This summer, in Davenport, IA, Cheryl Jacobsen and Madison Bennett taught a week-long workshop on Gothic Cursive & Medieval Vellum during the Roman Holiday International Calligraphy conference. The class enthusiastically dehaired, fleshed, stretched and sanded two goat skins, producing a beautiful piece of vellum which was made into a charter that all the students signed. They then went on to learn Gothic Cursive, make a book from vellum they purchased, visit UI Special Collections and see the show Making the Book Past & Present at the U of Iowa Main Library. This was the first time skins were made into vellum at a calligraphy conference and a it was a huge success!
Over on the other side of the international date line, thanks to the support from a CAPS (Center for Asian and Pacific Studies) faculty research award, Prof. Nick Cladis was able to visit Japan to install a solo exhibition at ArtBase Fukui and take workshops with several papermakers, conservators, and bookbinders. He spent time with Sasaki Shigeo, a conservator, mounter, and art framer, to learn Japanese methods of mounting handmade paper for display. The method he settled on for the solo exhibition utilized a lattice support system similar to the one found in shoji sliding doors. Congrats on your exhibit, Nick!
Back in Iowa, UI Conservation and Collections Care staff, led by UI Conservator and UICB Faculty Member Giselle Simón, assisted with Oakdale kozo garden maintenance. They came to call their team the "Thistle Support Group." And while they wrestled with the prickly plant, the experience was beautiful in its own way, and everyone enjoyed the Friday summer mornings. The project sprang out of a need to keep unwanted plants at bay and allow the kozo to flourish during the summer months. Maybe even more critical though, was the task of pruning the kozo plant so that branches, used for papermaking, grow straight and tall. This produces longer and unblemished fibers. And the CCC staff have a direct stake in those fibers, as they are doing this work in exchange for paper fabricated at the Oakdale facility. Conservation treatment methods call for many handmade papers, most notably thin kozo mending papers, made using the Japanese papermaking method. Now that the semester has started, the CCC staff handed the baton to Nick Cladis' students to tend the garden until harvest in November. The CCC staff will eagerly await the first sheets made by Oakdale staff and students for the many conservation treatments underway in the UI Libraries.
Back over the ocean, Matthew Brown and Elizabeth Yale and MFA Candidate Sara Parr presented at the annual meeting of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing at the University of Reading in the UK. Brown, Yale, and Parr, representing a team that also includes UI professors (and UICB associates) Paul Dilley and Kendra Strand, shared insights into developing hands-on global book history curriculum as part of the three-year NEH Humanities Initiatives Grant on "Global Book Cultures and the Student Laboratory.
