.

I did journals also for the Society for Calligraphy. I just think when people don’t know something, they ought to know it, and a journal’s a really good way to get that information out. So it was very fun to meet with them, the group, on a periodic basis, and we particularly had hilarious times at kind of the organizational meetings because of the mix of people joshing each other and being just funny in themselves. It was really, really wonderful. It’s too bad that we couldn’t keep it up, but, you know,—



00:34:24

COLLINGS:

Well, these things have a life cycle.





MARYATT:

They do. To mention that, Guild of Book Workers, for example, is, gosh, more than 100 years old. Maybe ten years ago we had our 100-year anniversary. And we hope that CBAA, which is a new organization, newish, will have the same kind of a cycle, a long cycle, but if it’s too local, maybe it’s kind of hard to sustain, but as it grows to be part of a national organization, maybe it’s more sustainable because then you get to visit other people and other places and it kind of reinvigorates your interests, I think.





COLLINGS:

Well, you had mentioned the Abracadabra, Gerald Lange, Carolee Campbell, Robin Price, yourself. Did the journal in any way reflect a particular way of looking at book arts that was sort of specific to the—





MARYATT:

To the region?





COLLINGS:

—Southern California context?





MARYATT:

You know, we did try to promote the people that were here, but also there were reviews. It was a very good journal. I don’t know that it had such a local flavor. I think that it was trying to have a sophisticated point of view.



00:35:54

COLLINGS:

So, precisely, you would have been trying to sort of project on the national scene then.





MARYATT:

Yeah, and there were lots of libraries who subscribed to the journal and were very interested in how we were putting together articles. So the only thing I can think of is that we did try to promote exhibits and events for the locals that would maybe highlight some locals who hadn’t gotten such national exposure, for example.





COLLINGS:

Speaking of sort of the L.A. context, the local chapter of the American Printing History Association.



00:38:50

MARYATT:

Oh, yeah. That was an interesting story. So, you know, printing in L.A. and in any city has the commercial component, and very few who do more work towards an artistic production because it’s more expensive to do it that way. I’m not explaining what I mean. There are those who work in commercial printing and those who are interested in the fine press tradition, and the APHA, American Printing History Association, whose age is—gosh, I don’t remember exactly. Maybe fifty years. I’ll have to look that one up. Has always included both components. But in any given city, you have a million commercial printers and you have a few commercial printers that you would go to, to do a more refined product. So you’ve always had those two kind of components in there. So our local APHA was just like our Rounce & Coffin Club, which was kind of a book arts club of people interested in printing and book arts and fine press and so on.

I was starting to say that the APHA was more dominated by those, or the quantity of people in the group were more commercial printers just because of that ratio. So, slowly the commercial printers were going out of business from doing letterpress and going into offset, and they weren’t necessarily so interested in printing history, amazingly enough. And so it slowly changed over the years from being very oriented towards commercial practices and slowly into more specialized fields.

So I was a member for a long time of kind of the old-guard group, and then one of the fellows who was running it was ill for quite a long time, and so the local chapter kind of languished. So at some point I think he must have passed away, and, you know, I said, “Well, isn’t anybody willing to do this?” And so I said, “Let’s just gather together a group of people. We’ll declare ourselves the officers and we’ll reinvigorate the chapter.” So that’s what I did. So I did that for four years, so we really had a lot of events and so on.

Then I went on to do four years of the program chair for the national organization, and now Nina Schneider and wonderful people have taken over the local chapter and are continuing it, so that’s really very exciting. So that’s always been a really strong organization for bringing together not just printing. Even though it’s called Printing History Association, they’re really inclusive. They really do like to talk about all the other parts of the book arts that might affect printing. So I’ve enjoyed the historical aspect of that organization.

Whenever we have our national conferences or events in town, we’re always going to libraries. Like, we came to UCLA. This is one of my very favorite events. I may have told you about it. I asked the Japanese librarian and the Chinese librarian to look through their treasures and take out all the earliest things and put them in one room, and they brought out just dozens of artifacts from early printing, early Korean metal type, the Dharani Scroll from Japan, this little scroll that a million of these were printed in Japan, and very early printing from movable-type books and books printed from woodblocks and handwritten calligraphic things. It was just this amazing treasure trove of things that they had never put together in one room or on exhibit. So I asked them to do it for our APHA group because I knew there were a lot of good things there. And how did I know that? I don’t know, but I found out. I dug in and investigated.



00:41:30

COLLINGS:

So this was when you were president?





MARYATT:

This is when I was president, and I said, you know, that would be really a great program for not only us to move away or be more inclusive with Asian artifacts, but also for the library to see this collection of things together. Maybe they should have an exhibit in Special Collections or in the Asian Library or wherever that would highlight this really wonderful collection that they may not be known for, like Berkeley is known for its Asian Collection and so on. So, yeah, UCLA should be known for that. Then I thought, you know, eventually APHA should really have a national conference swirling around those kinds of early printed things that would be matched with early Western things so that the whole story could be told. Because that’s one of my efforts when I teach printing anywhere, is to make sure that people realize that Gutenberg wasn’t the first to do movable type. It’s what I had been taught and didn’t realize that of course that’s not exactly true, but just the first in the West.

So I’m very interested in the printing history before Gutenberg, and of course I’m really interested in Gutenberg himself, too, and did a book about his setting of type and so on, the Beorum II book, which I can talk about later. But anyway, so I’m very interested in printing history, but also bookbinding history and papermaking history. If you know very much about them, they’re all just totally interrelated, of course.





COLLINGS:

So this is sort of where you took the organization in your four years.





MARYATT:

That’s right.



00:43:21

COLLINGS:

Bringing forward the history.



00:44:55

MARYATT:

That’s exactly right. We’d go to the Clark Library and I’d ask them to pull out special things on a certain topic, and it was also a social club to see who’s printing what. So we’d go to various studios and visit to see who’s using letterpress equipment and maybe printmaking or lithographic studio and so on, and then we’d have discussions.

One of my favorite discussions that I had organized was a salon. I thought, I really like the idea of a salon where you come together and have a potluck, bring things, and then sit down and just talk over something. So what we talked over and one of my favorite ones was, “So what about type?” That’s pretty general, but, “What type do you like and what type do you not like?” So people brought in books with type they liked and had a discussion about why they liked this one or that one and how do you choose, and really got into a good discussion about how to use type, especially since now everybody has to choose type. Used to be that when you were a designer, let’s say, fifty years ago, you’d go to the person who knew how to set type, the typographer, and you’d specify a type, and if they didn’t have it, you’d have to specify a different type. Nowadays, people have to choose their own and mostly don’t know anything about it. So that was another thing, too, is one of our—





COLLINGS:

Because they’re using digital type.





MARYATT:

Because it’s all digital. They see now hundreds of typefaces on their computer—maybe not hundreds, but there’s embedded a whole lot of typefaces, and then they can get freebies and horrible stuff, and then they can buy good stuff. So if they’re going to buy something, this would be the natural organization that would say, “Yeah, that would be a really good typeface for you to use.” Or I would tell them about what I call my house face. My house face is Prospera, which is just a beautiful face that has tinges of modernity and classical structure and is just beautiful to use, and every time I use it people always remark about, “Oh, what is that type face? I don’t recognize that one.” So that’s been my lifelong effort to get this beautiful typeface out in the world.





COLLINGS:

Who innovated Prospera?



00:46:46

MARYATT:

Oh, I knew you’d probably ask. His name is—that one is not on the tip of my tongue, but he’s in Illinois, Chicago, and I’ll get his name in a minute. In fact, this was the most amazing thing. I found out that he and Bob McCamant worked together to have their business and issued Prospera and Oz spaces, and I had no idea until I met Bob McCamant and worked with him through APHA, that he was the partner of my dear typographer friend Peter—oh, my goodness. It’s on the tip of my tongue. I’ll get it in a minute. So I was delighted to find out that they had worked together, and it was just, again, part of this continuum, these little serendipitous things that happen all the time that makes life delightful.





COLLINGS:

You had mentioned, just as an aside, more of like a social group that meet?





MARYATT:

Yes.





COLLINGS:

What was the name of that?





MARYATT:

The APHA. It was still social.





COLLINGS:

It seems like there was something else that you mentioned.





MARYATT:

Well, the salon.





COLLINGS:

Before that. Maybe I’ll come back—





MARYATT:

Well, going to people’s studios and so on. In a sense, really, all of the groups are social because it’s just so delightful to be able to talk to people who understand the serif. The shape of a serif is essential to have a discussion about, right?





COLLINGS:

Yes.



00:48:19

MARYATT:

And who in the normal world is interested in that or the fibers that you used on your paper. “How did you do that pulp painting? Did you beat the fibers longer than usual so that you could squirt it out of the bottle?” These kinds of things are so arcane to most people. If you try to have a conversation with them, you’re the only one doing the talking, right? So these groups, for me, have always been completely social. I love my calligrapher friends. They were my first really important social group—well, except for when I was teaching at Santa Monica High School, I had a wonderful social group there too. Anyway, all of them are really so that you can have fun talking to each other about the latest things or what you’re up to or what they’re up to. So I think that’s true for really everybody, that you’ve got to get together with your buddies who are doing things that you like.





COLLINGS:

Do you find that the printing community tends towards this sort of sociability?





MARYATT:

Oh, yeah. What’s really nice and maybe a little bit different about the printing community is that you have a lot of scholars in APHA, which is not always the case in, let’s say, the Calligraphy Society or the Guild of Book Workers, those who are really interested in research in APHA and they give their papers at these conferences. So that’s what I appreciate particularly about APHA, is that if you really want to know something about—like, we had one event at the Rounce & Coffin Club, and this fellow from APHA—





COLLINGS:

Oh, that was what I wanted to ask you about, the Rounce & Coffin Club.



00:50:04

MARYATT:

Yeah, Rounce & Coffin. I’ll tell you about that in a second. But anyway, this one meeting was maybe one of my first meetings, and this wonderful guy came who was a typographer type historian, and I said, “So when was the first use of small caps?” And he’s thinking about it, and he said, “Okay. 1501, Aldus Manutius.” And no one had ever thought to ask that, but I just was thinking, so I know when the first use of italics was and, and same guy. So that was the big advantage of being around people who have a significant scholarly interest in the history of whatever it is you’re doing, and you don’t find it as much in the other groups. It certainly occurs in the other groups, but APHA is particularly oriented that way, and, of course, a lot of librarians, too, in APHA and not as many in, let’s say, the Guild of Book Workers, where you’re really interested in making books with your fingers. So that’s one reason I really, really have loved APHA.





COLLINGS:

Is there much cross-pollination?





MARYATT:

Yes, there is. In fact, it just drives me crazy that they keep on organizing conferences on the same dates. So I haven’t been able to go to the Guild of Book Workers for years because they put them on the same weekend or the next weekend as APHA, and because I’ve been so involved in APHA for many years, I couldn’t go. I used to go every year to all the Guild of Book Workers standard seminars because you learn so much there, plus you get to see all your friends. So I’m really looking forward to getting back to seeing them, but I don’t want to miss the APHA. We’re going to have our next conference here at Huntington Library, which is what I had suggested. I’m really glad that we’re going to come back.



00:50:51

COLLINGS:

Why is it called Guild, Guild of Book Workers?





MARYATT:

Well, it was done at least 110 years ago or so, and those were the days when social organizations leaning towards a particular technique were called guilds, so it’s kind of harking back to the medieval guild of a certain skill set. You belong to the Guild, and that’s how you get your business, and if you don’t belong to the Guild, you don’t get your business.

So it wasn’t that, of course, for the beginnings of the Guild of Book Workers. But it was called Book Workers and not Book Binders, so it was people who worked on books that got together many, many years ago. So now they’re usually called societies or associations or many different names for getting people together.





COLLINGS:

“Guild” is interesting.





MARYATT:

Yeah.





COLLINGS:

So what is the Coffin Club?





MARYATT:

So the Rounce & Coffin Club is a group that’s no longer functioning, unfortunately, because it was really a lovely group of people who were interested in fine printing. Rounce & Coffin refers to the parts of a hand press. So that was around for quite a long time, maybe started in the thirties, I’m thinking, in Los Angeles. So it’s a Los Angeles group, and they were mostly librarians and commercial printers and fine printers who belonged to it, a lot of printers, and their big claim to fame was that every year they put on a competition and declared the best books produced from those that were submitted, and I believe you had to be a member of Rounce & Coffin Club to submit a book, as I recall.



00:52:40

COLLINGS:

Sort of sounds like the Oscars.





MARYATT:

Yes, and sort of like the fifty best books of the year by AIGA, American Institute of Graphic Arts. So it was kind of like that. So for many, many years, you would submit a book and if it got into the exhibit, the exhibit would go around the country to different libraries for two years. I don’t know if that started in the thirties or if it started much later, but I know when I joined, that’s what they were doing. And you couldn’t join it; you had to be invited to join. So that was not nice, I thought, because you had to wait and wait, and somebody would finally invite you.





COLLINGS:

And when were you invited?





MARYATT:

Oh, so that was maybe when I went to Scripps, started teaching at Scripps. I don’t remember exactly now. Was it before I was teaching there or not? But I think probably right around then. So we started putting our Scripps books in there and we always got in, which was very nice, and so people could see them around the country, what the students were making. So that was really, really nice. They would have dinner parties and social events and bring in whoever happened to be going through town that might be apropos, they would give a talk. And it was free, and you just had this really nice group of people. I don’t remember how many people, maybe 100 total over the years.



00:54:12

COLLINGS:

And they tended to be—





MARYATT:

It was a mixed bag, but it was mostly people involved in printing, involved in some way in printing or librarians, a lot of librarians. One of the main people who was sending those books around for two years was Mike Sutherland, and he passed away, and everybody threw up their hands and said, “Who could possibly do all of this work that Mike Sutherland has been doing?” Mike was at Occidental College, so all of the books that went on exhibit—you gave two of them, and so there were two exhibits that would go on simultaneously all around. It was just a fabulous project. One of the books was given back to you or was auctioned off to raise money for Rounce & Coffin Club, and the second one was always put in the collection, which is still housed at Occidental College. So they have eighty years or so of books that were worthy of putting on exhibit. So it’s really a fabulous collection to be able to go back, especially to the early books. Slowly, the later books, more and more offset books got into the exhibits because that was just the technology that was taking over, and they were still making beautiful books, but they might not be letterpress. So it became much more of a mixed bag near the end there.

But really that’s what happened, is that Mike Sutherland had his finger on the pulse of all the places that would—and, of course, there were lists, so we would be able to figure it out, but who in the group was willing to take on really this major task of shepherding all these books for two years, keeping track of where they were, putting out a catalog. There was a catalog for every set that had to be printed and sent along in groups.





COLLINGS:

What a wonderful resource for research.



00:57:56

MARYATT:

It was a wonderful resource. Paul Bohne was a major player in helping keep that alive too. He tried really hard to get all of the files off of Mike Sutherland’s computer, so that it could continue if someone or several people could get back together again and continue the effort. I was doing too much. I thought about, “Oh, man, this would be a great thing to continue,” but I couldn’t volunteer. I said, “I’ll do whatever is necessary to help pull the files together,” but they just couldn’t get the files together because of the software that was on the Oxy computer. It was insurmountable, apparently, and so that was maybe ten years ago that that did fall apart, which was really a shame.

But also in town we have our local book collectors’ club, which is called the Zamorano Club, which is another club that you have to be invited to. Again, I’m not fond of these kind of restrictive place clubs, but on the other hand, I guess if you want to keep it small, then there’s a reason to do that so that it’s a manageable organization that you can put on your event. So Zamorano Club is kind of paired with the Roxburghe Club in San Francisco, and they have joint meetings. We just had a joint meeting up in San Francisco that I went to that was just tremendously fantastic, and we have every—what is it? Every first Wednesday of the month, I think, is a talk at the Pasadena City Women’s Club, which is a wonderful venue, and I think there are about, I don’t know how many members, maybe 100, 150. Not sure what the number is.

So the main focus is on book collecting, so there are mostly book collectors, but there are a lot of librarians and there are some practitioners. It used to be that back in the thirties and forties or whenever it started—it’s pretty old; it’s more than 100 years old, also, I think—is that, of course, because so many more people were involved in printing and in fine printing, in the olden days, there were a lot of printers, and so they would print the invitations to the events.

So when I joined, they’d asked me if I would print the invitations to the events, and so I did that for a few years until I finally just said, “I can’t do it anymore. Somebody else has to take this on.” So now they’re not doing it by letterpress anymore, which is a shame, but you can only do what you can afford, and so they still are sending out invitations for these events.

So they also sponsor a lecture at the Huntington Library every year. They also have a meeting, I think every—let’s see. Once a month on Wednesday morning, they have a get-together at the Huntington, just a social thing. You go and have a chat at the Huntington. So they have a lot of really interesting group things, group events that you can join in on, and they have a very good, strong governing structure. So it’s been very fun to be involved with them.



00:59:36

COLLINGS:

What kinds of books do the members collect?





MARYATT:

It’s everything under the sun. It’s from mystery and first editions to scientific books to medieval books to very specialized, for example, books on sailing or whatever piques their interest and suddenly they have to collect everything related to that. So it’s a very nice mixed group in that sense, and I especially love talking to the ones who have collected or maybe are not still, but have collected medieval books and can really talk about how maybe thirty years ago, fifty years ago or so—there’s this one fellow, Todd, who just is fascinating to talk to about when he could get these Aldines that were not necessarily cheap, but not out of the ballpark nowadays. So, very fun, why would he do that and how did he first get into it and all those kinds of fun questions to ask people why they collect. Of course, most of these collectors, of course, have day jobs. They’re everything under the sun, also, right? Librarians and doctors and printers and lots of different fields. So it’s a very nice mixed group, very erudite, too, lots of very clever people in there who really know their stuff. So a lot of the talks are really from members, and they’re really, really fun to listen to. Sometimes I don’t choose to go to a particular talk, but usually the talks are really very uplifting and informational.



01:01:33

COLLINGS:

Well, I’m really struck by how wide-ranging your interests are, from all aspects of production to the history, to the whole world of collecting, to the fine arts aspects.



01:04:2101:05:49

MARYATT:

Yeah, I just feel kind of insatiable. I really can’t get enough of the things that I get all excited about, and so, yeah, and I don’t know why I’m like that, but I’ve always been like that. When I taught math, I was just fascinated by the history of math and had to read the history books, and I liked bringing in art, the artistic aspects of the shape of seashells and how that had to do with spirals and just all kinds of geometric shapes and things that were natural that you could describe by mathematics.

So I always like to see a field in all of its glory, all of its aspects, and that’s why I’m insatiable, because you can’t get enough of these things. The more you dig into something, the more detail you find that you’ve got to know. Like I’ve been working on this Transsibérien for many years. This is La Prose du Transsibérien by Sonia Delaunay and Blaise Cendrars. I just this last weekend gave a talk about how did they produce that book, why—it said that they were going to plan 150 copies—why did they only do sixty—that seem to be extant—and trying to do a census and so on. So the more you dig in, the more questions come up about—so I find it just fascinating and interesting. And then after a few years, maybe I move on to some other thing that I’ve got to grab onto.

So I got really interested years ago in reading in Donald Anderson, which is a book about history of calligraphy, about Gutenberg’s first typeface having 270 characters in the font set, and I just thought, “Whoa! Why did he do that?” It took me a long time to kind of mull that over for a while and then realize kind of like, duh, it came from calligraphy and everything was done by hand, and the shapes would vary depending on the circumstance, and there were a lot of ligatures and there were abbreviations. That’s why. It just took me a long time to figure that out, and it was just such an exciting thing to come to that. And then I wanted to do a project with my students so that they could see this glorious combination of calligraphy and type that they would never have maybe experienced without looking at Gutenberg’s type and see where did it come from.

We had the most amazing opportunity to buy Gutenberg type, because his type, of course, was all trashed once he stopped printing and wasn’t needed anymore with all those ligatures and the abbreviated letters and so on, moving on to Italian styles and Roman and so on. But anyway, so when I had a chance to buy that B42 type that Dale Guild Type Foundry had been commissioned to make for a Japanese firm, I just thought this would be a great opportunity to really dig in and look at all of those characters and see how they were used and why they were there, and how did Gutenberg make his decision about this ligature versus that ligature. You’d have to know the number of times that it would need to be used in any particular text. So I just thought that would be really great to dig in.

So that was another one where I really dug into that and wanted to read everything and have my students doing research and looking at the chemical components of the ink at the end of the book that was different from the beginning of the book. There was a great article a student found. She was a chem major. Anyway, all these wonderful things that students can get that bring me information. I find information, give it to them. So there’s just this great growing of intellectual content that’s really fun.

Anytime you take on a project that’s very complex, that a lot of people are looking at—I was able to bring in Dr. Eric White from SMU, Southern Methodist, who was an expert on Gutenberg, to give the Goudy Lecture, and then I pumped him for information for three days. We went to the Huntington Library. I took my students there. We got to see the Gutenberg Bible they had there and talk about a lot of details. So, just really, really it’s fun to get into a project where you can really learn so much more about it that it becomes satisfying, that even if you don’t tell anybody—I mean, it’s fun to be able to tell somebody what you found out, but even if you don’t tell anybody, you know something now, and the students know something, and we have something to show for it.





COLLINGS:

Now, do you have a sense that the Fine Press Movement, which was sort of a precursor to all of this other activity which started in the sixties, had that kind of investigative impulse?





MARYATT:

Well, you know, those who were printing books had the idea that they were producing new literature, mostly. They were sometimes taking books and short stories and poems that had been already published and just presenting them in a beautiful way, but the more important work that was being done were those who were interested in publishing new work. So that was really the Fine Press Movement. That was its significance.



01:07:30

COLLINGS:

Yes. But in terms of choosing fonts, choosing inks, choosing paper, choosing binding—





MARYATT:

Well, you can only choose what you have or can get. So that’s a significant thing, because here you have, if you’re a printer, you have a bank of cabinets or one drawer or one case. So you choose either to use what you have or possibly to borrow it or you have to buy it, and type foundries have gone away. There’s only one left in the United States, except for some private type foundries. There’s one other commercial one. But anyway, it’s very hard to get type now. So it really has changed in that sense.

So, same thing with paper. You used to be able to choose handmade papers from all over the place. They were mostly imported. They weren’t in the United States. Twinrocker was the one who reinvigorated commercial hand-papermaking for sale in the United States, but back in the early Fine Press Movement, in the sixties and so on, as you say, they had maybe more of a choice of papers, especially from England and France. So, yes, they were making aesthetic choices.





COLLINGS:

But they were aesthetic choices, not investigative intellectual—





MARYATT:

Well, I think they had to.



01:08:51

COLLINGS:

—choices as you are describing.



01:10:4301:13:1401:15:30

MARYATT:

Yeah, maybe not so much in depth, but, again, if you didn’t have the typeface and you knew you needed Van Krimpen for this particular kind of poetry, you needed to buy it. But you would have to know a little bit about the Van Krimpen, that it existed, first of all, and that it had this particular style. So I think you did have to do a lot of investigation about what kind of type you would use and what kind of paper you would use, but, again, it was on a more practical level, rather than maybe something that would be just as satisfying intellectually to know something.

But, you know, as those fine printers were choosing who they were going to publish, usually it was either they knew these poets or writers or they were themselves poets and writers—the self-publishing has been going on for a long time—or they would get solicited. Somebody would see that they were printing books, like Black Sparrow Press, for example. You’d send a lot of your poetry to them and see if they would publish you. So I think it was for the Fine Press Movement really, really hard to make a living unless you were able to produce a lot and they were popular enough to sell, so that you could just make your costs. Well, just making your costs doesn’t do it. You’ve got to live too.

So there were the grants that you could get from the government, NEH grants and so on, that certain fine press publishers would be able to get, but it’s a hard life to be a fine press publisher, and I think it’s really equally hard to be a commercial printer, also, or a commercial publisher. They’re all not easy professions.

The Fine Press Movement was really oriented towards literature and not so much towards art. For a long time, there was—maybe not for a long time. For a certain amount of time, there was this kind of divide between artist books and fine press books. So probably about twenty years ago, maybe twenty-five years ago, there was a show that came out of UC Santa Cruz, I think, where they had Fine Press Artist Books, I think was the title of the exhibit, and they solicited books to be juried into the exhibit that were fine press artist books. So there was that discussion back then.

So artist books that are done like zines, like Xeroxing, there was all of that being done, too, and being sold. So they were limiting just to focus on those artist books that were done by fine press. So today, now artist books cover the gamut, and so they could be produced in any way, and what does that mean? So what if it’s a—Xerox is hardly even used much anymore. Now they’re all scanned and produced on the computer or other methods. So it’s quite an interesting and exciting time today for knowing what artist books are.

But for some people who aren’t maybe well informed, they think of artist books maybe as only being those kinds of books that are produced cheaply and quickly and want to get to out an audience. In fact, there’s an L.A. Book Art Fair coming up at the end of this month at wherever it is. This is their third year here, and they have also the gamut, very few fine press books, if we’re talking about letterpress. Why can’t fine press be designated for other techniques that are done well and with consideration and so on? So that’s a discussion about what is a fine press book versus an artist book? Do they have to be distinct? So, really, artist books just are just artist books now. They can be done by any technique and can still be extremely well respected.

I’m thinking of one of the books that was the focus of this last weekend’s [CBAA] event [at Scripps], so that we had the Transsibérien, and then we had Ed Ruscha books, which were all done by offset, and he was there at the event, which was very exciting. I invited him to come. Then the third one was Sam Winston, because I wanted to choose a contemporary book artist who was using digital means, and he did his book using QuarkXPress. He designed it on the computer. He printed it offset or digital. I think it was offset. Possibly it was digital then. I can’t remember now. But anyway, so he’s gotten really famous and does wonderful books. So anything can happen with a well-made book, with a great idea, with beautiful visuals, and with a message and a lot of different kinds of artist books today.

I think maybe the most controversial types of artist books are those which are more sculptural and less functional. There are certainly the artist books where they are made of a piece of steel of 500 pounds that are closed, and does it have the attributes of a book, like we were talking about before. Is there enough bookness in there or is it really just pure sculpture?

So there’s a lot of discussion in the history of book arts whether or not the usual historians, Betty Bright and Johanna Drucker, whether or not they’ll address the sculptural aspect of books because there’s so much to write about in the non-sculptural books, that at least Johanna Drucker decided that she wouldn’t address that side of bookmaking in her book from—was it published in 1980, possibly? No, maybe a little later, ’85 maybe. But Betty Bright decided to talk about some of them, but her book only addresses 1960 to 1980. So we’re waiting for the 1980 to 2015 book now. There’s a lot to talk about. But a lot more people know what artist books now are.

Just like the same thing with calligraphy. Back when I was starting, you could say the word “calligraphy” to somebody, and they wouldn’t have a clue what you’re talking about. Maybe they would know it’s beautiful writing, but they wouldn’t have any idea of what kind of a tool or what the meaning of doing that was. And the same thing with artist books. Years ago, “What are you doing? You’re an artist making a book? What is that to do? The imagery in it?” Really, and of course there’s still a lot of confusion about what an artist book is, but a lot more people now are aware and see lots of exhibits at universities, particularly, but there are a lot of really big-deal artist books, like Anselm Kiefer that would be showing up at L.A. County Museum. So there are artists who are famous not just for books but for their artwork, working in the book form from time to time also. So it’s a conversation that’s—



01:16:48

COLLINGS:

And I always wonder if there’s more of a sense that there’s something special about the book arts now that we’ve sort of lost the de facto physicality of the book.





MARYATT:

Well, I think that’s an interesting question because I think we haven’t lost it. I think that those who are making—





COLLINGS:

The de facto, that we have so many ways of approaching the book that don’t involve picking up a book and turning the pages.





MARYATT:

Well, with artist books, you still have to pick up the book and turn the pages.





COLLINGS:

Yes, that’s what I’m saying, that that’s kind of like the preserve of that experience.





MARYATT:

Yeah. Well, it is interesting that young students really do have a different view of books today, and I just kind of hate the idea that it’s just going to be something remote from them interacting with on a daily basis. I certainly love eBooks, and I have my Kindle, and I have my Kindle on my iPhone, and I love being able to read when I want to read it and have as many books as I want on my iPhone, which is really exciting. But, boy, it sure is nice to curl up with a physical book. It’s a lot easier to read than on the screen, the little tiny iPhone screen or an iPad, but that’s not really important, I don’t think. But it is interesting that the students are not interacting with the physicality of the book, and so when they do see books that are sort of blatantly physical—





COLLINGS:

Yes, yes. Blatantly physical. That’s a wonderful way of putting it.



01:18:57

MARYATT:

—having a real presence about them, they’re totally fascinated, and therefore they assume that all artist books are like that. So I have to make sure that I show them the other kinds of books like the Ida Applebroog or books that are deadpan, like Ed Ruscha, where they’re not physical, where they’re not shouting, “Look at me.” They are subtly saying, “What do you think of this? Think about this now.” So they’ve got to see all kinds of manifestations of an artist’s desire to say something.





COLLINGS:

It sounds like a fabulous class that you teach. Really, it does.



01:20:3401:23:16

MARYATT:

Well, I can’t do everything in every class. It’s really every class is like on a need-to-know. I can’t address every single one of these ideas that we’re talking about, so that’s why I try to focus on a particular subject, hope that it’s really fascinating, and that they can delve into something in a deeper way than the surface trite sort of ways that often are asked of students. Well, not at Scripps, for heaven’s sakes. We really make the students dig in. But it’s easy to maybe just stay on the surface of something and not really understand the ramifications of whatever that subject is.

So last semester, we did “silence,” and that was because our Humanities Institute picked the subject of silence for discussion for the whole semester and had a lot of movies and talks and discussion groups about that subject. That was the focus, and so I thought, “Perfect! We’ll just dig into that one.” So what will they bring in that we—I don’t want my students just to go to a lecture and then repeat sort of the ideas and maybe dig in a little bit more, but I said we’ve got to do something maybe that they probably won’t be addressing, because silence has so many ways of thinking, many, many political and social implications. What can we do that won’t be maybe about being silenced? That’s the first thing you think about, censorship and so on.

So I thought maybe we should do the senses. How do you have the sensation of silence through your physical body? How do you hear silence? That’s the easiest one because it’s like lack of noise, except that it’s on levels, that there’s no such thing as total silence, except in a vacuum. You can never experience total silence. So there’s level of silence in hearing, but then how do you see it, how do you think about seeing silence, and it gets worse.

So I had them writing about hearing silence first. Everybody wrote an essay, short essay, short creative thing, paragraph or two, and then we picked the top three—we’ve never done this before—and said, okay, now everybody go write about seeing silence now, even the people who were picked. We picked three more, seemed to go with the other ones. Now you have to taste silence. That was a little harder. How about touching silence or—what’s the last one [smell]? Anyway, we did all five, and they just had to keep on writing. Those who had two selections for the book or one didn’t have to write anymore. We just kept on making them write. So it was harder and harder for those who didn’t get selected at the beginning, but some of them just kept on writing. They thought this was kind of an interesting thing.

So we had this mixed bag of all of these selections about the five senses, and that became our book and how to present it and how to get imagery for it. But it’s hard to do research for that kind of thing. You kind of have to pull it out of you. So that maybe wasn’t as research oriented as the Gutenberg book, where they had a lot of literature out there to be able to research, or about paper and how it moved from the East to the West, or many other books where the research component is really strong. I really like it when it’s really, really strong because then they can get outside of their own—what they know already and find out something that they don’t know, and that has to go in the book. I don’t want them to be able to produce text that they could have produced the first day of class. I want something to be thought about so that they can give me new information or at least new to them. So we don’t always do the research component. Like with silence, there wasn’t that much research. But with other books, we’ve done a lot of research.

But also I’m really interested in giving them a really uplifting and fun experience when I can because a lot of subjects are so serious. So we did a book once on play, which was really a fun book, and I’ve decided that we’re going to do a book on automobiles next semester because everybody has some kind of experience with automobiles and can find out—and there could be the social aspect of it, with all of the efforts to make automobiles cleaner and be able to last longer, or alternatives to automobiles could be part of the subject. So I never know when I think of some subject that I think everybody has some way of getting into, whether or not they’ll all pick one aspect and then everybody dig into that aspect, or what’s usual is that they all want to do their own thing, and that’s what I kind of have to fight against a little bit, because then we have just kind of a—not a coherent book unless we can find what we call connective tissue, the tissue that will hold things together to make them not just be, I think this, and you think that.





COLLINGS:

That sounds like it would be very challenging.



01:24:29

MARYATT:

Yeah.





COLLINGS:

Well, I think the idea of silence in relation to a book is interesting because a book is by its nature communicative, we hope, and therefore sort of the opposite of silence, and yet the idea of the library, of reading, so often this is conducted in silence, so there are some interesting opposites there.





MARYATT:

Yeah.





COLLINGS:

So we’ve gone for an hour and a half. I wondered if you would like to wrap up or would you like to talk a bit about paper in Los Angeles or leave that for next time.





MARYATT:

Oh, we can talk about paper.





COLLINGS:

Okay. So last time you had mentioned a paper mill event that you thought occurred before 1980.





MARYATT:

Yeah. I’ll have to look up that date.



01:25:33

COLLINGS:

Okay. I think what got us on talking about the subject was sort of thinking about how the prevalence of using Japanese papers—





MARYATT:

Right. So I think that event that I’m talking about was after I got back from Ascona, now that I’m remembering it. But to go back to paper in Los Angeles—





COLLINGS:

Like what was available, what kinds of things people liked to use.



01:27:3201:29:5101:31:29

MARYATT:

Yeah. We had a main store. McManus & Morgan was the main store where you could get fine papers, and you can get commercial papers practically anywhere from huge warehouse-type places. But to get the fine papers, it was McManus & Morgan. That was pretty much the only one until the Paper Source came along, and the Paper Source was downtown also, just like McManus & Morgan was. So McManus & Morgan brought in papers from Europe and Asia, so that’s where you would get your papers from either part of the world, and he brought in a lot of marbled papers also, and Suminigashi, decorated papers from Japan. So that was your major place. They’re still in existence.

Paper Source came in and brought in mostly European papers but a lot of handmade papers, and they were run by Rosemary and Wally Dawes, and McManus & Morgan was Gary Morgan. Then Hiromi came in. So Hiromi was probably in the mid-eighties—I’m trying to think—and she was on Glencoe Avenue, and then now she’s in Santa Monica at Bergamot Station. So those are the three main places. There are art stores who would carry some nice papers, but mostly those were the places where you would get paper. So you could easily get Japanese paper, Western papers, handmade papers.

But there was nobody making paper in L.A., except for two fellows, Dr. John Urabek and the other fellow. His name—he’s a printer. He taught at Cal State L.A., and I’ll think of his name in just a moment [Dick Hoffman]. But they regularly made paper with a Hollander beater in not John’s but the other fellow’s backyard, so I would go make paper with them.

I don’t know who it was that brought Twinrocker to town, but Twinrocker was started in San Francisco by twins, Peggy Prentiss and her sister, Kathy Clark. She married Howard Clark. So they were all in San Francisco, and they started making paper by hand because both of them were printmakers and they wanted their own special paper to make their prints on, and slowly they built it up where they were selling paper, and eventually they moved to Indiana and opened up the first commercial paper mill in the States for many years. I can’t think of where other handmade paper mills were. So they revived hand-papermaking in the United States.

They came out to Los Angeles in—I just saw them recently, and they told what year it was, but I’m pretty sure I was in graduate school, so it was probably the early eighties, and John and this other fellow [Dick] had them up at Cal State L.A. because he was teaching there, and so they gave a big demonstration and I went to that, and they gave a talk in town. So that was really, really interesting. But still nobody got the bug to make more paper in L.A. for either commercial or for their own personal use, so really there hasn’t been a big papermaking presence in L.A.

So my student Colin Brown took many classes—several, three classes with me at Scripps. So he was a Pitzer student. I can draw from all five colleges. So he came, took my typography class, and then he wanted to do an independent study and do calligraphy, and I said we could study calligraphy if we can pin down a particular style you want, and he wanted to do the Chaucer style from the book in the Huntington Library, but he was taking a Chaucer class. I thought this is so perfect. So he could do the intellectual study of Chaucer and then he could see how it was written out. So we had a facsimile at Scripps. It all worked out really, really well, where he could work from the facsimile and learn calligraphy and also learn about Chaucer.

Then he wanted to do another class with me where he wanted to use the C&P press because we always used the Vandercooks, and he wanted to use the Chandler & Price printing press. So I said, “You can do it as an independent study. That’s fine.”

So then he was going to be in Chicago when I was going to an APHA meeting at Columbia College. Was it APHA? I think it was. So I introduced him to the people there. He fell in love, they fell in love with him, and they accepted him for their MFA program. So he did his MFA there, and now he’s back in L.A. making paper, and he comes out every year for me and helps me with all of our equipment. We’ve got a Hollander beater. We’ve got the hydraulic jack built by Howard Clark, and so the beater’s built by Howard Clark too.

So we make paper, and I have both my typography and my Core students making paper, and once we made our paper for the book, but we need so many hundreds of sheets, it’s just practically impossible to get the students to make the paper and write and make imagery and so on. So we made paper for half of the book. But I always make them use their paper, if possible, for either our book, or for the Core students, I have them use the paper for their own one-of-a-kind books, if it’s appropriate. So that’s what we’ve doing for, gosh, maybe seven or eight years. He comes back every semester and helps me with all the papermaking equipment, buys the fibers for me. He’s just a wonderful resource, and he does work commercially for artists. If an artist needs paper for their book, he will help them, and so he did that for my Figure of Speech book. I said, “I need to make my paper. I want to do pulp painting.” We took all of the equipment out from the Scripps equipment. He beat the fibers for me. Black fibers I needed for my pulp painting and white cotton for the substrate, and he helped me make the paper for my edition.





COLLINGS:

Fabulous.



01:33:17

MARYATT:

So that’s what he does. So he’s the only one still. There was one person up in Santa Barbara who was making paper on a regular basis, and also Sukey Hughes, years ago in the eighties, was also making Japanese paper. She had studied Japanese papermaking in Japan, and she was teaching workshops, and I had her give a workshop out at Scripps. So we were learning how to make paper from various sources, but really Colin is the only one in L.A. that’s doing it on a regular basis and working with other people.

So you keep on hoping that more people will get involved, but it’s a big thing. It’s like getting letterpress equipment. You’ve got a lot of equipment, and you can do it without so much equipment. If you get the right equipment, the Hollander beater and so on, you make better paper, paper that will last, paper you can do things with and on. So that’s papermaking in L.A.

I don’t know very much about the history before I got interested in book arts, but I believe that there were a couple of papermakers that I’ve heard someone talk about once, maybe in the thirties or forties. But really there hasn’t been that big effort like up in San Francisco where they have Magnolia Editions and other papermakers. San Francisco is the mecca. If you want anything in the book arts, anything you want is going to be there, and it’s going to be first-class.





COLLINGS:

Do people in the book arts community here sort of rely on San Francisco in a way? I mean, perhaps there would be more that had developed here in L.A. if it wasn’t so easy to go up to San Francisco.





MARYATT:

Oh, that’s interesting that you say that. I don’t know, but I’ve taught many times up at the San Francisco Center for the Book, and I just totally love going up there and seeing all of the people who are doing things. They invite me to the Roxburghe Club to give talks, and they have a Colophon Club up there. There’s a lot going on up there. But does that mean that it’s been easy for us because, no, you don’t just sort of jet up there unless you have enough money to be able to go up there and take workshops, but there they are. They have a fabulous, fabulous program. So really, really happy that over the years that they developed to be such a mecca for book arts. Really, really strong.



01:35:14

COLLINGS:

Okay. Shall we leave it there for today?





MARYATT:

Sure. [End of January 15, 2015 interview]

SESSION FOUR (February 4, 2015)



00:00:24

COLLINGS:

Okay. So today is February 4th, 2015, Jane Collings interviewing Kitty Maryatt at the Scripps Press workspace, shall we say? And we said that today we were going to go over the founding of the Scripps Press and its evolution.





MARYATT:

So we know about the founding because there are letters between Dorothy Drake, who was our librarian, and Frederic Goudy, who’s a typographer, famous typographer. So he came in 1939, I think, to Occidental—maybe not Oxy, but to Pasadena to give a lecture, and Dorothy Drake happened to go hear that lecture, and she thought, wouldn’t that be nice if he came out to Scripps. So she invited him to come give a lecture at Scripps. So now I can’t remember if that was ’38 or ’39. So he came to see Scripps before the press was ever developed, before there was anything.

So Dorothy Drake was pretty forward-looking, and we all loved her, for one thing, too. She was very friendly, encouraging to come look at the books and look at these special treasures that we have. Just totally amazing. So she was the one who really wrangled the Press, and, again, we know these things from these letters that went back and forth. So in 1941, she got the class of 1941 to give the Scripps College Press as its class gift, and one of the students in that class also gave $500 to hire Frederic Goudy to design a typeface for Scripps.





COLLINGS:

Now, was this Pat Morrison that I read on some of the documentation?





MARYATT:

I don’t remember who the student was, but it was basically the class of ’41 that gave this amazing gift. So what promulgated that? Dorothy Drake—you know, this was the time when there were private presses around, and there were some teaching presses like Carnegie Mellon in, what, Pittsburgh?



00:02:17

COLLINGS:

Yes.





MARYATT:

There weren’t very many, but there were some around. So Dorothy Drake just had this vision, I think, and she invited the students to the library to look at these rare books and got them all excited about wouldn’t it be great if we could do something like this. So that’s really how it started, was her vision.





COLLINGS:

It was for Scripps, in particular, which is a women’s college.





MARYATT:

That’s correct. That’s right. At that time in 1941, there would have been Pomona College and Scripps. Scripps was started in 1926. And that may have been the only two colleges here in ’41. That one I don’t remember, because there’d be Harvey Mudd, which was the fifties, I think, and Pitzer and CMC. So I don’t remember if any of those were around. It may have been just Scripps and Pomona.





COLLINGS:

So her vision was for Scripps.





MARYATT:

And she was a Scripps College librarian. So the premise of the class was that this would be an experimental typographic laboratory, which is really amazing to think about—





COLLINGS:

It’s interesting, yeah.





MARYATT:

—how kind of forward-looking that is, because she wanted to make sure that it wasn’t commercially oriented, because women, in general, didn’t go into the printing field, but she didn’t want them to think that that’s what they were going to do with their lives. This was for edification, for being able to experiment, to be able to write something and print your own words.



00:03:50

COLLINGS:

Oh, fascinating.





MARYATT:

The focus wasn’t so much on writing your own words in the beginning as it is now, but still, to be experimental in 1941 is really truly a different concept than it is to be experimental today. It’s much less experimental back then. They were going to try experimenting with arranging type, but it wasn’t wild like the futurists or the Russian constructivists and so on. So it was pretty straightforward.

But we, of course, didn’t have any type, and Frederic Goudy, before the fall of ’41, therefore had to design this typeface for us. So he did all of the drawings, and he also made his own patterns with a pantograph machine and cut his own matrices. These matrices were then taken to a place in Chicago and the commercials were made, and then the type could be cast with monotype machines. So there was one size that was designed, a 16-point on an 18-point body, so it was big, big typeface for this kind of work. So it wasn’t so appropriate for bookwork unless they were big books, and there weren’t that many big books.



00:05:13

COLLINGS:

Why was that choice made, do you have any idea?





MARYATT:

Well, I guess Goudy chose that, I would guess. I don’t have any documentation as to why it was 16-point and not 14-point. Sixteen on an 18-point body is pretty unusual, so it gives you lots of leading. Type looks good big.





COLLINGS:

Yeah, I just wondered.



00:07:2100:09:15

MARYATT:

Yeah, I wonder, too, now that you ask me. I don’t know. So there was another size that was cast. So this type, 16-point type, was cast by M & H in San Francisco, which is now called Mackenzie-Harris, but it was M & H then, and they did the first casting, and we still have that casting here in about ten, twelve cases of that size type. Also 24-point caps were found to be necessary, so they were cast at the same time. So from 1941 to ’47, that’s the only type that was in this laboratory. So in that sense, it was really nice to be able to experiment with a very limited amount of possibilities so that the students could focus and they were challenged to having only one typeface.

So it’s interesting to look at the work from that period, 1941 to ’47, when Ward Ritchie was invited to be the professor and he taught one class. I’m not even sure if they got credit like they do today. It was a different kind of structure then. He came in, I believe once a week to teach the class. He brought in his hand press, a Washington hand press, so they only had the one size type, except for the caps, and the hand press, and they did pamphlets, booklets, cards, and sometimes they wrote their own words, but mostly they did other people’s words, which was common, and to make it look beautiful, used nice paper and so on.

So he was here for six years, but, in fact, the very first semester, he didn’t teach the class. Mary Treanor taught the class. She was actually a student of his. There were several students before the Press started who went to study with him at his own Press in L.A. So she was one of those who was gung-ho to do that, and so when they started the Press, she actually taught the first classes. But then the war came about, so this is 1941, fall of ’41, so she went off to help with the war effort. So that’s when Ward Ritchie came up here and came up to teach the classes. So he did that every semester for all these years. We have a list of the names of the students in there.

One of the students was Muir Dawson, who is no longer with us, but he with his brother owned Dawson’s bookshop, and they were instrumental in getting a lot of the books for our collection from donors. So donors would buy these books and give them to Scripps. They would either form their own collection first and then give them to Scripps or buy things to give to Scripps. So they were a wonderful friend of Scripps College.

At that time, Muir Dawson made a paper mold, a wire-laid paper mold, which he gave to us maybe ten years ago because we were getting our papermaking equipment back up to speed, and so that’s a lovely thing to have. And Agnes Dawson has also supported the efforts of the press and gave us money towards making the videotape of the press that we’re in the process of doing. So they’ve both been just very instrumental in moving the Press forward. So he was in one of those very first classes.

So in 1947, Joseph Foster was hired as a full-time tenure-track English professor, literature professor, and he had studied with Porter Garnett and wanted to teach the printing class, and so he did. So Ward Ritchie left, and Joe Foster came in and said, “Well, we don’t want to use a hand press. Let’s use this.” He got a C&P, Chandler & Price, press. And, “Only one typeface? Let’s get some type.” So he bought a lot of type with the money that was actually put aside to cast more Scripps College Old Style typeface. But he felt the need for variety, so he bought a number of ATF typefaces, American Type Founders typefaces. So we still have those today, both the 1941 Scripps College type, and we have Garamond and Caslon and a number of display faces that he bought at that time.

So that gave the students the capability of doing a variety of work. So the kind of work that he did with the students was, again, less on the book side and more on making cards and posters, broadsides, pamphlets and so on. He did that for a very long time and only used this Chandler & Price. So here you’d have a class of a number of students and only one press, so they didn’t always get to print what they typeset, but he would help them with the printing. And, again, the thrust was still that it was an experimental typographic laboratory, not to be at all commercial.





COLLINGS:

What was the definition of “experimental” then?



00:12:19

MARYATT:

You know, I don’t know what they meant exactly because I haven’t seen it written, and I think it’s that they had a space of a page to fill up, and they weren’t necessarily going to do it in the traditional time-honored way, but they really did. From our twentieth-century, early twenty-first-century point of view, it wasn’t very expansive or very experimental, but for the students, it was an experiment, I suppose. They maybe would write something, would have to figure out what the measure is and what size of piece of paper and all of that. But I don’t know. I can’t really answer why they did that. I just was always curious.





COLLINGS:

Right, and what the purpose was in experimentation.





MARYATT:

Well, it was just basically that it was not for commercial purposes, that these things would never be sold, that they would be just the student’s individual interest being printed. I think that’s really what it was.





COLLINGS:

Maybe that was how that point was—





MARYATT:

Dividing line.





COLLINGS:

—that dividing line was established. This is experimental. It is not product-oriented.



00:13:3300:15:21

MARYATT:

Yeah. So I never took that class. [Dr. Foster] He was here when I was here, and that class was going on, and I’m not sure that I even knew about it, really. I was a math major and a French minor, and I was completely full up with all my classes. I loved music, so I took music classes, and I loved languages, so I took other languages. So I really didn’t have, besides all of our three years of humanities as a double course, out of the five courses, two were humanities for three years, and then you’d have your major and your minor and then maybe one choice every once in a while. So it wasn’t on my radar. It was a literature class. I was a math major. [laughs] So it was interesting that I didn’t really know very much about it.

I did know Dorothy Drake, and she did show us the treasures. They were in the basement, and it was kind of scary and dark down there, and I just didn’t get caught up in that. But what I did get caught up in, and I did mention it before, was that we had our medieval dinners, and I loved medieval books, and we did see those things in the collection, and I loved everything about them. I loved the size and the shape, the colors, the calligraphy, the purpose, just everything about medieval books. So it is curious that I didn’t really know about this class.

So it’s unfortunate I never got a chance to study with Dr. Foster, because all of his students speak very fondly of him. He did a very nice thing for his students. After he left, he published a book of their work, which is just wonderful to look through and see all the different kinds of things that students were able to do in many different colors and using a lot of ornaments. He bought a lot of ornaments too. That really bumped up the possibilities in the Press. So that’s how we get to see what the work is like. There’s also, of course, our own archive of the student work in our library, so you can go see the originals. Ward Ritchie, also, all the work that he did with his students may or may not be here. I don’t remember that so much. I know that he gave a collection of the students’ works to the Clark Library, the Andrew William Clark Library (that belongs to UCLA). So he has an archive—well, Ward Ritchie has an archive there, which is really great. So if we don’t have it here, we’ve got it there.

So then after all those years, from ’47 to ’71, that Dr. Foster taught, he eventually retired, and when he retired, they didn’t replace him with someone who knew how to print, and therefore the Press went dead. So they did not get rid of the equipment. They just had it—





COLLINGS:

Fortunately.





MARYATT:

—in storage until Robin Trozpek, who had taken Dr. Foster’s class, was talking to Muir Dawson, who said to her, “My, it’s such a shame that all of that equipment is dormant.”

And she said, “Yes.” Meanwhile, she was working for the President, in the Development Office for the President, or I don’t know what her role was. At any rate, she went to Judy Harvey Sahak, who was the current librarian, and said, “Say, why don’t we revive the Press?”

And Judy said, “Yes.” They developed a list of people who would donate money to put on the first effort. So they hired Christine Bertelson, who had studied with Walter Hamady, so she was a young printer. They hired her in 1980 and established the Frederic Goudy Lecture Series at that time to bring in the community. So Christy was here from 1980 until ’85, and she was the one who changed the emphasis of the kinds of work that the students would do, and that was towards the writing. So she asked them to write their own books and produce their own books. So they all, each student that came into her class, did that. Sometimes they’d take it for a semester, sometimes for a whole year.



00:17:12

COLLINGS:

So each one would produce their own individual book.





MARYATT:

Produce their own edition, right.





COLLINGS:

Wow.



00:18:47

MARYATT:

That’s exactly it. Wow. So that’s pretty hard to get students who don’t really know anything about typesetting or binding to learn that fast to do books, but some of the books that were produced during her tenure here were just pretty magical. So she was wonderful. She had a wonderful sense of style, and the students really loved her. But she left because of a divorce, and she needed to move to another place. So she took a leave of absence, though, and Susan King replaced her for a year. So Susan did the same thing with students, had them work on their own books.

So, Susan left, and now the Press is in dire straits because the money that Judy and Robin had been continuing to raise to fund the Press, they were no longer allowed to raise money because the Development Office said, “We, as the Development Office, raise money. So you have to stop raising money.” And therefore there’s no money for the Press.

So Judy, of course, is—they’re both crestfallen, and Judy convinced Scripps to continue the course for one more year, that it was already in the course catalog, and they shouldn’t quell it yet.

So I was hired to have the Press have more presence on campus, so that it would get more attention and that it wouldn’t be killed off because there’s no money. So I thought that we’d better make books that we could sell, and that it would be easier to make books as a group. It’d be quicker. They still need that time to do the typesetting and the technical skills, but you need the time to develop an idea for a book, and that takes longer to learn, really. So I just thought we have to do a collaborative book, that everybody has a page or two or three in this first book that we’re going to do. Then as soon as they learn the technical skills and how a book is developed, then at the end of the semester or near the end of the semester or halfway through or whatever I was thinking, we’re going to branch off and get to do your own book. Well, that didn’t work at all.

So once they finished their part of the collaborative book, they were ready to move on to their book, which was quite reasonable, but they didn’t want to do any of the front and back matter of the collaborative book. They didn’t want to bind it. They really wanted to move on to their own book. It was just completely—of course, I should have seen that ahead of time, but I didn’t, and so I changed it after that semester, and the students really had to rush to get their books done.

The problem is we only had two presses, and so how are you going to have—I had twelve students that first semester that I was there, twelve students trying to get time on the press. Plus we really didn’t have the right kind of materials to do longish books. They could shortish books, and they all had to have different typefaces because there wasn’t enough depth of typeface to really do longish works. So those are all the things that I was facing that very first semester, and the fact that we had very little money to buy anything that we did need. We didn’t have any paper. So we had $150 for the year to buy whatever we needed. So I thought, “Okay, we’re going to sell this book, and that money we’ll put into the next book.” So I think we did about forty books that first semester, and the book that we did, I thought was really about my philosophy about teaching, is that you have to learn standards. So I thought, what are the standards for typesetting? Well, there’s so many. It’s hard to learn really fast.



00:21:38

COLLINGS:

And the book was called?



00:22:2300:24:21

MARYATT:

That book was called Rules of Thumb. So what I wanted the students to do was to know the rules and then break them. That was the idea of this book. But it’s easy to break rules, but you have to know the rules first, and why would you break them. So I asked them to write about the rules that aren’t in rule books, the things that you don’t think about, that you just see in not only book work, but in any type work, where you start a sentence with a capital, where you have spaces between words, where you have space between lines, where it is in a particular position on the page, and all of these kinds of things that both come from tradition but also from readability and so on.

So they had to make up as many rules as they could figure out that weren’t in normal books, although we looked at normal rules, too, and write a paragraph explaining why that rule is in existence. Why do you start with a capital? Then they had to take that rule or maybe possibly that and another rule and write a text that would be better presented by breaking that rule, that would maybe draw you in in a new way or have you see something in a different way.

So one of the examples would be that you have two columns—that was very common—and so you don’t suddenly go across a column and start reading down that column. They’re pretty distinct. So one of my students wrote a text where you have to go across the column, so she had two separate columns, then across the column, then two separate columns again. But that would only work if you printed it in two different colors, because otherwise you wouldn’t know where to go. But that was her idea, break the column rule. But how do you do that so that it’s necessary?

So that was really intellectually challenging for them, and some of the students got it and some didn’t, as usually is true. So that was a little bit hard for them, but each student had two pages in that book where they had to suggest the rule and do it in a very traditional, enlarged initial letter layout, and then they had to do something breaking the rule.

In that book, one of my students withdrew near the end of class. I don’t remember the reason. Maybe she was ill. This was the only book that we’ve ever paginated. We’ve never done it since because I learned my lesson, that now we were missing page seventeen. It was blank.

So I quickly went to my stepson and I said, “Kevin, you know that story that you wrote about Big Eddie? Oh, my god. We could really use that.” It’s all about dialogue, right, and this rule that she was trying to break was using different typefaces for the different voices in a dialogue, and I thought this would be perfect. So I asked his permission if we can use that, and so we put that in the book, and I just left her name as if she had done it because I thought it’s too complicated to explain it. So anyway, now I’m explaining it.

So I’m really proud of that page because I was so proud of my stepson because his writing was so tight that when I ran out of sorts, I ran out of lowercase ds, because he was in the past tense, I had to see if I could change his text, and it was so tightly written, I couldn’t—it was really interesting, very interesting—even though I had different typefaces there. I used my type from my [Two Hands] Press because I lived seventy miles away, and it was really hard to come back and forth and put in that extra page. So I could typeset there, and then I printed it here, probably.

Then I had to do the front and back matter, too, because the students just were really involved with their own book. So that Rules of Thumb, those little rules that I put on the front page, I had to kind of figure that out. So that was kind of interesting, but it was too bad that the students didn’t get to do that part. So from then on, they just would have to take an independent study if they wanted to do their own books, and that’s worked out just fine.



00:25:54

COLLINGS:

That sounds like a good plan.





MARYATT:

It’s a big deal to make a book, right? But anyway, so that was a very big success, that book. We used some leftover bookcloth that had damage, and it we just cut around the damage, that was a bright turquoise-blue. We had just had the Olympics, so we used these three different colors for the tapes that we sewed over, and so it looked nice, and we had just enough money to buy some type and some extra leads and so on. So then we used that money to pay for the materials for the next book.

So we went on from there, and that’s why they are collaborative, that I figure that we can learn all of the multiple decisions that you have to make in making a book by doing it together, rather than having each student having such an uphill battle to learn so much about making a book, and making a deeper book than if you were so pressed for time. We really do work hard on getting substance into what the students write. There’s some significance and not just experimenting with the shapes of things.





COLLINGS:

And when did you start using the campus theme? For example, this year you said that there was sort of an intellectual focus on the notion of silence this year.



00:28:0800:29:1200:31:2500:33:18

MARYATT:

Trying to involve other people on campus from time to time, I thought would be another way of getting a presence on campus. So I asked a music teacher to come in and give some lectures to my class, because I wanted the students to find out about John Cage’s book called Notations about modern music notation. Well, in order to know modern music notation, you have to know the beginnings, and we have this wonderful gradual, huge gradual in our collection, plus a number of music books that show the beginnings of notation, music notation. So I invited him in to interact with the students, and then he can be asked musical questions that I didn’t know. Of course, I’m really interested in music, anyway, but he’s just such a wonderful expert. So I did that one semester.

Another semester, we had the Humanities Institute invite five or six poets to class, and each poet was going to give a reading of their poems over a period of a year, but the poetry was ekphrastic poetry, and that’s really an interesting concept. So it’s poetry in response to a work of art. So I thought, whoa, wouldn’t that be great if we could pair together, and they would pay for the half the materials, and then they’d get half the edition. So that’s what we did, and that was a wonderful thing.

It took us a long—we had to do that book over a year because we couldn’t finish it in the one semester, because we didn’t even get to hear the other poets. So the next semester’s class actually had to work on that book before they could start their own book, but basically it was binding it together, but all the printing had been done and so on. So that was an effective and interesting process to have the students interact with the poets that came on campus, which was great.

But also then they had to write their own ekphrastic poetry. They had to determine which work of art that they wanted to write about, and then do poetry. How do you write poetry? It’s very challenging, all of those things, but they’d listen to the poets. And then one of the poets we asked—someone asked or I asked. Somebody asked, “How do you write a poem?” or something really basic. Thinking, how do you teach writing poetry? I’d bring in John [Peavoy]—one of my colleagues, a writing professor, to come in and talk to—very first class, I had him come and talk to the students about writing a book. So I’d bring in the writing professors. But anyway, so in that case, I think it was John—the poet, John—starts with a W; I’ll think about his last name [Hollander]—who said that he thinks of a structure first, which I thought was really, really interesting, that, of course, once he tells you his answer, at least you think, oh, yeah, it’s going to be in this particular form, whether it's going to be repetitive or free verse or in stanzas or whatever. I thought that was really interesting, that he thought of a structure first.

Another writer who came to campus that we asked, who wasn’t a poet, but some other writer, and I think I’ve read this from some other writers, too, and I just mentioned to my students today in class, in fact, because they’re just writing their rough draft for Monday, and that is that, “I don’t know what I’m going to say until I write it,” and I thought that’s a really great piece of advice because usually when students have to write term papers, of course you do your research, but you have to do your outline first. But in creative writing, you may or may not want to do an outline structure. You want to think of what your idea is first. But I thought the fact is that you may not know what you want to say until you start writing about it and find out what you’re going to say. So I just thought that was really—there are so many useful things that you learn from all the people that we bring on to the campuses here, whether they’re Goudy Lectures or other kinds of events that we have here. So that was the Humanities Institute.

Then I paired with them again. Although they didn’t ask me to, I paired with them again last semester on the concept of silence. So the Humanities Institute brings in lecturers, puts on films, puts on events related to that concept, and so poking at lots of different aspects of silence, and the political ones being silenced and so on were foremost, but many different aspects of silence. So we needed to find our own way into the idea of silence, and so we talked about the physicality of experiencing silence through first hearing, and then trying to figure out can we imagine seeing silence. How do we experience silence through seeing? That’s a little bit less literal, and as you get to touching silence and tasting silence, it gets even more metaphorical. So the students had to write more literal to less literal kinds of texts for that book. So that was a very nice—it wasn’t a collaboration in the sense that we didn’t talk to each other at all. I just told them that that’s what we’re doing, and then I sent them [the Humanities Institute] pictures of the book. I haven’t given them one yet.

So whenever I can, I try to involve somebody else on the campus. I was going to work with a painting professor two semesters ago, but then she left. But I can’t do it always, but I can from time to time. And, again, to expand the presence on campus, I send out the Goudy Lecture flyer every semester. I invite the people on campus and all the campuses to the publication party, to any events. We have an event this afternoon on a reception for my Core III students’ exhibit that they put up in the Clark Humanities Museum.

So I try to get people on campus to pay attention us, but I think they all have their own focus, and it’s hard to get them when there are probably five hundred lectures and events a semester. But I work hard to try to do that, and that’s what I was asked to do from the beginning. So we probably have more presence off campus in the book arts world because people buy our books. We have fifty-eight standing-order patrons. We have people who are individuals who collect our books, but lots of libraries and collectors, and we enter in exhibits, and so the books are out there all over the place.





COLLINGS:

How were you able to cultivate the standing-order business from the beginning?



00:35:0200:36:4600:38:2700:40:06

MARYATT:

Well, that’s interesting. I didn’t cultivate it from the beginning, and I have to admit that I didn’t know what a standing-order patron got when they first started. So the first book we sold them, and then the next book that we did was—I’m thinking. On that list, book number two—oh, we did The Color Book, and then we did Los Angeles Women Letterpress Printers. Okay. So The Color Book was all about color. We did a poster about color. Because color is so impossible to describe, I said, “Okay. Describe color. Pick a color from the Winsor Newton gouache line and describe that color.” We made a poster, and they painted the color on the poster, and now we made a book where they had to mix inks to match the exact color of the Winsor Newton gouache, and then they did a book.

But then next semester, we did this Los Angeles Women Letterpress Printers, where I asked the students to see who’s doing letterpress in Los Angeles. So we stuck mostly to Los Angeles, and the students interviewed people by phone. They didn’t have cars, and so they didn’t go visit the Presses, but they did interviews. At the end of that process, again we had another publication party, and a fellow came up to me and said, “Well, I’d like to be a standing-order patron.”

I said, “Oh, that’s very exciting. Wonderful. We’ll keep in touch,” after he bought a book, you know. And I ran over to Judy and I said, “Judy, what do they get as a standing-order patron?”

She said, “They get a discount.”

I said, “Oh.” [laughter] So that was University of Nevada in Reno. That was Bob Blesse. So he started us off. I really hadn’t thought of doing that. You know, I was a part-time hire. I came twice a week for my little sum of part-time money, and so I never thought I’d be here thirty years, really. I really thought, well, let’s get this going again. We’ll see where it takes us. So to get a standing order started was really generous of Bob, and I could have thought of doing that, but I just never did. I just thought these books would get out in the world and wherever they got, whoever came to the publication party, lots of individuals, some librarians and so on. So UCLA was actually one of the early ones right after Nevada.

So it was unbeknownst to me, and I just thought that’s a good thing. So as we’d get more [sales] from the publication party, and then when we put out the lists of the books that were still available, then we would put on the back page, well, you can become a standing order. So we’d get some from just the mailers that we’d send out to invite people to the publication party or to the Goudy Lecture. So it just slowly built up. I do a lot of conferences and I’d take our latest book and maybe show it around if I had a chance. It would be in exhibits, and somebody would call us up and say, “Oh, I noticed your book. We’d like to get that.” So we’d get sales from that, but also occasionally we’d get standing orders, and I think we’ve gotten so many, which was just amazing to me, because we really keep our prices down. They are very reasonable prices for these kinds of books.

Now, we know that they’re student books and that they have mistakes in them as students, of course, need to be able to make mistakes, but they’re pretty well made, and they’re also well thought out. I really do work hard on to get the students to say something, something significant if they can or at least be really entertaining, and try to get them to collaborate with each other. That’s a real focus is to have—as if one person made the book. That’s hard to do when you have each student making one section of a book, which is the typical way that we do it, and there are many atypical ways that we do our books, too, that are more cohesive.

But you don’t want just an anthology of student work. You really have to discuss what the theme is, how you’re going to flesh that out, how are you going to write around that theme, and what kind of imagery you do to support it, or sometimes we start our books out completely with imagery and have no words until we’ve done all the imagery, and then we figure out what we’ve just said and what words could supplement that. So—I forgot my line of thinking about how we got books sold, but I guess it was mainly through just getting books out there, exhibits, conferences, and people coming to Goudy Lectures.

We’d put out the books so people could see them and—oh, I guess it’s the price, right? So we started with, like, $40 for a book or something. I can’t remember if that’s really true. We have all of the costs. We publish all of that stuff. But we only had like forty copies to start with. We figured that’s plenty. Each student gets one, so twelve are gone, and then I get one, the library gets one, and then we sell the rest. So it’s not a whole lot of money, but it was enough at the beginning just to be able to buy some more leading. We were really desperate for leading. Slowly we built it up, so we’d charge $150 to $265 for a book, and that’s not insignificant, but when you’re a patron, you get 20 percent off. That makes it affordable.

Some people buy our books because they’re book artists themselves, and they find them really inventive and they can learn from them. I know that for a fact some of our patrons are like that, and many of them, of course, are collections, and we try to get them into collections, libraries where book arts are taught, and then they can use those books. Like at Purdue, for example, they’re not a standing order, but they bought a lot of our books. Dennis—Dennis [Ichiyama], who teaches there, has used those books for the students to bounce off of. He gives them a project. For a semester project, look at this book, absorb it, and make a book on that subject, being informed by this other book, and then he’d send me a copy of them. Really wonderful things like that.





COLLINGS:

That’s wonderful.



00:41:5000:43:5700:45:5500:47:5200:49:0800:51:1400:52:43

MARYATT:

So that’s what I’m hoping, is that they show that once you give your students confidence that they can do something very professional, that they don’t have to be making a million mistakes. They can make some, but there are standards. So that’s why the books, I think, are successful in general. Not all of them are real successful, but most of them are very well accepted in the book arts community for being well made and well thought out, and that’s why people want them. Luckily, I’m a bookbinder too. So if I were a printer and really didn’t know anything about bookbinding, then we’d have a harder time kind of coming out with different structures that marry with the content. So that’s kind of lucky that I’m really interested in bookbinding.

So I’m hoping that whoever replaces me someday will really have these skills. The students nowadays who are getting their MFA in book arts do get both sides—all three sides: the content, developing content, and being able to figure out how to print it, whether or not it was letterpress, and bind it, whether or not it’s commercially oriented or by hand. So I expect that whoever replaces me will really have a lot of the skills that are necessary to do a book. It’s different from maybe teaching a letterpress class where you have them write something and present it, copying the futurist idea, for example. That’s different from making books. I’m really adamant about the fact that books have these complexities, sequences, and structures that make it really appealing to people to dig in with deep ideas.

So that’s really why we do books, and so I’m really grateful that when they revived the press in 1980 that that really became the focus, that students’ writings, their own writings were the focus. So that’s still true, and of course they can supplement with other people’s writings, if we can get permission, or they if they just use other people’s writings to bounce off of or use books in the library to be inspired by. We have an exhibit in Denison Library right now, where we’ve got about, I don’t know, ten or fifteen Scripps College Press books and the books or things that inspired them from our library. So the Gutenberg page that we have, the Noble fragment, the one called Beorum II—we did our Beorum book based on that—and other things. Claire Van Vliet’s books have always inspired books and some particular ones and other things that have inspired us. Even Roget’s Thesaurus inspired us for one of our projects.

So you have to figure out where your inspiration comes from, and if it’s a concrete object, it’s really a lot easier than if you’re very philosophical. When we do books like about change, well, that’s pretty tough to kind of figure out where’s our focus about change. So we worked a lot on that particular book to find our way into something that the students could all discuss, and that one was kind of a miracle because they came up with the idea that they would have kind of a dream text going along this other text that they couldn’t get a hold of yet, and the dream text would have the phrase “And then she woke up,” and each person had to write a text with those words within it. So this little dreamscape kept on, “And then she woke up.” There’d be a text, “And then she woke up.” So it was really this kind of lyrical part that showed change and wasn’t so much about change, and then we got to show change in a different way in the rest of that text.

In fact, that book—that was Mutatis Mutandis—that book won first—well, I don’t know about first prize—yeah, first prize, I guess you could call it, in a show in Hawaii, in University of Hawaii. Hedi Kyle was the juror for that show, and that was a long time ago, gosh, maybe nineties, and mostly professionals would—in fact, all the shows that we join in are really mostly for professionals who make books. So we got this best-in-show kind of thing. I can’t remember literally what it was called, but it was first prize. But it was very nice to get it, and we were put on the cover of the brochure that was sent out, and that was very exciting because the students were having a hard time finding their way into what they wanted to write about because it was not as much research-based as other books that we’ve done, which I prefer the ones that are research-based in the sense that they have some meaty things that they can mull over and decide whether or not they’re going to use their research.

So we did a book on spices, and I wanted to know more about how spices got from East to West, and I knew that, of course, going from China to the Mediterranean, would go through countries where it’s in conflict, so I thought that we would have a really good political side of it, that as we saw how these spices moved, that they would have to know where these countries are, where is Kazakhstan, just where is it physically. So we did maps and a lot of really wonderful things came out of that book, discovering a Dunhuang scroll in our collection, which I don’t remember if I talked to you about that. That’s another one of my things I’m proud of.

So the research helps the students a lot, not just writing from the seat of their pants, and “I think this,” and, “I experienced that,” which can be lyrical and effortless if they’re really good writers already, but when students have a hard time with trying to figure out what they want to say, if you have some research and you have a focus, it’s a lot easier to write something that might slide in with all of the other students.

So for this semester, we’re doing automobiles, and, of course, everybody has millions of experiences with automobiles. So how do you find your way into something where they’ll put something new in their text that they didn’t know at the beginning of the semester? Could they have written this book at the beginning of the semester without any of the extensive discussions that we’ve just had? So that’s what we’re in the process of doing right now, is they had to do research on what do we need to know about cars. Like, does anybody know when the first car was produced and what was its engine? Nobody knew anything like that. So, okay, we need to know that. What is an engine and what about men and cars versus women and cars? And so many.

So we wrote a list of ten things that we wanted to know, and with eight students, each student chose a subject and then gave a presentation to each other, pulling together as many facts and figures and pictures of automobiles that they could. So now we have this huge variety of informational factlets that we could use for our book if we choose to or not, but it just helps them figure out what they’re going to write.

So finally, after discussing all of that and discussing what the subject of our book is, we decided that it really wasn’t about cars, it was about power and powerlessness as well as power, and that the car was going to be the vehicle, as we called it, to get us to figure out what kind of power we were going to talk about and how it manifested itself in either using or being in a car and so on. So they may still not have very many facts and figures in their text, but at least they’ve heard each other and they might be able to draw in some aspect that could be supported by some research. So I like books with research like that. It just makes it a little bit easier on them. It’s also harder on them that they have to do research.

But it used to be that I’d bring in—well, people don’t go into libraries very much anymore, I am so sad to say, that we used to be able to—I’d take my class over and we’d browse in the “Z” section for different books on typography, just kind of look around. So now, not always, but at least the last five years or so, I’ve been bringing in ten to thirty books physically in the room, start researching, look at these books, look at everything. Like on our big data project, they don’t have a clue about where to start on big data, so I brought in books on big data, on visual analysis, visual representation, all kinds of things just to—we’ve got jumpstart it, because we start, like, bang, right away with the subject, and we have to develop the idea pretty quickly. Otherwise, we rummage around for how we’re going to build the book, and then we have to have our six weeks of printing time and three to four weeks of binding time, and we have sixteen weeks in the class or so. Some of its vacation time, spring break and so on. So we have maybe three to four to five weeks at the beginning of the class to learn everything.

They have to learn typesetting; they have to learn making imagery; they have to learn development of a concept; they have to learn how to write; they have to be editing; they have to make some imagery. It’s a very nerve-wracking time for the students. It’s very exciting. It can be fun, and sometimes we laugh, and sometimes it’s hard. But that’s, I think, the meat of the class right there, those first several weeks when we have to figure out why make a book, what’s a book, how is it different from making a work of art as a painting or a sculpture or building a car or building a building. How is building a book different, and what is a book, and what is an artist book? So we have all those discussions to see what it is that we can do that’s equally as exciting as any other student project that’s been done.

So I bring in to show them all of—whatever apropos project that we’ve done in the past. I show them what we thought about this, we thought about that, and just to show them the scope of the kinds of things that you can do and the kinds of things that take longer and are harder. So anytime you get away from a codex book and signatures, where each student has a signature, it gets a little bit harder if you diverge from just that fairly straightforward collaborative vision model. So we have to talk it over as to whether or not we’re going to break away from that model. So we call that our default book. Default book, everybody has a signature. Everybody figures out how many pages you have for that signature, and you produce it over the course of the semester. We gather them all up at the end of the semester, and then everybody binds them.

So that’s a fairly easy model, but that’s the one where it’s harder to get this what we call the connective tissue, where we have elisions between stories—and we try even not to use the word “story”—narratives or texts, try not to make, like, a story that has a protagonist who has a crisis and it’s resolved. We try to stay away from those kinds of things. We try to be more inventive if we can. I think maybe that’s why the books are different from people who just maybe somewhat quickly make a book, and it is quick for us to make this book in one semester, but I can’t keep the students for a year.

A book takes as long as you give it. If I gave it a year, if they stayed in with me for a whole year, man, we could just go crazy, be fabulous. But I really—these are majors from every—they’re from five campuses with every major under the sun, so I can’t say it’s an art class where they know already maybe how to draw. They’ve got to learn everything. So it’s a big experiment. It’s always a big risk every time.





COLLINGS:

Going back to the notion of an experiment.



00:54:46

MARYATT:

It is. It totally is an experiment. It’s an experimental typographic library. It is the true twenty-first-century notion of what is experimental, and that it’s harder to be experimental. It’s easier to be straightforward. I don’t want to use the word “traditional,” because we are based on tradition, but it’s easier to set a text from left to right and not have something perpendicular or try to go off on an angle. It’s easier to have books that are easy to sew.

But sometimes the content just dictates to you, and that’s the other thing. We say that the books really take over. The idea of the book, it will be successful if we let the book speak for itself, so to speak, if we listen to what the book is saying. If we’re struggling with a book, it may be that we’ve made a bad decision somewhere along the way. We can’t probably fix it because we have such a short time, but that’s part of what they learn in this class, is that you can’t solve everything. You have to have the consequences of your decisions, and it’s complex, and each of you has a part in this, and if you don’t do your part, it’s evident, and people get mad if you—“I do so much work, more work than Student B.” Well, that’s what teams are like. Everybody should do all an equal amount of work, but that doesn’t happen.

Some students, of course, get really excited about the whole project. They just get so invested. They’ll spend more time doing what needs to be done just because they want to be here. I have kids who live in here. I have other students who just hate the class. They don’t want to be here because somehow they didn’t get invested in the idea, or they don’t like the technique, it’s so slow to put little pieces of metal together, or they get frustrated because you have to replace type that’s worn out. I get some students who are fairly unhappy, and it’s hard to—you know, you have a mix. Sometimes you have a class where everybody’s happy, everybody does everything on time, they get along, but it’s a different experience every single semester.

So that’s why I’m still teaching this class in slightly the same way every semester, that it’s a new experience for me every time, too, that you have a different personality, you have a different subject, you’re always going to teach them how to set type, you’re always going to teach them how to bind, but maybe a different kind of binding. So it makes it fun for me that we have something new to do every semester, I think.





COLLINGS:

It sounds great, energizing. You mentioned some of the things that you were proud of.





MARYATT:

Yeah. Oh, the type. Let’s talk about the type.



00:56:10

COLLINGS:

Yes.



00:57:5401:01:0501:01:4401:04:16

MARYATT:

That Scripps College Old Type, Scripps College Old Style type is our typeface that was designed by Frederic Goudy in 1941. He was asked to design the matching italic in 1945 and finished it just before his death in 1947. So this is our typeface. This is most unusual for a private college to have its own typeface. So there were newspapers who had their own typeface designed for them, that was common, and the private press would design their own typeface, like the William Morris Press does and so on. So it wasn’t uncommon for people who had enough money to be able to design a typeface and have it cast, but for a college to have it was unusual, and I’m sure that was Dorothy Drake’s idea.

So we have these many cases of type, enough to set a whole book, really, all those ten cases of type. But it’s pretty big, so you’re restricted maybe on how you’re going to use that. But we start every single first class, they immediately start setting their names, telephone numbers, and dorm name on a line where they have to learn how to center the telephone number in the middle. They learn a lot in the very first day of class, and that very first day of class they need to tell me whether or not they like doing this, because if they find it tedious versus exciting, then they probably won’t enjoy doing a lot of this in the semester. So that’s my little test to see if they really want to stay.

But anyway, to get back to the type, that’s neat that we have this typeface, but it was only cast in the one size. But during Christy Bertelson’s tenure here, she had some 14-point type cast. So we had matrices for 16- on 18-point body, 14-point, and 12-point. So she had some 14-point cast at downtown L.A., L.A. Type, but it didn’t align. There were problems because they didn’t have the commercials. I talked earlier about the Goudy matrices versus the commercials that were done in Chicago. So with the 14-point, they didn’t have the commercials, or the 12-point. To make a long story short, we couldn’t use it. But previous—at some other point—now, this I don’t know very much about. But we do have 14-point—oh, I guess I had it done. Now I remember. Who did that? I did that. Okay.

So I went to Theo Rehak, who was practically the only person in the United States that could cast from these problematic matrices, which required hand rubbing each piece of type. So I had three cases of type, 14-point Roman cast by him, and then later I had some italic done, and the italic was done for the Dorothy Drake and the Scripps College Press book, written by our librarian Judy Harvey Sahak, where we asked her to write that book after we had our fiftieth birthday party, and I had asked her to give the lecture about the letters between Dorothy Drake and Frederic Goudy to talk about the beginnings of the Press.

So she did that, and I said, “You know that would be an awfully good book for us to publish at the Press.” We had another project that we were going to do, which was still connected with Goudy, which was going to—but anyway, so we published her book, and so for her book we wanted to get the italic cast. So we got the italic cast, some, not very much, a little bit of italic cast. But the 12-point matrices never did get cast because of all this hand rubbing, and it’s a little bit harder with 12-point, and Theo wanted to make Barth matrices instead of Monotype matrices because he had a Barth caster. He had gotten it from ATF. So there’s different kind of ways of casting type, and it’s harder—anyway, it’s better for the Barth, except that we already had matrices for Monotype, and we knew that we could get it cast at M&H, now Mackenzie-Harris. So I said, “No, we’re not going to do the Barth.” He wanted to electrotype Barth matrices. Anyway, it was very complicated, and we wandered around that one for about ten years. We raised money for that, and it never happened. So I’m very sorry that that never happened. We still have the money. Theo sold his business, and the people who bought his business do not want to cast that type. So there’s nobody in the whole wide world that I know of that can cast this type for us. So that’s just—I’m devastated by that.

But anyway, meanwhile, the digital age comes into being, and everybody’s now—everybody—those who are type designers are designing typefaces for the digital age, and I said, “We should digitize our typeface because someone else is going to do it for us if we don’t.” I got a committee together, brought it to the administration and said it would cost $10,000, and can they help me raise $10,000, and the answer was no, they didn’t see a need for it.

So a few years later, someone digitized the face for us and presented the digitized version as a gift to us for—maybe it was for the fiftieth birthday. And we said, “No, thank you. I’m sorry, but we don’t want your digitization. Did you look at the drawings, the original drawings?”

“No.”

“Who are you?” So I wanted somebody who knew what they were doing, and so I called someone who called the lawyers, and we had to go through a process of asking him not to use Scripps College Old Style as the name of the typeface, but he could sell it as something else, which he did.

So now I find some money in my budget. In 1988 we got a donor. I didn’t even tell about this. We got a donor who now supports the costs of the Press. That was through a review that we went through in 1988. So now the donor’s paying for my salary and my budget. Whatever’s left over goes back into the general funds. So I found out about that years later and said, “You know what? We didn’t use these several thousand dollars. Can I use them to start the process of digitizing the type? Because we have to do it.”

So I was allowed to use part of that money and some of the money from the next year, and I hired Sumner Stone to design the type because I knew him from when he worked at Autologic. In 1980 I first met him, so I’d known him for many years by that time, and he was a calligrapher, and so he would understand the type and the historic nuances, the fact that when you design, when you make digital type from a letterpress type, which was, of course, very common, that you have to take into account the squeeze of the ink onto the paper and how it looks versus the drawings. So he would be capable of looking at the drawings, looking at the prints that we had made, and making some conclusions about how to adjust, so that when we used that type digitally, it would look like it matched ours, but also if we made a photopolymer plate that it would match our type as much as possible. So he was the one I knew that could do it, but we just didn’t have the money. He was always the one that I wanted to do it, and I did investigate some others.

Anyway, so that’s how I used that money to start him on the process of digitizing the type. We worked together on that and made certain decisions. I used the first version of the type in a book that I was doing commercially for someone to see if we could see any problems with fitting of the characters in pairs and all kinds of things. So that became something that was ours, right? And we didn’t have to sell it, but we could use it.

And then I felt we really had to do the Italic, so I said, “Okay, Sumner. We’ve now got enough money. Please do the Italic.” So now we have the whole face and numbers and everything, and what are we going to do with it? Now it’s complete, and Sumner had a connection with AGFA and introduced me to this fellow who said that he would distribute it and we would get royalties.



01:05:19

COLLINGS:

Wow.





MARYATT:

So that’s what I did. I got a contract, got it vetted through the administration, and we get royalties for our typeface.





COLLINGS:

For Scripps College Old Style.





MARYATT:

For Scripps College Old Style. So you could go onto fonts.com and buy Scripps College Old Style, and we get a nice amount.





COLLINGS:

Oh, really.



01:06:36

MARYATT:

Yeah, it’s really great. So I’m really proud that we were able to do that because that’s the official version, right? That is Scripps College Old Style as best as you can make these decisions when you’re copying a face that existed only in metal. So that was significant. So you can go on our website and read about this, and you can buy your own.

I haven’t done it yet, but I intend to get it on all the computers on the campus. I just haven’t done it because I need those—we’ve got both PCs and Macs, and anyway, I just haven’t done it. Maybe that’s my last thing I have to do before I go. We have to make sure that it’s on the campus computer so that Scripps students can use Scripps College—when they’re just going through the lab and computers, they suddenly come upon Scripps College Old Style and say, “Whoa! What is that?” And then they can look it up and find out about its history.

So there was this big discussion as whether or not it should be digitized and other people allowed to use our face. But again, it was the premise that we need to get the Scripps College name out there in the world, so that people that would always say, “Oh, Scripps Oceanography. You have an awfully long drive.” I get that a lot, you know? Scripps College should be out there. So not only Scripps College Press, but I’m an alum of Scripps. I love getting the Scripps College name out there, a place where women can come and learn how to be independent thinkers. So that’s just another little thing. Not a little thing, a big thing.





COLLINGS:

No, that’s a big thing.





MARYATT:

I think in a way I saved the typeface because—





COLLINGS:

Yeah, you did.





MARYATT:

—we can’t really get that in metal. We just can’t get it. If we could get it, I would have gotten it. So there it is. It’s out there, and then we can use it when we don’t have the size that we need or we need to make posters, or they used it for all of the signage on the campus. So it’s there. It’s ours.



01:07:59

COLLINGS:

That’s wonderful.

We’re sort of pushing up against four o’clock. Would you like to stop or say something about the Ward Ritchie Press and the Saul and Lillian Marks typeface that you have here?





MARYATT:

Yeah, I probably should save that for next time.





COLLINGS:

Okay. All right.





MARYATT:

Yeah, because there’s probably a fair amount to say about that.





COLLINGS:

Well, then we’ll stop, then.





MARYATT:

Okay. Great. Well, that was fun, remembering all those things. [End of February 4, 2015 interview]

SESSION FIVE (March 13, 2015)



00:00:40

COLLINGS:

All right. So today is March 13th, 2015, Jane Collings interviewing Kitty Maryatt at her studio in Playa Vista.

So, last time we met at Scripps College Press, so now it seems like a good time to look at your work at the Press in totality, and I think you suggested that there were several themes that you can see running through the work over twenty-five years, is that correct?





MARYATT:

Almost thirty.





COLLINGS:

Almost thirty years. So how would you like to describe what you see in terms of those larger themes?



00:01:58

MARYATT:

So when I first started, of course, I didn’t really know what I was doing, and so as you do it for many years, there’s an opportunity to go back and look back and see if there are themes or if I repeated themes very often and so on. So I gave a lecture about teaching at the Press, and that’s when I looked back at those things and made a list of all of the books and just tried to imagine how I might categorize them.

So I came up with basically six categories at that time—this was maybe five or six years ago—so we started out right off the bat with the rules of typography, and that was called Rules of Thumb, and I just thought that would be important for the students—we talked about this before—important for the students to know what rules there are that aren’t written down, and, of course, those that are written down and how it would be efficacious to break them, how it would be necessary from time to time to break them, but you don’t always have to break them.

So I was wondering, in looking at this list of about fifty, sixty books, how many other books were under the typography category. So it seemed like there were about five, and, of course, this list that I have in front of me only has fifty books, and we’ve done ten since then, so there could be some more typography books and probably are. But anyway, of course I’m interested in typography, and I thought that the description of the course is typography and the book arts, so students might naturally want to come not just because they want to make a book, but they really want to know more about the structure of type. So we’ve done five of those, and maybe the most important one of those was—maybe Rules of Thumb was pretty important for me to start off, to kind of get my—what’s the simile—my ears wet.





COLLINGS:

Feet wet.



00:03:53

MARYATT:

My foot and my feet wet just to see how it was going to go making a collaborative book with students.

Then our other one that was really important was the Beorum II, which I think I’ve talked about before, where we studied the Gutenberg type and where everything came from, at least in Western-style metal. Then another category that was really big is wordplay, because a lot of students come in who are literary, who like to write, they know they’re going to write for a book, and so that just seems natural to work with not only just a literary bent, but to play with words in a way that makes the students really enjoy taking the class. So some of those books—one of the early books was Zig-Zag, where they were talking about opposites, and we came up with kind of an interesting book structure, which was at that time back in the eighties pretty unusual to issue in an edition a book structure that wasn’t a normal codex.

One of my favorites from the wordplay category was Words That Burn—oh, no. That was another one. There was another one, Word, maybe. Maybe Word was—they’re all so much my favorites. But Word was really important because of the Roget’s Thesaurus, and I think I might have talked about this before, too, but—





COLLINGS:

Well, you just alluded to the fact that you had done one.



00:05:46

MARYATT:

That’s right. Students didn’t know the significance of Roget’s contribution to finding synonyms, but it was way beyond just finding synonyms. So when I was growing up, my mother was very good with words, and she could define anything just right on the spot, so she’d be the go-to word person. So she had Roget’s Thesaurus there, and hers was a 1941 copy. And as you work with the Thesaurus, you would go to the back to find a word, and then you would find listed under that word many, many, many different meanings of that word, and you could look up each one and find not only synonyms, but phrases and phrases in Latin and in French and idea groupings. So that was the significance of Roget’s Thesaurus, was that you would be able to expand on maybe the way you were writing something, either creative or for school, with idea matchings. So you’d look at the pages surrounding that word and find antonyms. You’d find ideas that are even deeper and more complex maybe than what you were looking at initially. So that’s what I wanted the students to discover, that there was much more out there than going to the thesaurus on the Internet and finding three or four synonyms.

So I structured the book where they had to start with a word and then look in Roget’s Thesaurus to develop a text that starts with that word. I didn’t care what the text was going to be about, but that was the word, and that they were going to play with that word and also typographically play with the word, so that the typographic imagery would be the imagery for the book. I think there are very few books where we don’t have some imagery that’s printed or cut into or stuck on. But this one, the type was the imagery.





COLLINGS:

So they each started with a different word or there was one word for the whole—



00:07:3400:09:09

MARYATT:

No. They just picked a word. So sometimes I want to be in this book, in the books that we do, and it started out because the very first book we did, somebody dropped out and I had to take over that student’s page. But then every once in a while, I just thought, I really want to do this, too, because mainly I can’t do editions outside of my Scripps work because I don’t have enough time, except for recently I’ve made time. But anyway, so occasionally I’m in the book.

So in this book, I—and I normally don’t show my work to the students until it’s appropriate. Let them do things, and I help them and they help each other. So this one was—my word was “crisis” because this was 2008, and we just went through the financial crisis. So I thought, well, there’s a good word, and so that gave a whole lot of ideas developing into the fact that you try to resolve the crisis, and that it indeed did get resolved, and you end up with success.

So, for me, it was a metaphor for the way the book project—all the book projects I’ve ever done with students and my own, probably, is that you start with something where you don’t know what you’re doing. You feel very uncomfortable, and you go through this crisis of determining what it is you’re going to do, and slowly as you get into production, things become resolved, and you hope to have success at the end. So that was my sort of subtle way of saying—my pat on the back to the students for making a successful book.

Also we would work with—I try to give them lots of devices to help them with writing, with making imagery, with thinking out creative thoughts and so on. One of them was called “Succes,” and that’s why I thought success would be useful in this one, in my little section, because it was s-u-c-c-e-s, so it was a mnemonic device to help them write effective texts. I can’t remember all of them, but “S” for “simplicity,” “U” for “unexpectedness,” “C” for “conciseness,” maybe, another “C” and an “E” and an “S.” I can’t remember exactly what they are, but we used that to try to help them develop a text that brings across the point they’re trying to make. That’s one of the hard things for the students is try to figure if they’re making a point, and if they are, what is it? And to be able to articulate what the point is. So that’s what I did for that book.

So the students really flourished with that assignment. So the wordplay was matching the ideas in their words that they developed, even if they weren’t sentences. Mine, for example, weren’t sentences. I had long lists and then these visual things with the sky is falling, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average high and low, and all kinds of things. So that was a very fun wordplay. So I just wanted to mention that because there are just so many things that I think students need to know basically, and one of them is how to use Roget’s Thesaurus, and it isn’t online the way you can use it as a physical book.





COLLINGS:

Right. That’s what it sounds like.





MARYATT:

Yeah.





COLLINGS:

That sounds like a great assignment.





MARYATT:

It was fun for me, fun for them, and, you know, this is a beginning course, and they’re always being challenged and challenge themselves, too, to do things that aren’t beginning exercises. So the wordplay where you’re trying to do typographic illustrations, so to speak, means that you have to learn typesetting in a little bit more sophisticated way than just linear. So that’s why the books sometimes are hard.





COLLINGS:

So what kinds of words did they come up with?





MARYATT:

Oh, my goodness. Now you want me to remember. One was actually a sentence, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” and he took eight iterations of that sentence and changed each word by giving its synonym until by the time you came down to the eighth one, the sentence was completely nonsense.



00:10:53

COLLINGS:

How interesting.





MARYATT:

Let’s see. I don’t recall exactly right now. I can seem them visually, what they were doing. We also threw numbers in there because it seemed like numerics went along with this. We also threw in some kind of a—it’s not a paper, but it was a spun material that we got at Hiromi’s, which had two sides, and so it was about changeability, and it was also a little see-through so you could see something underneath.





COLLINGS:

How lovely.





MARYATT:

For the beginning section of each person’s text, they had to use three words and make a short text to introduce their idea, and they had to use three words—let me see if I can remember them. “Change,” “word,” and a third word [“meaning”], and then any other words they could use, but they had to use those three. So that idea kept on kind of repeating itself in a new way to introduce every text. So I often try to do that. As students do independent sections, we always have problems with making the book look like it’s cohesive, and one way to help with that, besides the design of the text or the pages or the colors and so on, is maybe to have this introductory thing that everybody has to do—





COLLINGS:

Sort of a motif.



00:12:3900:14:03

MARYATT:

Right. And that helps bring things together. So that was wordplay. That was just awfully fun. Other wordplay ones were, for example, Unbuttoned. Maybe I should say something about this one because this was pretty fabulous for me, too, although the students had some—at least one student had some difficulties with collaborating as much as we needed to on this one.

So I wanted the students to get a little bit into narrative and dialogue and how to connect the text to each other again so that we could integrate a little bit more than each student having their section. So the assignment was to develop—we often almost always developed lists at the beginning of the semester, so that we started out with the word “play,” and I wanted all of the words and phrases that have “play” in them, play ball, play havoc, and so on. So we came up with 100 words and phrases.

Then as a group we selected a character to develop for the book, and the character had characteristics, which we would just call out. I’m always the scribe. I just write everything down, and then we look at the characteristics and say, “There’s some conflicting characteristics here. Let’s throw out some of these.” So now we have a character, and now what are we going to do with this character? We’re going to have her play—or maybe it’s a he. Well, it turns out it’s a she. So we’re going to have her play, and now everybody has to let her play and choose one phrase from this list of 100 to use, that you have to use in your section, and your section’s going to be an accordion-fold book, we decided, and some students would have one double-page spread, some would have two, and some would have three, and they would have to help each other for those who had more work.

So that was playing with words, playing with developing texts that could be connected. So basically we had ten texts, and now we had to put them in order. So we just spread them out and said, “Okay, where’s a good beginning for this sort of non-narrative right now? Is there an ending?” Turns out there wasn’t an ending. We had to develop some more text. “Can we make an elision between these two students?”

So once we got sort of an order, then some students had to write more text to get some connection between the previous text and the next text, and that was that book, and they had to do a lot of things to play with the book, so that the person who’s reading the book isn’t just reading the words, but is turning things, lifting things, things pop up. So that was also inspired by one of Claire Van Vliet’s wonderful pop-up books. I showed that to them so that they could learn how to do some basic pop-ups and develop their ideas for having our character play.





COLLINGS:

Well, it sounds like there’s always this element of interrogating a structure, which seems so appropriate for young people at a liberal arts university, where so much of their education has to do with examining the social structure, the political structure, economic structure, and figuring out what makes sense, what is their place in it, how can they contribute going forward. It’s almost as if making the books is sort of a microcosm of everything else—





MARYATT:

Yeah, absolutely.



00:15:50

COLLINGS:

—they’re doing at the university.



00:18:1800:19:4300:21:19

MARYATT:

I really do feel that. It’s a liberal arts college, it’s not an art college, and it’s an interdisciplinary course in the sense where all the students have different majors, and so they’re all coming at this idea of this girl, to have her play. What kind of things would should play with? So they can connect it to their own lives. They can connect it to what they’re doing in college and what they want to do in the future. So it’s a very holistic kind of assignment, almost always.

Sometimes it doesn’t work out so well, but sometimes—like that, I just loved that assignment, but the one student who didn’t love it didn’t like having to change her text to be able to be aligned with other students. So that was interesting, but I understand, you want to own your thing and you don’t want to have to change. The students really do support each other too. But I thought it was a really, really good exercise, just trying to get away from each student having always to do their own section. So I tried different strategies to do that.

We did the same strategy with our silence book recently, where I had the students work in groups. I won’t go into that one, but just the default book is, to work in signatures, each student gets their own section, and if nothing else comes up that the subject that we are addressing demands that we do something else with it, then that’s just going to be the way we fall into that.

So I’m going to go back maybe to the other three categories, and they are image play; historical cultural significance or related to Scripps College somehow; or bookness itself; or something psychological. So on the image play one, for example, Color Book or The Power of Ten, Libretto, Nature, and so on, it’s sort of like wordplay, but now we’re starting with images. So instead of maybe—I do like to throw the book around to the opposite, instead of always starting with words, starting with an image that would maybe then, after you’ve developed the whole book through imagery, then you’d find the words that might be appropriate to give you even new information. So those are always fun to do.

And, you know, what’s interesting about these categories is that—I was just thinking of another book that probably isn’t in this category, but it certainly should be in this category, and it’s just like Johanna Drucker’s zones of activity when she talks about her ten categories of books. They really overlap so much. So I was thinking of our book Boustrophedon, where we started out with imagery, but we really started out with the idea that in Asian culture there is a harmony, an inherent harmony between calligraphy, poetry, and landscape, and they’re all done with the brush. So this was a very old concept. I don’t remember what century, probably sixth, eighth century A.D. or something, where a poet gave something to the emperor, and the emperor said, “Oh, here’s this harmony,” and he gave it a particular term.

So when I was reading about that, I thought this is exactly what we’re trying to do at the Scripps College Press or anybody trying to make an artist book. You want an integration of all of the elements. But it just seems like it’s so much harder for us because we’re carving in linoleum, we are working with metal type, we are maybe writing poetry, but not with a brush, maybe on the computer, maybe cut-up letters and so on.

So I just thought I would mention that that would be the premise of that particular book, that we’d start out with a landscape and develop a narrative by putting them in order, not maybe a very easily read narrative, but putting them in order so that this narrative could be read from left to right or right to left, and that’s why we called it Boustrophedon, because that’s the term in fifth-century Greek lettering where you would read the line of letters from left to right, and then the next line would be from right to left. So it’s called as the ox plows, so it’s a term.

So I just thought, well, we’ll do an East-West book, where we bring out the elements from the East that lead to harmony and try to find what elements we can put together to help create a similar harmony. So I found some beautiful paper that Hiromi had made in Japan that had calligraphy in it, so I thought, that’s how we’re going to get our Asian calligraphy into the paper as watermarks.

Then the students, after they’d done their imagery, they had to choose a snippet of the Chinese Book of Songs that were written down between fifth century B.C. and 500 A.D., that would be poetry that would be sung mostly, and they had to find some snippet that seemed to go with their particular image that they had done, and we were going to put that in the book in Chinese.

Then they had to write four lines of their own text that went with the Chinese text, the imagery landscape that they had developed to help bring it into the West, and then all three of those things would be printed on the paper. We also put some Western paper inside underneath the Japanese paper so that you could see the watermark better, so then we had all of these elements that are both East and West. So we bound it so that you could open it up either in the Western style or the Eastern style. What’s really pretty fun about that is that when I just put it on the table for somebody who’s Asian to open up, they open it up Asian style, which works because we had two title pages, we had a double-headed dragon, and so on. So that was one where the images started the book, but the idea, again, about trying to find this harmony between all of the elements.



00:23:20

COLLINGS:

Well, this notion of the harmony between the elements, it almost makes me think of the artist book genre itself as being a way to overcome, what I hadn’t thought of before, was a particular alienation from words that has to do with the typesetting aspect itself. I mean, I’d always thought of movable type as being something very liberating, which I think it was, but as you describe the brushstrokes and the relationship with the forms, it makes me think that these linear lines of metal typeset words almost drive a wedge between the words and meanings, and the artist books almost seem like they’re trying to remedy that distance as you describe it in this instance.





MARYATT:

Yeah, that’s really an interesting point. So I always have the students—at the beginning of the semester, they don’t know what an artist book is or maybe they kind of know kind of basically what they think it is, and so I have them read three texts that will help them just quickly jumpstart what we’re trying to do. One of them is Ulysses Carrión, who talks about what book art is as a manifesto, and so it’s meant to be challenging, sort of like any manifesto in a way. So I have the students read that to challenge them to think about a book as a new form of art. Also Johanna Drucker’s—in my Core class they’re going to read all of Johanna Drucker’s book on artist books. In my typography class I have them just look at the introduction, so that they can get a sense of what she thinks an artist book is, and then they have to select one of the chapters to work on. Then also Betty Bright’s book, her introduction or first chapter and some other sections. So it’s challenging to know what a good artist book is.





COLLINGS:

It is.





MARYATT:

There are lots of artist books being made out there that are fairly lightweight and not very well thought out, and so that’s my challenge to students, to say, “Here’s our challenges. We want to make something that isn’t just an assignment that you write for the professor. We need to make everybody connected.” There’s so many things that we need to do. Again the structure, not only the physical structure of the book, but the textual structure of the book has to be so well thought out, and sometimes students can’t get there. It’s a little bit difficult for them. But a lot of times, they do. So that’s why it’s fun to talk about the ones—



00:25:18

COLLINGS:

Are these quarters or semesters?





MARYATT:

A semester.





COLLINGS:

Oh, well, that’s good.





MARYATT:

Yeah. So we have fourteen weeks with one week off for break, so essentially we have thirteen weeks. So it’s really not enough to do something like this. This is always very ambitious, and I always try to calm it down because students do get excited about doing their part of the project, and they do want to, in a way, show off their skills and so on, and sometimes they write too much or they’re too ambitious with too many colors and so on. So I have to hold the flame and say, “Here’s what you can do,” or else look them straight in the eye, say, “Do you want to spend ten hours cutting this hole in this piece of paper? Because we’re going to do 100.” So sometimes they say—well, mostly they say, “Yes, I really want to do it,” and sometimes they say, “Yes, I really want to do it” and then they don’t do it. So occasionally we’ll have a blank page in the book where something was supposed to go there, and it didn’t go there.





COLLINGS:

Very Zen.





MARYATT:

Yeah. [laughter]

So, another category which I had just mentioned was something related to Scripps College or something historical. I think it’s so important for a lab like ours where we are using this historical equipment, for them to understand how it was used as an ordinary everyday practice.



00:26:44

COLLINGS:

Yeah, that’s a great point.





MARYATT:

And also we do things that maybe would be new to the book world. Because I’ve heard it said so many times, “Why would you ever want to put another book out there in the world? Why would you? It’s got to be good enough because everybody can make books, but what’s your contribution here, a new point of view or something?”





COLLINGS:

That’s a very heavy weight to bear.





MARYATT:

Yeah. It is for these poor little students. I ask a lot of them, but just seems like, why not? This is a college class.





COLLINGS:

That’s the way to answer, isn’t it? [laughs]





MARYATT:

These are smart kids going to these five colleges. They should be challenged. I don’t want to make it miserable for them, and for some it is miserable because they maybe lose interest. But for many of them, especially years later, they probably think back and they come back.

Anyway, so to get to the historical significance. So the first one that we did I think that was pretty interesting was called L.A. Women Letterpress Printers.





COLLINGS:

That sounded fascinating.



00:28:3600:29:39

MARYATT:

Yeah. I just thought—well, originally, it’s so funny how these books come into being. So what I wanted to do was something like I had done with Andy Hoyem. Not Andy Hoyem. Andy Horn up at UCLA. When I took his class, we took printer’s marks and wrote about them. So I thought, oh, well, let’s do women printer’s marks because we’re at a women’s college, so that would be kind of interesting, and so let’s start with Claire Van Vliet, and I found out that Claire Van Vliet didn’t have a printer’s mark. So I thought, “Hmm, hmm. Well, my friends do here in L.A.” So we had by that time—in 1980, we started Women of Letters, we called ourselves.

So I knew all of my friends had pressmarks, so I thought, well, there’s a start. If we can’t have Claire in the book and all of my other women friends around the country and in the world, at least the students could call all of these women and interview them in L.A.—are in L.A. So we had about ten in our group. So the students telephoned everybody and did telephone interviews. Nobody had cars, and so nobody could go out and visit them, which would have been ideal, and they did interviews.

Then slowly, people started hearing about our book and would call me, or else somebody would mention, “Oh, did you do so-and-so?” So we ended up with seventeen. So that was a really good book to have as a record of what was happening in that year, which was probably 1991, in Los Angeles. These were the women who were doing letterpress and doing pretty significant new kinds of letterpress. So that was an excellent book.

Then we had the fiftieth anniversary for our founding of our press. So I had read the letters between Dorothy Drake and Frederic Goudy about how she first met him in 1938 or ’37 at a lecture in Pasadena, and how she slowly invited him to Scripps and wanted the students to meet him, and eventually she was the one who was the architect of developing the Scripps College Press. She was our librarian.

So at the fiftieth birthday party, I asked Judy Harvey Sahak to read those letters and come up with a talk, and I was going to talk about the previous work before my time and up to my time. So she gave this great talk. So when we were going to go through the letters and look at the imagery and the letters themselves and produce a book about those letters, I just thought Judy had given such a great talk, we turned around and said to her, “Judy, we’d love to print your book.” Now, this was a slide talk, so she had to suddenly revise it and quickly for us because we’re ready now to typeset. So she just turned right around, revised it so that she had the words there, and we just started typesetting. So that was really a fabulous account of the beginnings of the Press from looking at the letters from primary sources and pulling out imagery that we had in the archives.





COLLINGS:

But you weren’t able to print it in Scripps Old Style because that came later, right?





MARYATT:

No.





COLLINGS:

You did?





MARYATT:

Scripps College Old Style came in 1941. That was Dorothy Drake’s handling, so, yes, we typeset it—





COLLINGS:

Oh, you did. Oh, you type—



00:31:28

MARYATT:

—in Scripps College Old Style.





COLLINGS:

I’m sorry. I was thinking about the digitization of it.





MARYATT:

That’s right.





COLLINGS:

So you did set it in—





MARYATT:

We did set it in Scripps College Old Style.





COLLINGS:

Oh, that’s wonderful.





MARYATT:

It was wonderful. By that time, I had had some 14-point cast, and so that’s what we were able to use, and I had just gotten some italic cast, which had never been cast at all in any size. So that was our breakthrough book—





COLLINGS:

Yes, I remember this now.



00:32:53

MARYATT:

—showing the italic, using the italic. But we were in the middle, in fact, of digitizing the type at that time, and so for a book I was doing for a client, I did that as our beta test of how the fit was, which was okay with my client, which was good. So we were in the middle of digitizing, so we didn’t even have it ready yet. So Sumner Stone was digitizing it during that year.

So that was a really important book for us to finalize what had been kind of talked about or at least was in the archives. It was clearly in the archives that Dorothy Drake was the one who started the Press and got the class of ’41 to put their class gift towards making the Press happen and putting some money towards hiring Frederic Goudy to design the type for us in 1941. Then in 1947, he died, but just before that, a couple of years before, he was asked to design the italic. So, luckily, he had done by 1947.





COLLINGS:

That’s a fascinating history.



00:34:24

MARYATT:

Yeah, it’s a great history. So another one—I could go on for forever. I’ll just maybe mention one more in terms of imagery, and that’s—history, I should say, is that it’s my history. So I went to Scripps and I had discovered that a Scripps student had written a brochure to give out to visitors to campus about all the trees on campus. So all of our significant trees on campus have a little plaque next to them telling you what kind of tree it is. So she had a tree tour. So I thought this would be great for the students to do a creative view of these trees, instead of whether or not it was deciduous and the nuts and bolts of the tree. So that’s what that particular book ended up being. We called it Deep Rooted, and it was all about the trees on campus. So, oh, my gosh, there’s so many other ones that are so significant.

But anyway, I’ll go on to bookness. So bookness is pretty far-reaching, but it’s kind of at the heart of what an artist book is. Is it a sculpture? Is it a painting? Is it a book? So what’s bookness? So we always talk about that every semester, what are the usual elements of books. We start with the most obvious ones and then try to pick away at it to see if we’re going to make a book that doesn’t necessarily look physically like a book, does it still have a lot of bookness in it, therefore we can designate it as a book.

So we’ve done a number of those kinds of books where we focus on a particular attribute of bookness as its main focus. So, for example, Mani-Fold Tales was one where I wanted the students to see how books, generally speaking, have to fold down to something that’s portable. It doesn’t matter if it’s big, but at least normally you fold pages. So I gave them a million folding exercises. We did some origami until they finally had to fold from a—everybody had the same size piece of paper and had to fold their own particular folding structure, so that when you unfolded it, the unfolding and revealing and concealing was part of the message. So that was Mani-Fold Tales.

Oh, let’s see. On the Impact of Expectations was a book where, again, we didn’t do it as a codex. The students wanted to do a book that looked like a CD case, that when you opened it up, you wouldn’t find CDs, you would actually find file folders, and in the file folders you would find a little structure which you would open up. So that was that particular book on—we were trying to do a non-bookish structure that was non-sequential, because non-sequential is the hardest thing to come up with that’s something other than just random. Well, we never did quite get non-sequential because I didn’t really—I mean, why do randomness? You can always do that. Do something that has a little bit more structure would be maybe more important for the students to learn about.

Then on Square Squared, for example, we concentrated on twenty-first-century artist books. How have the last five years—because I think we did it in 2003 or ’04 or ’05 [Fall 2003]—how the last two or three years, how those artist books might be different from the ones from the last thirty or forty years, and what are those attributes, and let’s—



00:36:34

COLLINGS:

What did you come up with there?





MARYATT:

We started out with the idea of square, that squareness is proportionally large and small, but also square is a great graphic element, and also it represents being inside the box and outside the box at the same time. So that way we could be more inventive. We could stay inside the box. I always like to do, as we do these books, to show them how things are done traditionally. “This is the usual way of doing it. What might you do, if you choose to do so, where you experiment a little bit of it?” Because they’re beginners, they have to know how it’s normally done, and we try to build that into the book as well as some experimentation and sometimes a lot of experimentation.

So that was the beginning of—so the title had a picture of a square with a “2” above it, so it was Square Squared, like we’re just like, you know—then we went to the edge because we were edgy. So we tried to build on these kinds of things, that the imagery was to enhance the text, and the text was to enhance the imagery. So I was hoping that they’d go for more abstraction than more representational things, and really only one student managed the pure abstraction, and so I thought that was maybe the best one out of that section, that you really didn’t know how to interpret this image until you read the text, which I thought was very twenty-first-century.



00:38:16

COLLINGS:

Well, it sounds like that program is conducting basic research on book arts.





MARYATT:

Yeah. Right.





COLLINGS:

I mean, it’s you have people, practitioners making books out in the world, and then here is this almost like laboratory setting where you’re conducting basic research—





MARYATT:

That’s right.





COLLINGS:

—to sort of determine what really are the book arts.





MARYATT:

Yes. And also part of that that’s so important is that they have to see books that other people have made, because we’re always inventing the wheel, and so if the wheel’s already been invented, can we do it in a new way? That’s really, really hard to be innovative in book structure, in how you say something.





COLLINGS:

Right, because you don’t want to just be doing it for the sake of it.



00:40:18

MARYATT:

That’s right. So they have to spend some time in our Denison Library with our fabulous collection looking at the history of our collection, cuneiform tablets and scrolls and Baskerville and all kinds of things and then what’s happening today. So that’s a real important part of the class.

Then the last category that is kind of a collector, when I couldn’t figure out where do these books fit, and I just called it psychological. So one of them was, for example, Speaking in Tongues. So I like languages a lot, and students come to me who don’t speak English very well sometimes, and so I ask them to write a text about a secret in a language that they knew very well; didn’t have to be English. Then after they did that, then they had to translate that into English or translate it into a language they wanted to see it in. So if they wrote it in English, they could translate it into Russian. Well, if they didn’t know Russian, they had to go get someone to translate it for us. Then we had to figure out if we could do Russian characters in the book, because at that time we weren’t into digital very much.

So anyway, so that was pretty fun because these built-in secrets make it kind of fun to try to figure out what the secret is. I said, “You don’t have to tell me what the secret is, but you embed the secret in there.” Sometimes they told me later, after we had our publication party, that the translation was a new secret. So he kept that secret from me. So we had six or eight languages in the book, and then I had to send them out to get Hebrew and whatever all those languages were. So I really—that that’s, again—





COLLINGS:

That sounds like fun.



00:42:1600:43:39

MARYATT:

—part of wordplay. These things are connected. I was thinking of another book where we did that too. I don’t remember which one that was now that I lost my track. But I really like to see foreign languages in our book because, again, that’s the world, and that’s our class too. So when we can see the physicality of something where the letters are different—oh, I know. I’m thinking of KØTØBÅ NØ PÅRTY. KØTØBÅ NØ PÅRTY was another one, which I wouldn’t say was psychological, but we really explored language. So that, I suppose, could have been, in a way, beyond wordplay, but really the nature of language. So going back to having seen a book at the Getty Museum by Iliazd that was called Poèsie de Mots Inconnus, the Poetry of Unknown Words, and it was written in 1948, but it was referring to poems that had been done when Ilia Zdanevich had been in Russia before he came to Paris in 1921. So he was referring to Zaum poetry, which is sound poetry. So it was the time of the Futurists and all the experimentation with language, and I wanted the students to see that this experimentation has been going on for a very long time.

So I had the students look—I took them to the Getty and they looked at that Poèsie. I had a chance to take a photograph of every page in that book and print out the whole book for the students. They had to try to read these things aloud, even though a lot of it was in Russian and French and they didn’t know what it said, they just had to read it aloud to hear the sound poetry, and then they had to make up their own sound poetry.

So the point with the language is that now they could put in accents from any other language into their poetry willy-nilly, wherever they wanted to. So that was the fun part. So I got a whole lot of Gill Sans because that’s what Iliazd always liked to use, and ordered just hundreds of accents. So they could pull out the accent where they would just put it in the word, consistently within their own text. So that was really, really fun, and so that was KØTØBÅ NØ PÅRTY.

Then we did the structure exactly the same as Iliazd’s structure with these folded pages. It wasn’t a codex. They were French-fold, basically, structures that were put in little fascicles, and then he wrapped it in vellum, and we made a vellum-like thing out of Tyvek that was reinforced.

So anyway, so there are lots more psychological ones, for example, Flight Patterns, where I wanted them to consider the risks of flight and how they could make a lightweight book as if it were flying and have things flying in or out of the book.

So that’s sort of a quick overview of—just the way that I don’t know what we’re going to do from one semester to the next sometimes. Sometimes I know it the semester before. Like with the autos, I knew last semester that that’s what we were going to do because something just popped up. But I’m reading the newspaper or I’m watching a program or whatever, and something comes up, and I just think, oh, that would be a good subject for our book, for the students to explore.





COLLINGS:

How many semesters do you have left?





MARYATT:

In my life at Scripps?





COLLINGS:

Yes. Before, you said you were planning to retire.





MARYATT:

Two. Two more books.





COLLINGS:

It sounds like it will be hard to walk away from this. It’s so vibrant.



00:45:36

MARYATT:

Well, I’m going to make my books. And I agree with you that that part of it, thinking up something that I can make a student salivate to want to do, that part is going to be really hard, and it really is hard for me to make my own books. First of all, the time factor is my big excuse, that I don’t have enough time because I’m always working on this so much, and I really do not have that much time. But I’ve spent an awful lot of time with organizations, and I’ve made a lot of one-of-a-kind books and a lot of hours put in learning the techniques, how to be a bookbinder, how to be a letterpress printer, how to make imagery, what are new ways of making imagery, how do you integrate imagery with text, and all of those kinds of things. So I study a lot. I’m always learning. I’m always taking workshops, getting grants to go here and there.

But, you know, it’s time for me really to see what I want to do, and so most of the books that I’ve made in my own personal practice, if they weren’t about learning a technique, they were mostly about the structure of the book. Most of my one-of-a-kind books that I’ve made are to try to see, well, I wonder what would happen if I do this? And it’s usually this thing that I want to do is extreme. Like, what would happen if I had a book that’s two feet tall with a thousand pages? Will it still stand up like Gary Frost talks about the way the book flexes with medieval wooden-boarded structures? Will the spine hold together if I push it past its reasonable limits for physics, for example?





COLLINGS:

Well, here we go back sort of to the notion of this sort of basic research laboratory—





MARYATT:

Right. Yeah, that’s exactly right.





COLLINGS:

—investigating bookness.





MARYATT:

Yeah. That is. It’s what I’m really interested in, is how the book works and how it functions. I’ve never felt that I was a literary person, that it’s easy for me to write my ideas out. I did do my own manifesto, as a matter of fact, for one of our books. One of our books was called Livre des Livres. We did a French-oriented book, and in that book I asked the students to find a poem that they really connected with that was about art and that they could get permission to print and that they would have a reaction to that poem. They’d write their own poem.



00:47:26

COLLINGS:

So this was the ekphrastic book that you—





MARYATT:

This was not the ekphrastic book. This was Livre des Livres, so another book where it was, in fact, in reaction to a work of art, but the work of art wasn’t physically a painting; it was a poem. So I chose Rena Rosenwasser’s poem, which I had read—I had found maybe in 1978 or ‘79. I don’t know where I read it. But anyway, it was about a woman teaching art, and I just thought it was so beautiful, and I felt like that’s what I was doing, that I was making art through my students, and she put it in a very beautiful poetic way. So that was the genesis of why I thought that the students could connect with some poetic statement about art, that that’s how they could connect with making their own statement.

So that was my manifesto, in a sense, that I put her poem, and then next to hers or interlineally, I think, I put my poem, which was—she’s a poet and I’m not, but I just felt like I needed to say something in reaction to that, that it was my manifesto, and so that’s in Livre des Livres.



00:48:46

COLLINGS:

Well, as you describe it, I sort of see you as the principal investigator of the effort.



00:51:1600:53:1900:54:40

MARYATT:

Yeah. And the book that I just did, Figure of Speech, was, again, not from a literary standpoint, but really a physical standpoint. It started with a brush that I made, and that was kind of interesting to me that I didn’t know how—you never know when you start a book how it’s going to physically manifest itself because there are so many structures that you could choose from, at least nowadays when you get good enough to be able to do different kinds of structures. The default is like an accordion book or a codex or something like that. But anyway, this book ended up being an accordion-fold book just because I wanted to be able to stretch it out. But it was interesting that I didn’t start with any words at all, and I did the whole book before I came up with any words that seemed to be the right words for that.

For my book that was the two-feet-tall book, there were no words in that. I just painted in that. The structure itself would elicit words, and I called that structure Duchampian Gap, and that was because of the way Duchamp talked about the viewer and the maker interaction, that there was a gap between them until the viewer saw the work of art and started interpreting for himself what that meant.

So, you know, it’s hard to know when you’re making a work of art that’s in book form. That’s really kind of fundamentally a hard thing for most people who make books to do because it looks like a book. It works like a book. It’s a book. How is it art? So that’s always a struggle to figure out what is your end goal. What do you want people to walk away from after they view your work of art, your effort? What do they think about? What questions are they asking? Are you answering any of them? Do you want to answer any of them? So most of the time when I start something, I don’t know where it’s going to go, and sometimes when I start, I do know where it’s going to go, and sometimes that works out just fine.

So I did a series of books where I wanted to leave the books in the physical structures that I used to make them. So a book press is sometimes used in bookmaking. I left the book in the book press under pressure. The whole theme of that book was that I was under a lot of pressure, and I made a list on the spine of that book, all the things that I had to do that month. I was under a lot of pressure. So I built that book, stuck it in the book press, and put that in a show, right? That was still [unclear].

Another book was in a lying press, l-y-i-n-g, and it’s used to clamp the book in order to work on the edges of the book. So I made a book that was a flip book where the binding was the lying press, and you would take the book that was in folded sheets of paper, but you’d stick the unfolded ends into the clamp and clamp it shut, and then you could flip through it.

Another one was in a sewing frame, and I sewed a pretty large book, as big as my sewing frame could handle, maybe fifteen, sixteen inches tall, by, I don’t know, fourteen inches wide or so, big thick book, and I sewed it on gold cord and black gauze, and I thought of it, like, as an evening-dress book, where it was about—I didn’t know what it was about until I started doing it, but I wanted the strength of the gold and the fragility of the black gauze, and I just thought it was my women’s book, that it was about needing both, that you need that fragility and sensitivity and you need the strength, and you can’t live without both of them, and that book wouldn’t be able to stay in that sewing frame without that.

But also I built in, as I was sewing, these little tiny trouble dolls that were Guatemalan trouble dolls that my son [Jason] had, that he had a little tiny box that I’d given him once. I used those little dolls to be being strangled and hanging out from the edge of the spine as if those are the troubles you have in the world that you have to overcome. So that’s what that book was about. But again, I didn’t know what it was going to be about until I folded the paper, thought, well, what shall I stitch it to? I’m looking through my pretty things in my cases.

So it’s kind of interesting that they end up being about something when I didn’t want to write anything, and I just wanted to see what would happen and let it dictate to me. I really do believe that books, once you start them, that they start dictating back to you what they want to be. I tell the students that, that when we’re making a book and we’re struggling, it may be that we made a bad decision somewhere. Maybe it’s too big or too small or the structure isn’t working very well. It’s really interesting that I really think that the book project takes over, tells you.

The other thing that I tell the students, that I’ve said to everybody, that a book takes as long as you have to give it. So if you know that you have three hours to make this book, you’re going to make that book in three hours. If you give it three weeks, you’re done. You don’t have any more time. You’ve got to finish it. And we have fourteen weeks at Scripps. We don’t have any more time. You guys have got to finish it. It’s very hard for the students to finish the book at the end of the semester when they have four other classes and final exams, and the binding, there’s glue or maybe there’s not glue. It’s very hard for them.





COLLINGS:

Well, I kind of like the idea of sort of having to retrace and sort of try to figure out where the mistake was, because it suggests to me a long math problem. If you have this background in math that you have to sort of go back through and try to figure out that in step seven there was a decimal point in the wrong place, and it’s thrown everything off.





MARYATT:

Yeah. Well, I have to say that we haven’t gone back to identify, well, was this a bad decision, because we don’t have time.





COLLINGS:

Because you don’t have time, sure.





MARYATT:

We just have to go forward.





COLLINGS:

Yeah, I understand.





MARYATT:

But I have observed that sometimes we have a book that just fights us, and that’s actually part of the fun of the discovery process, too, is that there is so much to learn. It’s such a complex project.



00:56:10

COLLINGS:

It is. It is. It encompasses everything.





MARYATT:

And that’s why people do it, that there is that potential for saying something in many different levels and points of view. So that’s what makes it exciting. People ask me all the time, “How did you get from math to book arts?” To me, it’s just a continuum. You know, math is complex. Math has lots of questions. It appears that you have lots of answers in math just like in book arts. Well, here’s the answer. We’re going to make it a codex or we’re going to make it an accordion book. As Chief Seattle says, “All things are connected.” It’s all connected.





COLLINGS:

Well, would you like to talk about Figure of Speech?





MARYATT:

Sure. It’s pretty amazing that this is my only limited-edition book that I’ve ever made for me, except for one other. One other book was a book I did in graduate school, and I did three copies because I thought, “I need to make an edition of this of this because I think it’s a good idea.” That was the book where I had taken the offcuts from the end of a book that I was doing commercially for someone, and I picked it up and it flopped around, and I thought, “Oh, this has bookness.”

So I made three of those, but I never sell them. I don’t sell any of my work, really, because it’s really hard to know what price to put on it. I don’t want to have to go sell something. And so it was really hard for me to envision this project, Figure of Speech, knowing that that was going to be my point. I was going to make my edition for sale.



00:57:55

COLLINGS:

Interesting.



00:59:58

MARYATT:

Do I really want to do this? I don’t want to do this. But, you know, I certainly have a reputation through Scripps College Press now, so maybe I could sell them, and so that’s what I’m going to do. The point is never to really make the money, but to at least cover all the costs of the zillions of boards I used and the paper and this and that. So that was my goal, was I have this summer and I’m going to spend this summer doing this project. I was a little bit foiled because I had to help a friend who was in need, and I did that, so I was a little bit late in starting it.

But I had these brushes that I’d made three years ago, and I just wanted to see what they would do, and I made them in a class at Scripps College where the [Williamson] Gallery had hired this wonderful fellow to teach us how to make brushes. So he showed us how to make basic brushes and then brushes that had funky things going on with them, so where you’d have two different kinds of bristles, one sticking out further, so that there would be two different kinds of brushmaking at once in one brush.

So I made seven brushes. Some of them were fairly typical, but some were really, really long hairs. One was a feather. They’re all with bamboo handles, and so one had little pieces of bamboo sticking out, so it could be its own little stand. Then I made this big brush with a big huge handle that was about, oh, maybe two inches in diameter with two different bristles, and did a little bit of painting in that workshop, but then I didn’t have time to really explore it anymore, and I’ve been in love with sumi ink forever because that’s what Asian ink is, and we used in Western calligraphy a lot, too, and for painting.

So I knew that I wanted to do something with these brushes, but I didn’t really know what. But also I had studied Japanese calligraphy with Yoko Nishina in Kyoto for a couple of months a few years ago, and I have studied calligraphy pretty much all my adult life, so I knew probably it was going to have something to do with the movement that you make when you’re trying to do letterforms. So I also have always admired, in Asian calligraphy, the inherent vigor of the strokes, which we try to do in Western calligraphy also, but because we can’t read what Asian calligraphy says, those of us that haven’t studied it hard enough, then all we can do is appreciate—





COLLINGS:

The form.



01:01:2901:03:21

MARYATT:

—the form. So it was a combination of those things, and I thought, “Well, let’s just see what these guys do.” When I do my own calligraphy, I mostly don’t use a brush. I use an edged tool, and sometimes like a huge edged tool that’s three feet across. But anyway, so I just wanted to see what these brushes would do for me, and I didn’t know what size. I just knew that if I was going to use this big brush, I needed some space. So I have a whole lot of paper. I’m kind of a hoarder. I have been collecting paper over the years to use for my projects, and then my projects don’t happen, and then so now I have some more paper.

So I had a whole lot of Rives BFK, which I’ve used a lot of in both Scripps College Press books and many of my other one-of-a-kind books. So I just pulled out some sheets. Actually, I started out with some other paper just to see what would happen, and I wanted these kinds of—you know, what does this brush do with these two different bristles in here that would or would not allow me to do letterforms? Do I even want to do letterforms?

Well, it turns out that I just wanted the brush to, again, sort of a lot like the book, dictate to me what it would do, and I wanted to be both in control and out of control at the same time. So I just started making marks, and the mark that I’d made in the workshop I kind of liked. It had kind of Japanesey feel. There was one part that was real elongated, that was that longer brush that went out of my control and did a splotch over there.

So I pulled that out to start, and I also looked at artists that I’d admired for practically all my life, also, like Jasper Johns and Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline, who make these big black marks. I brought out some Asian calligraphy that I had. I have Asian calligraphy on my walls, and I have always liked these sort of big gestural marks, too, as well as the small handwriting calligraphy. So I just kind of looked at all of that stuff and said, “Okay, here’s the Kitty mark.” [laughs] And so I started doing some things, ten, fifteen, twenty paintings until I finally got something and went, “Oh, that’s what I wanted.” I didn’t want it to look like Western calligraphy or Eastern calligraphy. I wanted it to have energy.

So I did one, and I put that one out, and I thought, “Okay, can I replicate that?” So it’s just like in Western calligraphy. You draw a beautiful capital E. Can you do another beautiful capital E that has that energy and grace and the thick/thin contrast and all of that that I wanted? So, yes and no.

So I just kept on painting, and I spread them out, because they had to dry anyway, and pulled out the ones that weren’t working, and, of course, the first one was the one that was the one. That’s the one I didn’t put in any of the books because it was the one. It was the master. I got it. I liked that one the best. I could never get that again as kind of almost perfect for me, but they were good, and I just kept on trying to make as good a one, you know. Never could get it as good. So it’s kind of interesting that I even wanted to put out these books with something that wasn’t as perfect, but they were still good.

So that became the first [completed] page in my book, and I thought, okay, this paper’s just going to be folded it in half. I don’t really want to fold this thing in half, but that’s what’s going to happen, and therefore my book is going to have pages that are fifteen-by-twenty-two because that’s half of a twenty-two-by-thirty Rives BFK piece of paper. So that was the start.

So now what am I going to do now? So I used my big brush. Now I’m going to buy—I loved the brushes in Japan. Oh, my gosh, are they expensive. They are so expensive. So I had bought some, and this baby horsehair brush, I just had to see now what is it going to do, and I’m not going to try—I studied Japanese calligraphy, and I could have copied some and tried to do it, but I knew I wouldn’t be as good as anybody who had studied Japanese calligraphy for ten years.





COLLINGS:

Of course.





MARYATT:

So I didn’t want to copy Japanese, but I wanted to use the Japanese brush. So I did the same thing. What is this brush doing that’s different from the other one that makes the movement on the page in a pleasing way and in a graphically important way, that there are diagonals, that the space that’s white is as important or maybe more important than the black and all of the graphic design elements that you study when you study graphic design. So I got another one, and so I just kept on doing that, developing, changing brushes, trying to figure out what is it that I’m doing. And what sort of evolved was the fact that I was making language that was not readable by anybody. It was my language. It was my visual language.





COLLINGS:

It’s a very exciting book.



01:07:1301:09:07

MARYATT:

So that was why when I described it to people, it’s pre-language. It’s the marks you make before you know what you have to say, but it says something, and it may be emotional. So I just kept on moving in that way through my brushes, through other tools that I made, changing color to my favorite walnut ink. Love that brown because you can get these gradations of brownness with that ink, and I’ve used that for many of my projects, and introducing some red because that’s so—one of the huge elements of all books made since practically the beginning of time is that red is the contrast color to black. So almost all early books, even in Japan, in everywhere, has red as an emphasis element. So I had to introduce some red.

Then once I had painted a million of these things, I thought, “Well, what am I saying?” And I finally came up with several different titles, but I ended up with Figure of Speech because I wanted to have that double meaning that this was speech. They were figures of speech. They were double meaning. Then the words started coming out. I’d look at the page and I’d think, “What would I say about that page?” So it was about these forces overtaking that were outside of my control, in a sense, the forces of the brush, the forces of letterform history, language history. All of these things would kind of tell me how I would move forward.

So some of the words I used were about forces, some of the words about control and in control and out of control. I don’t even remember my texts anymore. But I didn’t want the text to be—it was very interesting trying to figure out if I could put text on the page. So some pages I thought said everything and I didn’t want any text on those pages, and I did some pages where the forces overtook the page, where only a little white showed through, so I didn’t want to kind of print any text on that.

Then the choice of, once I found some words that I wanted to put, I just did them on the computer and stuck them on, and then now what typeface. Well, of course it has to be some beautiful calligraphic face that I own in my own collection that’s rare, and I had Lutetia, which is a Jan van Krimpen face, which is so gorgeous, and it’s kind of big. It’s not small. It just seemed like, “Well, this is a big book. It would be good to have big type in here,” and so that’s how it kind of all came together.

So it was going to be an accordion-fold book, and you have a choice with an accordion-fold book whether you’re going to stick together the two edges, and so it doesn’t pull out completely as an accordion-fold book, which is the easier path, or one where you make a little tab that you fold back and glue them together. I wanted to be able to stretch out the whole thing to be able to see what the book was as a totality. And so that I kept on changing around the position of these pages as I painted them, and then maybe between two I needed a different transition. So that’s how it developed into this kind of long thing. So I guess flat, it’s about thirty-five feet, and then standing up, it’s about twenty-five feet. You could also turn it around. I tried that up at UCLA when I took it up to Genie to see if she wanted it, and it didn’t work so well turned around. It really needs to be spread out. So, luckily, on the first exhibit that I put it in up at our Faculty Show at Scripps last year, I was able to put it up completely twenty-five feet.





COLLINGS:

Fabulous.





MARYATT:

So that was really great to be able to see it that way, and then, of course, we had rains in December, and it leaked onto my book.





COLLINGS:

Oh, no.





MARYATT:

Yeah. So that was really sad. Oh, no. On the colophon page, which has the most text. Anyway, that was very sad.

But anyway, so in terms of the binding was going to be real simple because I was just going to have a front and a back, but I wanted something that wasn’t your usual beautiful book cloth, and I didn’t want it to be faux leather. It seemed like it needed to be something kind of striking, and so I came up with something that I got from Winter America. They have sort of unusual vinyls and faux leathers, which aren’t so pretty, and some suedes and some interesting papers. So I’ve used them before, and so I have kind of a thing with squares in it. Then I just needed the red touches. After all that work, I felt like it’s got to have a clamshell box. So that’s basically stopped the project in its—





COLLINGS:

That sounds like a large box.



01:12:11

MARYATT:

It’s a large box and it takes a lot of time, and also I wanted to do some pochoir on the cover of the box, and I also wanted to do something on the cover of the book, and I wanted to do it as freeform as I was doing the insides of the book, so I did foil stamping, but with just driving a brass tool through foil that’s a pigment foil, freehand. I needed it to be freehand on the covers. So I’ve got all of the clamshell parts made and cut, but not glued together, and the book cloth isn’t on them, and the covers—I have two books completely made, but that’s all, and this was supposed to be all done by mid-December so I could send them out.

But then I had the CBAA annual meeting at Scripps in January. I was trying to finish 100 copies of my Scripps collaborative book with the students, and, I tell you, everything else. This is why I have really so infrequently even tried to make an edition, is that really I have my job, and my job is to be at Scripps and put on all kinds of activities. So I’m just getting back to finishing these books because I sold all the books in the first month.





COLLINGS:

Great.





MARYATT:

It’s just amazing to me, and I didn’t want to have to do it, but I did. “Okay, bite the bullet. You’ve got to write to people.” So I made a PDF and sent it to them, and people bought the book without seeing the book, except for Genie. Genie’s the only one who’s ever seen the book. So it’s amazing. So I’m not done, but I’m going to be done really soon because, otherwise, the fiscal year runs out and nobody will be able to pay me. So I’m at my edge of the cliff.





COLLINGS:

I see it in a standing Plexiglas box.





MARYATT:

You know, I have done some books at Scripps and my own books here in Plexiglas boxes, and I could have done that, but I guess I really didn’t even think of that. I just thought I’ve got to do a clamshell. I wanted the color. I wanted the red—





COLLINGS:

Oh, lovely.





MARYATT:

—and the black and the red. It’s pretty dramatic, black and red, in general. And I know I could have hired somebody to do them for $50 each or something, but I didn’t feel like it was appropriate.



01:13:52

COLLINGS:

You wanted to do it yourself.





MARYATT:

For our Arch book—I did want to do it myself. For our Arch book, we wanted a Plexiglas case, and we chose Plexi that looks like glass because it was about architecture, and it was our glass curtain wall, so it’s appropriate. Because I also know that Plexiglas scratches. So one of the books that we issued called Mutatis Mutandis, we pre-scratched the Plexiglas case in a pattern, so that we knew it was going to get even more scratched. But we pre-scratched it to say it’s okay to be scratched. So I just didn’t see it. If you have a clear one, of course, you could see the thing itself. Anyway, so that was my decision and that’s why everything kind of stopped, and I’m getting back to it. Next week I have spring break. In fact, I’m on spring break right now—





COLLINGS:

Oh, nice.





MARYATT:

—so I will hope to have them all finished by the end of next week, maybe. I’ve got a lot of work left. But all the paintings are done, all the books are glued together, all the covers are made, all the trays are made.





COLLINGS:

How exciting.





MARYATT:

So I’m close. It’s just it really is a lot of work, still. It’s also risky, you know, because it’s so easy to make a mistake. So as I’m foil stamping, if the tool isn’t quite hot enough, it won’t hold it all the way from—that’s twenty-two inches that you’re going to drag it. So I made extras of things. So, so far so good.



01:15:25

COLLINGS:

Very exciting.





MARYATT:

It is very exciting, and I was just incredibly gratified at all the people who wanted them, and I could still sell more if I—





COLLINGS:

Wanted to make more.





MARYATT:

No, I can’t make more. That’s the edition. But what’s exciting about it is that now I’ve established that I can sell them, and if I want to make another book, I’d probably go back to those people again. Next book would probably be more than fifteen copies because it will be smaller because I’ve done my big thing, and whatever I’m going to do is going to draw on the skills that I have developed over all these centuries. So there will be a lot of handwork because that’s what I like to do, and it makes the book so much more interesting if they’re a little bit different from each other, and I’m really into color. So there’s going to be something about a colorful new next book, but it probably—I don’t know that I’d even be able to start it before I retire. I just don’t know yet because it’s obvious that I really just—next year is our seventy-fifth anniversary.





COLLINGS:

Things are going to be busy.





MARYATT:

So I’ve got plenty, and I’m possibly putting on an exhibit at the Williamson Gallery, too, that I’ve had that slot for three years, and it’s not filled just because I haven’t been able to raise money for the three different things that I might do with it. So my book now, this week, comes first, and then I have to get back to figuring out what I’m going to do with that. So I really do have lots of interesting things. But I’ve pulled back lot from all of my organizations, and I really, really, really want to travel a lot with my husband. So I’ve got plenty to do for the rest of my life.



01:17:06

COLLINGS:

Oh, yes.





MARYATT:

But I may still make some more one-of-a-kind books again as I want to explore things, or I may feel like, “Well, maybe that one could be an edition.” But again, it’s just I just really don’t like the selling part of it, sending to somebody who you think might want to buy it and then they don’t. Well, I don’t want to go through that.





COLLINGS:

Of course they’re going to want to buy it.





MARYATT:

No, but some don’t.





COLLINGS:

These things are beautiful.





MARYATT:

Well, I had fifteen books to sell, so I sold them all, but I sent to a lot of people, and some didn’t buy it—





COLLINGS:

Oh, I see.



01:18:52

MARYATT:

—which is, of course, they couldn’t afford it or it wasn’t in their category. So that’s how you sell books. You find out what the category is, what’s their price level. But that’s not fun for me. I don’t really want to make money. I just want to express myself. So here I have all these one-of-a-kind books. Shall I sell those to somebody someday? Who are they going to go to? My dear son? I don’t know. Does he want my big—they’re big, some of them. Then I have a whole lot of experiments. And probably Scripps will get all my stuff, so they can have my experiments, but I don’t know if they want them. But anyway, you just have to do these things. But travel’s really high on my list, so I’ll squeeze the books in when I can, and they may be about traveling. So like this summer, I just got a grant to go to Paris to do some research, and so if you wanted to talk about the Transsibérien, I don’t know if we have time today, but that would be the next thing I would love to talk about because that’s a fascinating project I’ve been working on for a long time.





COLLINGS:

Okay. Well, would you like to talk about that today—





MARYATT:

Yeah, I don’t mind.





COLLINGS:

—or would you like to schedule another session? It’s up to you. I don’t know what your time commitments are today.





MARYATT:

I only have something at one-thirty, so I have time if you want to talk about it.





COLLINGS:

Okay. Well, then we looked a little bit—we looked at the—what was it that you showed me at Scripps? Was that an actual copy of the book?





MARYATT:

Yes.





COLLINGS:

One of the few in existence?





MARYATT:

That was in facsimile.





COLLINGS:

A facsimile, okay. So what is La Prose du Transsibérien? Published in 1913, a seminal artist book.



01:22:2601:23:43

MARYATT:

And that’s really why it’s important, is that it’s really before what is usually touted as the beginning of the artist books is 1960 when Ed Ruscha and Sol LeWitt and a number of other artists started working in book form through photography and other means. And all of the books that are on the history of artist books or about artist books, like Riva Castleman or many other books, will have the Transsibérien either as the cover or as a pullout from the inside or have it printed on several pages, because it’s striking, it’s beautiful, and it’s different from a codex.

So I saw it for the first time, and I’ve read about it in books many times, but I saw it for the first time up at the Getty Museum. When I found out that they had it, I thought, “Well, goodness. I’d better go see it.” So for my Women of Letters group, we meet in each other’s studios, but sometimes we go on a field trip. So I took them on a field trip because I wanted to share the viewing of this, so that Marcia Reed could accommodate several people and would have fun showing us. So I saw that, and I thought, “Man, what’s so striking about that is that it’s an edition, but it looks like each one is a completely brand-new, fresh painting. How did they do that?”

So when you find out that it’s pochoir, that it’s French stencil technique, it’s just mind-boggling to think how did they do all of those overlapping colors. It’s not like usual stencil, where you have a flat color inside a space. So I thought that would be interesting to figure that out. I had been introduced to pochoir in the eighties, doing it with the real pochoir brush, which is a big, huge, fat brush, which I didn’t own, but I learned how to do it in this workshop. So stenciling’s been done in every country since the beginning of mankind, but the French stenciling was a way to put many multiple colors on usually a collotype print or other kinds of printing, which at the time in the 1910s and twenties in Paris was an affordable technique that was more cost-effective to do an edition than it was to print fifteen or twenty colors with the usual processes. So hundreds of women, by the thirties and forties, were being employed to do pochoir.

So this was done in 1913, and I wondered, well, who did it? At first, in twenty-first-century thinking, as we book artists make our own books, I thought, “Oh, well, of course Sonia Delaunay had to have done that. Who could have done it for her?” Well, of course she didn’t do it. She hired somebody. But it’s taken me all these years to kind of figure that out.

Blaise Cendrars had—this was only his second poem. The previous poem was Les Pâques à New York that he’d written in New York. He’d come back to Paris and learned typesetting and typeset, if not all of it, at least part of it, with a printer friend of his and published it as his first published poem. So this was his second poem. He, meanwhile, had met Sonia and Robert Delaunay in beginning of 1913 and connected with them because this poem is about a prostitute who had traveled from Paris to Moscow, so it was about his experiences in Russia also, and Sonia Delaunay was Russian, so they connected.

At first, it would have been more common for the male artist to have collaborated with somebody, but he connected with Sonia, and so they started talking about working together to publish a book. And what fascinates me is how did it change from a codex, which would be the normal fallback position, to this accordion-fold book that’s folded over once and stuffed into a little container, so that you could never read the book as a normal book. It would end up being a poem painting, so it would naturally go up on the wall or you’d have to have a six-foot table to view it. So it’s really different from a book. There were lots of artist books—or let me put it as livres d’artiste—that were being produced in France at the time and other countries, but they were mostly conceived by a publisher who wanted to make money and would get together a famous artist and a wonderful text, and he or she, mostly he, would publish x number of copies and try to sell them. So it [the Transsibérien] was promulgated by the artists themselves. So this was an unusual thing where the two got together and said, “Hey, let’s make a book.”





COLLINGS:

I’m almost thinking of those very ornate room dividers as the possible model.



01:26:0801:28:0001:30:0901:32:17

MARYATT:

Yeah. Well, accordion books were certainly Asian. That was a typical model. Pochoir, in fact, derives from Asian stenciling. I found the smoking gun, I call it, anyway, a book in—oh, gosh, what was he in? 1847 or 1848, somewhere around there, a book was published in Paris of the Japanese stencils that were used for kimonos. So stenciling that was very intricate like that was in Paris, and they used stenciling a lot for wallpaper patterns, so it was in the ether already, and to colorize prints when they had multiple colors, and a lot of fashion prints were being done in the 1910s. Fashion magazines were being colored by pochoir technique. So it was around there.

So Robert Delaunay and Sonia Delaunay, in 1912, were showing, they were painting, and, of course, this was just on the cusp of the first abstract paintings in 1913. So Robert Delaunay had a show in Germany at Der Sturm Gallery, and they were friends of Apollinaire. All things are connected. It’s absolutely amazing. So Apollinaire had written a little poem to go with this catalogue for the show, and one of the pages in this catalogue, the colors were chosen by Sonia Delaunay, and it was published by André Marty, who was a pochoir publisher. So it’s taken me all these years to dig in to find out all of these things.

Then another author told me that Atelier Richard was the one that was the pochoir company who did the pochoir for this piece, but I only learned that last year. I’ve been looking and looking and looking. I thought maybe it was André Marty because now she already had an established contact, and so I don’t know why she didn’t choose him because he was the leading pochoir company in Paris.

And also what was interesting about this book being so very non-booklike was that—I lost my train of thought. Pochoir. I can’t remember what I was going to say about that one.

But anyway, so I’ll go back to why I thought it was important to me—oh, I know. So they were going to publish the typical range of an edition, which would be 150 copies, but they never got it done. They got maybe sixty copies done. So that has always stuck in me, why didn’t they finish? Well, probably it’s the pochoir. I always assumed it’s probably the pochoir. Because if they printed the book, usually when you’re printing, if you have several different pages, you establish the number at the beginning, and you wouldn’t stop at some number just because you don’t have enough time, you have to get on to the next page. You usually print the whole set of those pages. And this book was printed in four parts, but each part was in four colors. So that’s sixteen press runs just for the type. So my assumption, although I have no evidence, would be that they printed the whole thing, all 150 copies, but I’ve never found any that haven’t been colorized with the pochoir, but there is at least one copy [with pochoir] that was never folded, glued together and folded.

So Blaise was in charge of the type, and she was in charge of the image. So I guess this is what I really—the point I wanted to make was how did they come up with this structure. So I don’t know, and I don’t know if anybody knows, and I don’t know if anybody could know. But here are some clues. One clue is that in 1912—she did a lot of paintings, as did Delaunay. They did big paintings. And she did a very long painting called Bal Bullier, which was about dancing. They would go dancing with their friends every Thursday night, and they had a salon. They were very connected to the painters of Paris and all over the place and in Germany and Russia and so on, and they were connected to the literary crowd through Apollinaire, and that’s how they met Cendrars, how Cendrars met the Delaunays.

Anyway, so why didn’t they do a book? If you would go to a printer, you would set the lines of type. How? So Cendrars had to make this decision about how he wanted his poetry to look, so the point being that he did have his fingers on the type with Les Pâques. Did he have his fingers on the type for this book? Well, he did use a printer. In another source I had, they said it was Crété, I think was the name of the printer. So someone else probably typeset it, but to his specifications. What were his specifications? So with Les Pâques, he handwrote that in New York, and I believe I tried to get a copy of his handwritten Transsibérien because I wanted to see what that looked like, whether or not the stanzas ended up the same as the original handwritten one. I haven’t found the smoking gun on that one yet, but I’m going to find it because I believe it exists.

So anyway, so his lines of type are some measure. Let’s say, we’ll call it 45 picas. Sometimes there’s a series of one-word things, and some were shorter, some were longer. They move across the page, but they only move about seven inches wide. They don’t move any wider than that. That could easily have been done on normal book pages. So, of course, preceding them was the Mallarmé, which was the big change in presenting text poetry on a page in 1890s—oh, what was that year, 1895 [1897]? So that was right there, and Cendrars may have known about those efforts to make poetry change the space of the page, the way you read poetry. But he didn’t do as many experiments as Mallarmé at least had proposed to do.

So it was fairly straightforward, and I would like to know whether or not the proofs that he got—because when you get proofs, you put the type on galleys, and the galleys could be long. So it’s possible that when you shove, let’s say, forty-five lines onto a galley and then the next forty-five lines onto the next galley and the next forty-five lines, and you pull the galley proofs, the galley proofs might have been on long paper, in which case, he could easily have said, “Oh.”

So there are the two things: that Sonia Delaunay had painted Le Bal Bullier as this very long narrow piece, and if you just imagine her painting for this book being turned 90 degrees, and he could have gotten the galleys on long sheets of paper in the old-fashioned way, and they could have come together in that way and said, “Oh, here it is,” but no one has ever said anything like that.

So the Getty has actually asked me to write this article because I gave a presentation to the CBAA group at Scripps on this subject and asked Eric Haskell to talk about the actual poetry and the painting, and Marcia Reed, in fact, to talk about the ramifications of this book and the influence. So after Marcia saw my talk, she said, “That’s a unique point of view from the practitioner.”



01:33:50

COLLINGS:

Exactly.



01:36:2601:38:17

MARYATT:

So what I had wanted to do and have been working on for some time now, about three years, is to actually reproduce the pochoir and find out how many stencils it took for each panel. Just like I analyzed the type, sixteen press runs for the type, for the first panel, how many stencils did it take? Well, right now I have seventeen [for the first of four panels] (added by interviewee). How many colors are there? What are the colors? I’ve done paint swatches. I’ve taken my Pantone. I’ve seen the Getty. I’ve gone to Rutgers. I’ve gone to Yale. I have the Yale facsimile, so I have the colors pretty well pinned down, trying to see if the colors are very consistent throughout the potentially sixty copies that are left, and I am trying to make a timing system to see how long it would take for one person to produce one. That’s not a very fair test, because as soon as you finish one stencil, you don’t really want to put down that stencil and go to another color and do another stencil. You want to stencil all 150 of them. So a better test would be for me to make at least five copies just to do a time test. Then I did a test at Scripps. I invited Julie Mellby out, who is the Curator of Graphic arts at Princeton, and that’s where the pochoir collection is there, and I went to visit it and found, in fact, a Saudé metal stencil, which is yet another story. This goes on and on. Anyway, so I invited her out to give a lecture on the history of pochoir, and she had never done pochoir, so I thought, “Well, let’s do a workshop.” We had a Kandinsky painting up on our calendar, and my husband said, “Oh, that looks like pochoir.” Of course, it was a painting, but he knew what I was involved in.

I said, “That would be a perfect project for a workshop.” We will pretend that we are a pochoir atelier. Everybody that takes the workshop will be a color, will cut their own stencil, and we’ll stencil an edition for everybody else in the workshop, and then we’ll do a time test. We’ll see how long it took for us to do this eight-and-half by, maybe, seven-by-nine pochoir with twelve colors with twelve people, or thirteen colors with thirteen people and so on, and then extrapolate that and see how long one person working on this project would take to do it, because what is looming in the future is the war, 1914 war, and, of course, Sonia Delaunay and her husband had gone off to Spain just before the war started.

So why did the project stop? How far did they get? Was it because of the war? Was it because they ran out of money? Was it because they didn’t have enough people doing the pochoir? So did Atelier Richard have one—was he the only one doing it? If he had two? So my first test was that it would take a person a year to do 150 copies with the fifty-four stencils with the seventeen different colors. But I have no idea if that’s a very good estimate at all. But if one person could do it, that would be the entire work of a shop for a year. Could they have afforded to pay that shop for a year’s worth of commercial work? If two people were working in the shop—now it’s six months—could they have afforded to hire that shop to have two people dedicated for six months on that project? If they had three people, now it’s shrunk to four months and so on.

When would they actually have hired the shop? Well, first Sonia Delaunay had to do the painting. So she painted her painting, which I saw. It’s at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, but I saw it at this fabulous show in New York called Imaging Abstraction—Image—oh, what’s the title of it? I’ll think of the title in a second [Inventing Abstraction]. But anyway, so it was a whole show about the beginnings of abstraction in painting, and Sonia Delaunay was upfront and center. So they had her painting, they had the maquette for the first [effort]—the type is here and the first painting effort is here, and then they had an edition from Museum of Modern Art in New York.

So the two [items shown] went back to Paris, so I’ve got to go back to Paris. I’ve seen them already, but I’ve got to go to Paris and see some more of it, and I need to look through the archives there. There’s a person at the Bibliothèque Nationale who’s been doing a census. I started doing a census about a year ago about where are these things that I want to go see each one if I can, at least in the States, and then compare the colors, see if they all look pretty much the same. So far, pretty much the same. Did the colors change from maquette to the edition? Yes, they did a little bit. They went from less pastel to more vibrant.

A woman there—because they did it—it’s so complicated. They intended to do it in three substrates. They did it on vellum, on Japon, and Simile Japon, which is like a faux Japanese paper. Not a Japanese paper; it was sold by a Japanese firm. So anyway, so not only did they have sixteen press runs, they had three different substrates. So did they stop on any one of those for their sixty copies? So if I knew that there were some vellum copies out there and some Japon copies out there, I could make some more [conclusions]. Maybe this happened or maybe that happened. So this woman [man] at the Bibliothèque Nationale has done a census. She [he] is not sharing her census.





COLLINGS:

Is that right?





MARYATT:

Yes, because she [he] wants to publish. I want her [him] to publish. Please publish it now. So she [he] won’t share it over the Internet, so I’m going there and I will just ask her [him] the questions. I don’t need to know where everything is. I’d certainly like to go see a vellum copy because printing on vellum is a lot harder than printing on paper. So this Crété, are they capable of printing on vellum? Did that cause delays? Did they print on vellum first? Probably not. They probably printed on the easiest paper first. I don’t know. So just ask her, “Can you just tell me at least where one vellum copy is? And in your census, do you have sixty?” So that’s all she [he] would say is that, “Probably there are sixty.” That’s all she [he] would say.





COLLINGS:

How fascinating.





MARYATT:

Yeah, yeah. And then if I’m going to write it for the Getty, she’ll [he’ll] be even more threatened, in a sense.





COLLINGS:

Right.



01:42:23

MARYATT:

So I really, “Come on. You write your article.” I’m not the scholar. I’m just a practitioner curious about all of this. I love pochoir. I’m fascinated by the fact that there are these overlapping colors, so you’d have one hole where you have three colors. There’s a lot of water going on there, too, and water seeps underneath the stencil, causes problems. There’s a lot of handpainting after the stencil—not a lot, but each edge of the stencil on almost all the holes has been worked on to make it less like independent stencil shapes. So it’s just totally fascinating that whoever translated the painting into something that could be stenciled had to be really skilled, because I thought that, again, that Sonia might have done this. But here are these experts who would have done this all the time. And who would have been willing to work on this project, and how did they afford it?

So again, all we know is that Cendrars came into some money from an aunt, but we don’t know how much. Did they run out of that money? Did Sonia put in any money? She was being supported by her family, her adoptee—she was adopted by her uncle, and that money ran out after a while but not until after the war, just right after the war. So it’s never been said that she put in any money, in any of the reading I’ve done. So what’s been fun about this is that I’ve had to read a lot of stuff in French, and I had French in college, and I’ve been to France a lot of times, but I’m not fluent.

So anyway, that’s been really fun to—first I decided I was going to translate the Saudé, which was the book about pochoir printed in 1925 by someone who was doing pochoir in 1925, but it’s the first text about the how-to. So I thought, “Oh, I’d like to see that.” So it’s not really long, so that was my first test. So I translated that, a few words, a few contexts. Then I found out somebody else in San Francisco was going to print the Saudé translated. I thought, “Oh, that’s great.” So I connected with him, talked to him about the actual brushes.

I actually got Talas to carry the French pochoir brushes, which I’ve never been able to find all these years I’ve been interested in pochoir. So last year, he started selling the pochoir brushes that I asked him to start selling, so other people can do pochoir. So here we taught the people in the workshop at Scripps, and the Saudé book is coming out. Julie Mellby’s writing on her blog about pochoir, and there have been people in the States who were commercial pochoir artists also, but there are no commercial pochoir artists that now—or at least aren’t doing it with the pochoir brush.





COLLINGS:

So it’s a real revival.





MARYATT:

Yeah. So anyway, so that’s why I’m going to Paris—





COLLINGS:

Wonderful.



01:44:4501:46:44

MARYATT:

—to learn a lot of things and do a lot of things. Also I found out that there is one commercial—maybe more, but I have found one commercial pochoir production company in France, on the coast of France, way far away, and they have a website. I haven’t contacted them. But I want to do my tests, take my tests to them. What’s fascinating about these stencils is they were not plastic like we do today; they were metal. They were various metals, aluminum or copper or zinc, or there was one other metal [tin]. Anyway, to cut metal stencils, you think, oh, okay. It can’t be too thick. If it’s too thin, then, as you’re moving the brush around, the little tongues that stick out could flip up. How’d they do that? Which metal did they use?

So I bought myself a whole lot of different thicknesses of metal and tried to cut different metals. There are different knives that you could try. I’ve had dozens of different kinds of knives to try. So it would be awfully nice if I could just go talk to them and see what they’re doing because they’re in the tradition, and I do know that they use aluminum .004 or maybe it’s .005, I can’t remember right this second. So I want to talk to them and say, “Here’s my effort. What do you think?” and how long it might have taken. If you had this project to do, how long does it take first—the first step is just to do the tracing of the painting and then the separation into colors and then figure out how to divide that up and mix your colors and then get into an editioning system. So there’s a lot of work there. So again, basically that’s the most likely reason that they didn’t finish them, is that the pochoir just never got finished.

But sixty whole copies are probably out there in the world, and the other—what would that be, ninety? Ninety copies never got done, but possibly all the printing got done, but no evidence of any pages in some archives somewhere. So I’ve got to check the archives in the Bibliothèque Nationale and at the Museum of Modern Art [in Paris], because Sonia Delaunay gave all of her archives—or gave everything to France, all her paintings, all of her husband’s paintings. So there’s a huge—there was just last year an exhibit of Sonia Delaunay’s paintings. It just killed me. I wanted so much to go. I just couldn’t get up and go with all of this stuff happening. So that’s what I’m up to.





COLLINGS:

Very exciting.





MARYATT:

So people ask me, well, what am I going to do with these facsimiles that I’m going to do. Well, I’m not going to do anything with them. It’s just for me. I can’t sell them. There’s copyright.





COLLINGS:

It’s part of the research, yeah.





MARYATT:

I’m going to go talk to Madame Cendrars. His daughter lives there, and Yale put out the facsimile, had to get permission from her to put out the facsimile. She put out her own facsimile. Spain put out a facsimile. It’s an important book in the world. Many years ago at one of the Antiquarian Book Fairs, I saw one for sale for $150,000, and that was years ago. I don’t know what they’d go for now. So it’s a very important book, and it’s got all of the good things that you want to know about why would they do that project. So again, Marcia Reed just thought this would be an interesting—instead of looking from the literary point of view, how did this happen, or from analyzing the painting, but from a practitioner’s point of view, looking to see is there any way to come to these conclusions by trying it yourself.



01:48:00

COLLINGS:

Very good point.





MARYATT:

I’ve done this before. I did that with the Beorum. I really wanted to know how long would it take to typeset. And I’ve never read anybody talking about how long it takes to typeset a Gutenberg Bible. They can see it. From the point of view of typesetting it themselves, I haven’t read anything. Maybe somebody’s done it, and I just—I know that one other person at least has typeset several pages, but it was only because in 2000 you could get the Gutenberg type as in the form of B42. And someone else is trying to do another facsimile for some other wonderful book from the early 1915s or so. So it’s a worthy project for practitioners to try to replicate something to try to figure out. So why am I interested? Well, I would love to make some of my books have pochoir in them and have not just your usual cut a shape and make it brown. What could I do? Because there were textures, there were shadings, there are lots of things that you could do which also, again, might have been adapted from Japanese stenciling techniques. So it brings in all of my interests.





COLLINGS:

Yes, indeed.



01:50:00

MARYATT:

I was always very interested in France. When I was in college, that was my minor, and I really wanted to be able to speak French fluently. So that’s my goal in retirement. I’m going to become fluent, which means I have to live there. My husband, I don’t know. He doesn’t really want to learn French. But anyway, so I don’t know how that’s going to happen, but I’ve got a lot of things to do in the next—I’m projecting at least thirty more years that I have to live. So I have a lot of things I want to do. But this project has—I don’t really have time to do a whole lot of research, so a lot of times the research I do is like with and through my students, like the Beorum and other books that we’ve done. So this is just my latest project.

It scares me to death to have to write an article because as soon as you write an article, people write to you and say, “Well, I don’t think that. I think this.” So I did write an article about the Gutenberg project, and I only got nice, complimentary things from people. But Getty is a little bit bigger than the American Printing History Association journal, so it makes me very nervous. But Marcia Reed was encouraging, and she said, “I’ll help you if you need help.” I thought, well, maybe I’ll get it done, but I don’t know when I’ll get it done.





COLLINGS:

Fascinating project.





MARYATT:

Yeah.





COLLINGS:

Well, I think we’ve come to the end of our interview, and I want to thank you for your time.





MARYATT:

You’re welcome. [End of March 13, 2015 interview]