PETER & DONNA THOMAS
260 Fifteenth Avenue Santa Cruz CA 95062 (831)
475-1455
The Pencil (2010) Peter Thomas. 8 ½ x 5 ½ inches. This book is a celebration of the pencil, its beauty, and its roll in dissemination of information and the advance of civilization. When the book is first opened the viewer finds six vintage advertising pencils suspended in a wooden pencil holder. The wooden pencil holder, made of pencil cedar wood, is constructed with a hand carved dovetail joint to represent the value that the craft content has in a work of art. The opened book reveals a second, inside, cover. If the viewer opens this cover a text is revealed; this process is meant to represents the challenges of learning. That text is a high school-like report, hand written in pencil. Its purpose is to reference the pencil's essential historic role in recording, organizing and conveying information.
The text is a brief history of the pencil, written by Peter in the manner he imagined a report would have been written by a high school student when reports were being written in pencil. The text was then hand written out by Donna using her best penmanship, then illustrated and decorated with colored pencil. That original was then color laser printed on Peter's handmade paper for the edition. The binding has a unique tri-fold cover, the text hidden behind the inner cover and the pencil holder. Donna bound the book using oasis goat leather for the two spines. For the covers, she used and Peter's handmade paper, printed with the word pencil, in multiple press runs in multiple colors using antique wood type. 12 pages. 30 copies. $545.
