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PETER & DONNA THOMAS
MINIATURE BOOKS, FINE PRESS BOOKS, ARTISTS' BOOKS, HANDMADE
PAPER
260 Fifteenth Avenue,
Santa Cruz, CA 95062 (831) 475-1455
peteranddonna@cruzio.com
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PETER & DONNA THOMAS
MINIATURE BOOKS, FINE PRESS BOOKS, ARTISTS' BOOKS, HANDMADE
PAPER
260 Fifteenth Avenue,
Santa Cruz, CA 95062 (831) 475-1455
peteranddonna@cruzio.com
August-October 2010: We are on the road in our gypsy wagon bookmobile.
To read about our adventures as wandering book artists click here.
A great article was just written about our work for Fine Books Magazine: Click here.
Listen to Peter play "What's a Book?" on a ukulele book. Click here.
From
April 2 - May 13, 2006 we walked from San Francisco to Yosemite,
following the route John Muir used in 1868. Click here to read about the trip.
Our paperback guide book for following Muir's Route is now available. Click here.
Being a Book Artist
by Peter Thomas
Being a book artist is more than just making books; it’s living and breathing them. It’s about becoming so involved with the subject matter that the physical attributes of the book reveal themselves. It’s about listening to the materials invoke the proper text. It’s about loving those materials and knowing them so well that we feel their desire to be used in the book we are making. We didn’t begin our artistic careers planning to be artists of the book. It was more a case of being called, inspired with the desire to make a Good Book: one that, through the materials, in the text, and by the visual and tactile impact, will move the viewer from the everyday to a new place, a place that stirs the soul.
We live in exciting times. Since the invention of the printing press the book, as a medium for the artist, has been encumbered by function. Over the course of the last two decades the personal computer has released the book from servitude to information, and thus set it free to become an aesthetic object, a work of art. Now, free of function, the book is becoming the premier medium of the artist. The book is clearly the most complex and versital art medium that exists, and I believe that very soon artists will discover how to exploit these potentials to create works of art that today are still unimaginable.
The artists book marries content, form and the passage of time into a single unified artwork.
For those of you who are new to our work; Donna does the illustrative art work for our books.
We make our own paper, print and bind the books ourselves, with a few random exceptions...
(There are always random exceptions in real life.)
-Peter Thomas