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]
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]
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]
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]
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]