Interview with Walter Tisdale

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM Interview # TISDALE, WALTER TISDALE, WALTER (19-) Book Artist At UW: Interviewed: 2018 Interviewer: Sarah Lang Index by: Transcribed by: Teresa Bergen Length: 1 hour, 22 minutes First Interview Session (June 11, 2018): Digital File 00:00:00 SL: So today is Monday, June 11, 2018. I'm Sarah Lang with the oral history program at UW Madison. I'm talking with Walter Tisdale, book artist, UW alum, and founder of Tatlin Books and Landlocked Press. And we're at the university archives in Steenbock Library. So Walter, could you start by telling us a little bit about your family and where you grew up? WT: I grew up in Portland, Maine, and lived there through high school. I went off to college. And it was your classic 1950s, '60s elementary school. Everyone in your neighborhood goes to school. You go home for lunch. There were 35 kids in my kindergarten class. And I met 11 of them a couple of years ago. There wasn't a lot of art programs in public schools then. And then I started to develop some, what turned out to be a learning disability. And in fifth grade, my mom got a scholarship for me to go to a private school. And they had two art teachers and a kiln. So I had done a lot of drawing on my own. But from about fifth grade on I was taking art classes, either at the local university or at school, and then taking private lessons with different art teachers. So I've always been involved in drawing and painting. But mostly drawing. I love to draw. And then when I went to high school, I went to a Catholic, Jesuit high school, they didn't have an art program, either. So that lapsed for four years. And I was plenty busy with other activities. And then I went to college, I went to a private school in upstate New York, Colgate University. And I started to take art courses again. And I was an English major. I don't know if I'm going too fast here. And I had a very influential professor who would suggest alternate subjects for me to study. And that's when I sort of discovered the book world. And I had read a review of a show at the Pierpont Morgan Library called William Morris and the Art of the Book. And I knew about William Morris and the whole Arts & Crafts, his involvement in architecture. I didn't know a lot about book 00:01:00 design, though. I knew him primarily as an author and as a designer of furniture. So that's when I discovered the ingenious ways libraries are set up. If you go to a card catalog looking for a particular book, and then when you go to that shelf you realize there's all these other books. So I really became sort of devoted to studying the history of the book. And based on that one catalog from the Pierpont Morgan Library. So I got interested in type design. A lot of my early interest was really British-focused. So I knew all about typefaces. And there was one particular book published by the University of Oxford Press called Methods of Book Design. And because in my childhood I'd had a learning disability, one of the easiest [unclear], and I had a mother who was a teacher, our best and favorite Christmas present were books. So I was a voracious reader. So I always, what was profound for me when I discovered this book on methods of 00:02:00 book design was I'd never thought of how books were put together. The way kids today don't think of the milk they might pour from a container, where it comes from. So that was a revelation. Actually people have to make books. And if a book is well put together, you don't really think of the design. It engages you in the book. That's the beauty of good design. So from my childhood on, I just read books incessantly. And then suddenly the light bulb went off. Making books. But where were you going to do that? It certainly wasn't part of any of the training I'd had in public school, private school or in college. So I just continued down the path of reading as much as I could about books. Book design, book history. Graphic design. And I was seeking out materials on my own. Going to libraries. And then I discovered that many libraries were not set up to have people wandering the stacks. So you could go to a research 00:03:00 library like at Purdue or here, the University of Madison, wander the stacks and find beautifully handmade books that really should be in a protected environment. But when the libraries were set up, they really were. Because in the old days, you'd go to the card catalog, get the number, go to the desk and they'd retrieve the book for you. So I started to devote my interest to going to libraries and finding these books, seeing what books they would have available on the shelf that I could go look at. So that was just, it was getting finer, closer and closer to the point where I started to think well geez, maybe I would like to learn how to make books. Again, there was no place that I was aware of where you could do that. So I think I've always been a reader. And that's really guided a lot of my interest in making books. The text, to me, is the kind of books. I like designing, creating books that start with the text and work up from 00:04:00 there. And I think it's because I've always been a reader first. And then, fast forward to Madison. That's where I met this range of opportunities. So my early childhood was just typically happy, reading. Living in the same neighborhood for my whole life. I think that's something that I don't take for granted anymore. 06:35 SL: And how was that beneficial? WT: I just think, well, my mom was a history teacher. She raised five boys by herself. I just think you get comfortable with where you're living. And then you start small, and you work up from there. But I think the fact that we didn't move around a lot, I think that was a, I don't know if it was an advantage in life. But it's certainly something that I've come to-and then when I had my own family, we were lucky to be able to stay in the same spot. I've been in Bangor 31 years now. And I've seen, yeah, it's just the way it was 00:05:00 like when I was growing up. So I feel like I've been very lucky all along in that respect. But the art classes, as influential as they were when I was younger, there were so many breaks, [unclear] break was in high school. I think most schools do have art programs, very vigorous ones, I think that four years was kind of a drought. And I didn't really think about making art during those four years. Because it wasn't an option. SL: When you were in college, did you take art classes? 07:57 WT: I did. SL: What kinds of classes? WT: I was an English major. And I was also very interested in architecture. Because where I grew up in Portland, Maine, within a city block you might have, it was started from the federal period, right up through some colonial, but federal, all the significant movement, architectural movements, were often within a block. So I was seeing all these beautiful buildings. So I always had it in the back of my mind I 00:06:00 wanted to be an architect. SL: Okay. WT: Which was a curious thing. I remember adults asking me, well what do you want to be when you grow up? And I'd say an architect. And I can understand the smiles that I got back in return. (laughs) And I discovered later in life that architecture, certainly someone like William Morris, architecture and books, they're really the same thing. And I think that was just because of the buildings that I grew up around. Architecture was something that was important to me. Just the details, the design. And it's something you live and walk through. I lived in the same city my whole life, but we moved, depending on circumstances, we moved five times within six blocks. So we lived in different homes. And they were all mid-19th century homes. So just seeing the fact that these homes had back stairs where, in the old days, where the servants could come and go. Third floors that were fully furnished with bathrooms, bedrooms. Those were our play rooms. So when I moved out here to the Midwest I remember always saying, where are the back stairs? I'd never lived in a house, or been in a house, that didn't have a set of back stairs. So I think the little things, I think that helped me as a, making books, seeing the little details of architecture and books, it's really the same language. You're building something that is going to be used on a daily 00:07:00 basis. Or something that when you open a book, it has the same passages working through the pages. SL: Did you end up taking any architecture classes in school? WT: I came, when I moved to Milwaukee, my dad lived in Milwaukee. So when I moved to Wisconsin, I had a girlfriend who was from Madison and going to school here. She was in the ag program. And I lived for a couple of months with my dad in Milwaukee. I went to a seminar. They had a big Frank Lloyd Wright symposium. Then I moved to Madison. And in the building I lived in, there were some architecture students. And they did everything they could to discourage me from going to architecture school. Because they were supremely unhappy. It wasn't what they thought they were going to-so that influenced me. I thought well I've always wanted to be an architect, but they're telling me I'd be frustrated. Because my idea of what was architecture was 19th century. They said, "You would maybe get to design a small feature of a whole design project. They may give you one little project. But you're not going to be the mastermind behind, unless you own the company." So that was sort of an eye opener. Hmm. And I was working and living in, when I came to Madison, I came here to live. And because all my friends were, grew up here, we scrupulously avoided, they scrupulously avoided the university. So I lived here two years before I even set foot on campus. SL: Oh, really? 11:47 WT: And that sort of colored my experience in Madison. Madison was just a great place to live and work. I lived on the Westside, worked on the Westside. And when I did come on campus, it was usually on the ag part of the campus. SL: Sure. WT: So I didn't really move here to go to school. And that set me apart, 00:08:00 as it turns out. And I ended up living here ten years. SL: And where were you working when you first moved here. WT: At a bookstore. SL: You were. Okay. What was the bookstore? WT: It was called Book [Markets?]. And there was a big magazine chain in Chicago, and they had a chain of bookstores. So they were the biggest, one of the largest magazine distributors in the Midwest. If not the largest in the Midwest, one of the biggest in the country. So this was a sideline. They were trying to see, can we make, we sell all of our magazines to bookstores. Why not-so I think it was the most northern satellite they had. And I worked there for two and a half years. And that, Madison was zealous about granting residency. It's tough to get-if they have, at least back then, if they thought you had moved here to go to work so you could go to school, they would deny you residency. So it was really scrupulous. When I decided to start taking classes, I had to get interviewed to determine my status. I was clearly a resident. I had a license, worked here, paid taxes. However, did I come here to go to school? That would have been disqualifying. So my residence counselor was one of our best customers. So when I walked through the door she, "Oh, well, end of the interview. I know who you are." So that was, again, just one of 00:09:00 those lucky things. Because I had a friend whose wife was the financial, she was working fulltime at financial aid. Her husband was a grad student. And he could never get residency. So his three years at MFA, he was paying out of state tuition. So that helped. That was one of those lucky things. SL: Yeah. So what made you decide to go to Madison, go to the UW, after you'd been here for a while? 14:03 WT: Well I was starting to think maybe that I could, I had a friend who was in the art department. He was a master's student. I knew him through a girlfriend. And he and I took a history of the book class in the library department. Dorothea Scott was the teacher. And so it meant I had to get into the system. And they had this special student category then. There was a little building, it's now torn down. So I was taking, because I was working fulltime. So I was taking classes when I could fit them in. My job was three to nine at night. So that meant I could take morning classes, or even an early afternoon class and still get 00:10:00 to work on time. So I took this class, history of the book. And I had met this fellow a couple of times, but he and I sort of boon companions by the end of the semester. Because the teacher would call on him when she wasn't sure about something typographic. But she taught the class through overlays. And it was a 120 class. It was fairly deadly boring. (SL laughs) So he always had to be awake, because she might ask him a question. So we were given an option. You could write a term paper, and there was a famous cartographer, David Woodward, who had taken the class. And his term paper was about a map that turned out to be the first printed map in America. So we were all like wow, no one's going to be able to top that one. So we came up with the idea of doing an exhibition [unclear]. Instead of a term paper, could we mount an exhibition? So we went to the rare book room and we were able to gather books that were in the stacks. And it was the printing press that was by Harry Duncan, the Cummington Press. So we got exhibition space and the two of us mounted an exhibition in lieu of a term paper of the Cummington Press. And by then he had said, "Do you want to come over and see my studio?" And I'm pretty sure this was the spring of '79. So when I walked into his studio and saw the printing press, the 00:11:00 type. And he was from a graphic design family, so this was all natural to him. That's when I said, I really want to learn how to make books. And I found the person who was, was Walter Hamady. But there were many more people other than me who wanted to get in the class. So I was not a regular student. And at that point, that was my first special studies class. Special student. So how was I going to get into Walter Hamady's class? And John Bennett coached me and said well, back then you used to have to go up to the, I can't remember what they called it. It was a building with a dirt floor, to get your registration forms. SL: Oh, yeah. WT: And the special students showed up on Friday, when all the classes were filled. So you pretty much got to pick over the dregs, if you were lucky. So the art department, those big bucks, they didn't want to hang around all week, waiting for people to show up. So they would do most of the bargaining on Monday, which was the grad students. So if you showed up with a portfolio, typically, or could make a pitch to the professor, they would give you a blue card and say, let this person in. This was on a Monday. Then on the day, like my day was a Friday. So, special students. On Friday I would go to the office, give them the blue card, and I was in the class. Well, I didn't know that system. John was the one who told me about it. And he told me how 00:12:00 to bluff my way into the class. (SL laughs) So that's what I did. I went up there Monday. And they're all sitting around, all visiting, because this was now the fall of '79. They'd all had the summer off, and they were all in a congenial mood. And they were going to wrap things, usually they wrapped things up by noon. All the classes were filled. So it didn't make any difference if you registered on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. You showed up, there was no one there. So you had to know you had to be there Monday to get your blue card to get into the class. So I went and made my case, and he let me in the class. But he let me in the class because I said John Bennett and I had done this exhibition on the Cummington Press. And that was one of Walter's mentors, was Harry Duncan. Harry and his aunt, his favorite aunt, were childhood friends. And when Walter was visiting his favorite aunt in Keokuk, Iowa, Harry was, in the summer, Harry was printing a book. That's the first time Walter had-she said, "Well, if you're interested in books, you should go meet my friend Harry." So Walter's always told that story. That's the first time he saw someone making a book. Harry was using a hand press. A book of James Agee's short stories, uncollected short stories. So when I said to Walter I had done this exhibition on Harry Duncan. And then I bluffed my way, I knew all about the history, he let me in the class. So I got my blue card. And then I started taking just his class, because that's the only time I had, and I was working fulltime. At a certain time, I had accrued enough credits, and there was a legendary dean of the special students who, it was her hobby to track people like me. So when I went to get my registration form, there was a hold on it. They said, "You have a hold on your transcript." I said, "Why's that?" She said, "Well, you have to go see 00:13:00 Prudy Stewart. She wants to see you before she's going to let you register for your next class." So I had to go see her. And she interviewed me. And she said, "What are you doing? You've got a lot of credits here. Have you been to college before?" I said, "Well, I've been to Colgate two years." "Well, get me a transcript. I'll let you register this semester, but you have to get a transcript from Colgate. And we're going to sit down before the next semester and see where you stand." So she's the one who encouraged me to think about becoming an art student. Because I had two years of credits at Colgate. And by that point, I had probably four classes under Walter. And so she's the one who pushed me into the fact that you've got enough credits here. You're just a year and a half away, you could have a degree. And I later had a friend who was an assistant dean of humanities. And he said, "That was her specialty. You got Prudied." (laughter) So as you can see, I've always sort of been lucky in the way I was sort of guided to taking 00:14:00 classes, becoming a book maker at Madison. Ending up at Madison. John Bennett taking the class together, that exhibition. Getting into Hamady's class. And then Prudy saying, "It's crazy for you to continue on this path. You should get a degree." Because by then it was '79, I would have been 23. I'd left school thinking I wasn't going to go back. 21:40 SL: And why was that? WT: Well, I had wanted to be an architect. And there was no formal way to be an architect at Colgate. So I was an English major. And then I knew a couple of people who ended up going to design school at Colgate. But I was unhappy with what I was doing. It didn't seem fulfilling. SL: Okay. WT: I couldn't see where it was going to end up. So I left. And then during the summer I met the woman who I came eventually, followed my heart to Madison. So that's probably the best way to say it. It wasn't the first. And then eventually I met the woman I'm married to now. She was a grad student here. So that's fairly typical. SL: Can you talk a little bit about that? WT: Well she, by then, that was '80, by 1980, see, I took Hamady's class in '79. And I was hooked, line and sinker. And the shop steward was Kathy Kuehn. And she had a benefactor in Winnetka, whose name escapes me at the moment. But that's an interesting story as well. So they were local 00:15:00 benefactors. They had an interest in graphic arts and painting, this couple in Winnetka. The wife, in particular. And she had called up Kathy over Christmas and said, "There's this funny printer in my neighborhood who's got a printing press for sale." And so Kathy asked me, "Do you want to buy this press together?" So we bought the press in January of 1980. And Kathy and Jim Escalante and I drove down and retrieved it. So we set it up in my apartment. There was a little butler's pantry. And the press wouldn't fit this way. It would only fit lengthwise. So that was in '80, the spring of '80, we set up the printing press. And she lived on Johnson. I lived in the building, which was, I think, Brearly Street. So that's where we printed books. She had her own press, I had my own press. And we were still taking classes. So we felt like we had the best of both worlds. Because in the shop, 00:16:00 there was basically one press that everyone was using. And as the semester wore on, they were six-hour shifts. So you would go twelve to six, six to twelve, twelve to six, six to twelve. And I was still working nights then. So I would often print, get off work at nine and print from twelve to three. And there were two other students who were doing the same thing. One was a waitress, and the other, Jim Lee, who was an MFA. Barb was getting her undergraduate degree like I was. Jim was getting his MFA. And he shot through the fastest of anyone. He took as many credits as he could year-round. So he did his MFA in two years. So the three of us got really, we bonded because we were printing pretty much from nine to three in the morning. But now, having my own press, meant that I wasn't dependent on that schedule. I could print when I wanted to. And I'd bought a little bit of type. I was buying my own equipment. So I was somewhat independent. Though I was still taking classes. Because by then, I was a registered art student, 00:17:00 so I needed to accumulate credits. And I started taking other classes, too, the required classes, painting and design. And I had taken enough art classes at Colgate that fulfilled the basic requirements. I still had a lot of credits to go. And then the other requirements of undergraduate, social studies. And by then, by I'm not sure the exact dates, by '81 or '82, they had decided to reopen the Silver Buckle Press. It had been dormant. And John Bennett was hired to be the first director. Because he'd graduated with his MFA. And up to that point, you got an MFA and then you'd get a teaching job. Well that's the way it had worked for a long time. But it was breaking down profoundly by '81, '80, '81. Art departments were shrinking, not expanding. So all these talented grad students were not finding teaching jobs. Sometimes in any given year, only two or three would get a job. And it was a huge art department. And the graphics, it was a very, very, as it turns out, that's another massive stroke of luck is I ended up in Madison, which is probably the premiere graphics department in the country. So for probably 25 years, their grads have gone on to become the professors that were hiring new grads. So if you had an MFA print degree from Madison, that was gold. That was a gold standard. So that's another thing I inherited, this reputation. But it 00:18:00 was breaking down pretty quickly. I'd say between '80 and '84, there were very few jobs. SL: Okay. 26:55 WT: And Jim graduated in the summer of probably '80, '81. Probably 1980. And he took a job in Winnipeg for two years. Then he left there and went to Hartford. He's been there 30 years now. And that was true until, but it was sort of a shrouded secret. I think the expectation was I'm going to get a teaching job. And when you couldn't, there was a lot of frustrated people, like what am I going to do now? That was never my ambition, and I was only getting my undergraduate degree. But for a lot of the MFAs, for some, it was crushing. The reality. Like, I'm not going to get a job. As talented as they were. That was the other thing, everyone was so talented. I don't want to jump ahead, but '84, when Joe Wilfer, who had gotten his master's here, he filled in on a sabbatical replacement for Hamady. And he was the one who was like, "The last thing you want is a teaching job." (SL laughs) So everyone was like, well, maybe he's right. So I would say 00:19:00 that one semester he was there, so eventually Ruth Lingen ended up working for him, Kathy Kuehn. And Patti Scoby and her husband moved to Michigan, and paper molds and this, and so it was clear there were viable options in life other than being an art professor. Because this was such a vibrant, I mean, there was at least a major professor in every department of the graphic arts. From Hamady, offset, litho, relief printing, silkscreen, etching, lithography. And then [Marja Kralik?] was teaching color in the Bauhaus method. So on one wing of that sixth floor, there were all those studios. And they all had grad students. But unlike the other side of academia, the scientific side if you're in grad school, if you're lucky, you're going to get some funding. Because there's usually, my academic side of life my wife's in, she's in computer science and engineering. So when you have a PhD come on, you can pretty much guarantee them funding. So all these MFAs were paying tuition. And there were a couple of TAships, but those were really rare as well. So most of these people were self-funding. And Jim 00:20:00 went through so quickly because he was determined to do that. He had enough resources to get through as quickly as possible. SL: And that was saving money, then? WT: Saving money. And I think they weren't as rigorous about the residence requirement to do, you had to take, I think to get a master's or PhD, you had to be on campus so many semesters, a minimum. And that was tuition dollars. They didn't want people shooting through faster than they should. SL: So did you have any thoughts as you were going through your classes of what you wanted to do when you were done? WT: Yes, I was convinced, I swallowed it all. I was going to be a book maker. I had the press. See, the thing is, I went from being a student working in a communal print shop, to having my own printing press. And then Kathy and I moved with two other students, in the summer when our lease ran up, when her lease ran up and mine did, four of us, one of them was a painter in the art department, four of us rented two apartments out on [Carlene?] Drive, out on 00:21:00 the very far west side. We were still in Madison, near Fitchburg. We were on the border of Fitchburg. So we rented two apartments. We ate, the women slept upstairs and we cooked upstairs. And downstairs, one bedroom was a painting studio, one bedroom was my bedroom, and then the living room/kitchen was our print studio. And we did that for two years. And by then, I was working other jobs. I worked at Dotty Dumpling's, and I was cooking at the, because I knew Jim and Mary, I was cooking at the sorority. And then I was working at the Silver Buckle Press. So I had these jobs to fit in, but I was printing, always printing, whenever I had any free time. I was printing on my press, because it was there. I woke up in the morning, it was there, and I went to bed, it was there. And there were a couple other people. Chuck Alexander, Charles Alexander had a press in town. That was about it, though. SL: Did people come to use your press, then, too? Or were they mostly using the one in- 31:59 WT: Well I think I was probably following 00:22:00 Walter's model, which is I've always described myself as a printer and a publisher. And it was through the Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee that we would go to poetry readings. So I was meeting poets, writers, in Milwaukee. I mean, the model is pretty simple. If you write an author and say, "I'd like to publish something of yours," you're going to get a response fairly quickly. There's going to be very little delay. And then I had all these friends who were MFA printmakers, who happened to be book makers. Half of them are book makers as well. So I would have them meet the writer. I'd get a manuscript and I'd show it to one of these friends. And they would always come up with something that I hadn't seen. And then when I was typesetting their design, ideas would occur. So that's why I've always described myself as a printer and a publisher. I generate-but I let them. I like getting to the point of ignition, where I got the manuscript, I've given it to an artist, and I was getting more involved in the structure of the book. There's plenty for me to do as a printer. And yet it's really between, the structure of the book takes, because of the internal fabric of the book. The illustrations, the artwork and then the writing, between those three, there's plenty to manage there. And I love that part of it. And yet that was a model that has really been, since the English arts and crafts period, but it was more self-publishing. I never felt a 00:23:00 need to be a writer. I enjoy the designing and the publishing part of it, and the printing. So, book maker describe what I do, in my mind. But printing/publishing-you say you're a book maker, and depending on how old the person is, it can have two different, radically different meanings. So I say printer/publisher. SL: Okay. Can you talk a little bit about how you choose which binding or structure for the book, for a particular project? 34:15 WT: Well in many cases, it comes out of the hand-setting of the manuscript. A good example would be a book I published in Maine. I met a writer, a British writer, who was from the very northern part of England. He was living on the coast of Maine with his wife in a little trailer. And they lived near two local conservation parks. I've met very few Brits that weren't habitual walkers. They love to walk. And even though he was from a very northern industrial city, living in Maine opened his eyes to the natural world. And it's beautiful along the coastline. It's quintessential, 00:24:00 which you'd imagine it would be. So I've always been interested in poets of the landscape. So he submitted a manuscript and there were lots of where the land meets the shoreline. So I have a paper maker that I met over the years who lives in Maine now. I met her in Indiana. So typically I will say to Katie, "This is what I'm thinking about. I'd like you to make a text paper," because I like combining different colors, different kinds of paper. So I have this green paper, very subtly green with a lot of blue fleck in it. It's a German paper. So I'd like something-and then I use Japanese papers and printmaking papers. So there's a range of papers in the book, depending on the poems. So certain poems will go on certain papers. The Japanese papers are more transparent, so when you turn the page, you see the back side of the type. So I like, and this is again what I was suckled on with Hamady, playing with all the facets of the book. The paper's really critical, I think, because of 00:25:00 Hamady's influence. We learned how to make paper. We could see what paper can do as a very subtle design element. So what I use Katie for is the cover papers or papers that are going to be an integral part of the binding. So on this book I said to Katie, "I'd like you to design a paper that would suggest where the land meets the ocean, the water." And I want the paper to have something in it, something that, there's always a [sker?] between the high and the low tide line along the sand beach, these pebbled beaches which are a defining feature of eastern Maine where I live. Very few sand beaches. So I want there to be inclusions in the paper, so it's going to have some texture to it. And that's all I'll tell her. We've worked together long enough so that she has an instinct for what-she'll make up some samples and send them to me, and I'll say, "This is the one." And then Mark in the poem, 00:26:00 during these walks, there's a lot of evergreens along the coast. But there are also birch stands. So several of the poems have birch. Well birch, I had a piece of birch bark. And I thought the green she came up with for the color, I'd like to-so you've got this green with these inclusions. And then when you open it up, there's no point in just going from the page right to the text. You want to kind of create this space, this environment. So I sent Katie a piece of birch bark. I said, "Why don't you make an end sheet paper for the, like a piece of birch bark?" And she wrote back and said, "Which color?" Because if you peel back the birch, there's a tan color and there's more of an orange. So I thought well, that's perfect. When I peeled it back, once I got the other piece that I didn't send her and peeled back, I know what she's talking about. And they look lovely together. I said, well, make them both. So when you open the book, you have this green, and then you have this lovely tan, and then this orange. And then you get into the body of the book. And that's, again, something that Hamady said. It should be a quiet transition between, with paper. And the papers that she makes are very stout. They're impervious. Because some cover papers, just the natural grease from your fingers get, or the abrasion of handling a book. So her papers are tough and extraordinarily beautiful. They're very tactile. And visually appealing. So I pretty much confine my books-and yet, they're very strong. So you can ask 00:27:00 them to do things that you would worry about the bending, the back and forth and eventually there would be abrasion, and then a tear. So she's been an essential part of my books structurally. SL: And how long have you been working together? 39:17 WT: Probably since '87, when I moved to-30 years. SL: so can you talk a little bit more about, I guess, finishing up your degree here? WT: Mm hmm. SL: Because you were going part time, how long did it end up taking you to get your degree? WT: Well, I just reminded Jim, who drove me over here. The summer of '87, my wife was finishing up her PhD. She lived, landscape had a huge studio in the basement of Steenbock. And she came to grad school in '81, the fall of '81, and was funded. PhD with a program. So she was paid to go to grad school. Which is fairly typical. So she had came here to get a master's. And then she fell into this program that really started, 00:28:00 didn't only start here in Madison, but they had some key faculty here. [Ben Neeman, Nick Chrisman and Barbara Buttonfield?]. And then there was David Woodward, and then there was someone in civil engineering, geographic information system, GIS. So this was 1981. It was a new thing. And she fell into that. So once she finished her master's, which was on sand and gravel, she went right into GIS. So she decided, we were married by then, she said, I'm going to go for my PhD. So that went from like '83 to '87. So '87 was launch date. I think of all of our friends, I was one of the last ones, we were one of the last ones living here. Tracy was still living here. Jim had now taken a job in Missouri in '80, '81. Jim Lee had long gone. Kathy had gone, Ruth had gone. Patty Scoby and her husband moved early that summer. So she was finishing up her PhD. SL: And what was her PhD in? WT: In the environmental resources. So 00:29:00 suddenly I had to wrap things up. And I had all these credits. I had probably 160 credits. You only need about like 120. If you do it right. (SL laughs) But not all the parts fit. So I was literally one credit shy in social studies and one credit shy in biological sciences. So I went to the dean. I said, "What do I do?" He said, "Well, you've got to find a class, if you can find a class that satisfies both, I'll split the credits." So I did. I found a class on environmental history that was taught by Bob [Oster??] in the geography department. Because I'd taken several geography classes, historical geography. It was an eminently famous department. Well, we left in a panic, a mad rush. Katie had her thesis defense. We loaded up a truck and moved. And she still had corrections. And she was teaching fulltime. And she had till December. In her mind. She was all but dissertated. Well actually, she had dissertated. She'd defended, but she had corrections to make. So she was making her corrections in the fall, and teaching. Normally when they hire new faculty, they often don't have to teach for the first semester. So she was teaching a subject she really knew very little 00:30:00 about. She was teaching a high-level math class. So she was two pages ahead of her students, who were all math/computer majors. So it was a terrifying semester. And finishing up, making her corrections. So I had a promise from the dean that this was going to happen. And when it didn't happen, I said the hell with it, I don't care if I have a degree or not. As far as I'm concerned, I was happy. I was content. So in '92, when Jim was teaching here by then, I came back and he said, "Well, Tis, whatever happened," he'd completely forgotten this until this morning. He said, "Did you get your degree?" Because we had another friend who was in the same boat, but with her master's, or her MFA. And I said, "Nah, it didn't go through." And he loves fountain pens. And he sat forward and he raised his hand and said, "I am God." He had the fountain pen. He was the undergraduate advisor for the art department. And this is what they do. They're the ones who say, if you get a, find a class that satisfies both, I'll divide the class. So with a stroke of the pen, he filled out the form, made sure that it was actually processed, and I got my diploma in the 00:31:00 mail. Which I told him I store in my dictionary. So that's how I actually ended up with a physical transcript degree. SL: Okay. 44:20 WT: And the only thing that disappointed was how small it was. (laughter) Katie got a nice big one. Of course, she got a PhD. But this thing's pretty small. But he'd completely forgotten that until this morning. So I'm very grateful. Because I was somewhat of an older student. And I was naive to think well, I don't care. In the art world, do you really need a degree? If you're not going to be teaching, do you need an MFA? And I had flirted with the idea of an MFA. Once Katie had said, oh, I'm going to go on for a PhD, because it took another three years. I thought well maybe I should do an MFA. And I said no. But all my friends are saying, you don't need a degree. But it began to dawn on that well, they're saying that, but they all have degrees. So maybe it would be a good idea to get a degree. So that's what really emboldened me to think, you know, and I was always thinking of Prudy Stewart, because I think she'd retired by then. You know, I should see it through. Because I knew what she would have said. "Damn fool. You've gotten this far. You've got like 140 credits." And because I was always working, I would sign up for a class and then four weeks in I'd say oh, this isn't what I thought it was. And I never went through the formal drop process. So I'd wind up with an F. SL: Oh, no. 45:38 WT: So apparently I had the highest GPA of anyone with all 00:32:00 these Fs on their, that's what I heard through my dean. Because he said, "You know, you can retro, you can go back and plead. Some professors will just slam the door in your face. But you can go back and tell a professor what was going on and they'll do a retroactive drop." Because he said, "At some point, you might want," because I was like a 2.7, 2.8-but again, I just said the hell with it, I'm not going to do that. (SL laughs) And this isn't something I brag about to my son. He's a much smarter kid than I was. He's a computer science major. (laughs) So academics, the history. My mom was a history teacher, so I've always loved history. So I feel like it's what I'm learning myself, that's fulfilling enough. SL: So then where did you say you ended up moving after your wife got a job? WT: We would go back, once we started dating, I would take her to Maine. And summer of '82, we went to Maine to visit my grandfather. And when I needed 300 bucks to buy that 00:33:00 printing press, I wrote a letter to my grandfather, saying could you loan me 300 dollars? And he did. Gladly. So we would go back, we picked the last two weeks of the summer to leave town. And Katie was, even though she's from Iowa, she did live in New Jersey for a while. She's always wanted to be on the coast, on the water. And so when she finished her PhD, as she was finishing it, she would go to conferences with other grad students. And she gave her presentation that impressed a faculty member at Orono, who invited her the spring of '87 to come, give a presentation, and consider a job. So she ended up getting a job at University of Maine in Orono. It was a complete fluke. If she hadn't gone to that conference, hadn't made that presentation. And they were in the same field. It was engineering. She had a job offer from Iowa State in natural resources. But they were going, Maine was allied with Santa Barbara and 00:34:00 University of Buffalo for this National Center for Geographic Information. It was an NSF proposal, so all these schools were competing. They wanted to get this, it was a 10-year program. And Maine got it. Maine, Buffalo and Santa Barbara got the-and actually, ironically, Wisconsin was in competition. So this was a big deal. It was a first time they had a sense that this GIS is something, viable future, research future. And they hired her because she came from Wisconsin. So that's why she's been there the whole time. And I just moved the press up there. SL: Okay. Can you talk a little bit about the name for your press originally? I know it was called Landlocked Press. WT: Well that was sort of, Hamady was the Perishable Press, Limited. And I think he's got a perfectly reasonable justification for it. John Bennett was the Gardyloo Press, and "gardyloo" was what you'd yell when you threw, in the streets of London in the 1700s, you'd yell "gardyloo" before you threw your waste out the window so someone below wouldn't get covered. (SL laughs) And other people, Kathy was Salient Seedling Press. So I thought, well, I've got to come up with something spiffy. So where I live in Maine, in Portland, there's a giant lake, Sebago Lake, which has one of the few landlocked salmon populations. A very famous one. One of the lithography professors, when he found out my 00:35:00 name was Landlocked, he's a fisherman, he knew immediately what it meant. Landlocked salmon. So I came up with this metaphor, landlocked salmon. Even though it was landlocked, it survived. So I was thinking well, this is a small press activity, so it was sort of a metaphor for me, the landlocked salmon. After the glaciation, the theory was that when the glaciers receded, the eggs ended up in the landlocked lake, and yet they were able to survive for generations. Because normally, it wasn't Atlantic salmon, which leaves, typically is in a lake, goes down a stream, out into the ocean, at some point in its life, unlike the Pacific one, it will come back up the river, its ancestral river, and spawn, and then go back out to sea. It doesn't die. But this salmon had adapted to a landlocked environment. So that was the metaphor. And it was 00:36:00 just sort of saying well, I'm from the east. But the longer I lived here, I realized I'm living on an isthmus between two lakes. I'm living between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi. So when I moved back to Maine, all my friends were, well, you can't be landlocked anymore. And by then I had started the Tatlin Books imprint. And I felt like that was a more, I won't say honest, but it was a more barebones, Tatlin Books. And he was a Russian sculptor, Vladimir Tatlin, whose work I admired. So I picked Tatlin. And I stopped using, I did a book in '92, it was the last Landlocked Press book. It was a Swedish book. The writer was, again, a really strong writer of the landscape. I figured this would be the perfect book to end Landlocked Press. So I haven't used it since '92. But I printed this huge book, and continued. I started using Tatlin Books in '85. SL: Can you talk a little bit about how your artist books have evolved over the years? Like how things have changed? 51:36 WT: Well, when I was first starting out, I was printing primarily poetry. Editions of 100 to 250. And they were 00:37:00 illustrated. But they were pretty straightforward poetry books. And yet poetry, you're not going to make a lot of money publishing poetry. But more than that, I began to feel, it wasn't till I met a writer in Maine who was a very good poet, he had his own press, and he published like I did. He said, the trouble with being a writer is you're not fulfilled unless it gets published. I had all these artist friends who make prints, primarily printmakers. When they're done with the print, they do another one. There's no like oh, I've got to get this print published. It's beginning, the middle and the end. For a writer, getting published is everything. And it creates this horrible anxiety. It began to occur to me that I might not be doing some of these writers any favors. Because I would publish a book of theirs. And it's always difficult to sell. And so I had to make it the cheapest price possible. So I wasn't making any money off them. And it began to worry me that it 00:38:00 wasn't really fulfilling for them, either. Because once it gets published, then how's it doing? SL: Sure. WT: And I've always, the way I negotiate with a writer is I'll give you 20 percent of the edition. And that's always, no one's ever objected to that. But I began, it wasn't like I felt like a fraud, but I began to think you know, this doesn't seem to be doing them any better. So I started to generate, I'd never done books of my own work, because I'm not a writer. So I started to play around. By then, I'd been printing for so long, and was comfortable with the medium, that I started to play around with book structures and prints of my own, to make my own books. So I'm halfway now. Unless I have a direct contact with a writer, I'm not publishing poetry, not publishing writers anymore. And I worked with two, three writers significantly over the years who I had day to day contact with, or a more personal, enriched relationship with: Karl Young, Mark Rutter and Joe Napora. And I didn't feel like, I didn't have those feelings of guilt or anxiety about publishing 00:39:00 people. Because it is difficult to publish poetry. So I think, I became less of a publisher and more of a book printer. So I don't use the publishing part as much as I used to. And when I say I would work intimately with Mark, Mark Rutter, the current one, we've been working together since 2000. When he comes back in the summer-he moved back to the UK-we work together in the studio. We have these printing sessions. And he's a part time musician. So for him to come and work in the studio together, sometimes we'd be successful, sometimes things wouldn't work. But for him, it was never a waste of time. And we've done a whole host of projects together. Small broadsides, books. We've done four books together, and probably a dozen broadsides in just the short amount of time that we're together. We're in the room together. And with Karl, it was a little bit different. He would just give me the manuscript and then allow me to make changes as it went along. Because his books were so open to, they're so fertile, the text, to me, is so fertile that I would get halfway through the book and say oh, I wish I'd done this. He didn't say well, why start over again, but it never bothered him that I might say, I think I'm going to start, take a different direction with this book. But if you said that with some writers, they'd say, does that mean the book's not going to come out this month? I mean, there was always this pressure, pressure, pressure. And I felt it wasn't fair to the writers for me to allow things to meander. Because the book was actually demanding those. That's why I became more sensitive. The book itself was saying no, this isn't what I want to be. And I think it enriches the book. So suddenly getting the 250 copies was less fulfilling than allowing this book to emerge on its own. 00:40:00 I don't know if that makes sense. So my books have gotten smaller. The editions are smaller. They're more involved, structurally, and they take place over a greater period of time. That's why you have to keep, I may have, at the current rate I'm going, I've got 12 different books going at different rates of completion. So it's still coming out to about a book a year. But I feel like one feeds off the other. And that's again something Hamady sort of instilled in us. Some years he'd be very, do small books, a lot of small books. And then he might do a book that might take two or three years. So that part didn't bother me. But when you have a, and I mean this sort of figuratively, when you don't have a writer who's counting on this book arriving to sort of get this sense of fulfillment, that takes some pressure off. And I felt that that was the part that was grating on the writers, that was 00:41:00 frustrating for them. I thought, am I doing them any favors. So. SL: So how do you find people now to collaborate with? 57:39 WT: Well, I've narrowed the field. I've narrowed the field to the people I've worked with the longest. And I'm still working with the same collaborators I had when I first started. So if you took the first three years, I'm still working with those same people. SL: Mm hmm. WT: But now I'm one of them. Now that I don't mind contributing the graphics to the book. So I'm still working with people like Barb and Jim. And that's, the three of us, back in '79, our first semester. Seventy-nine and '80. And Barb is finishing up her degree. She left and went to Twinrocker, which is where I met Bernie and Katie, my paper makers. So I'm still working with the same people. SL: Can you talk about one of the books that we have here at the Kohler Art Library, Fishtales, that you had done with Barb? WT: Well that came out after the collaboration the Silver Buckle did of the surrealist game, the exquisite corpse. No, what was the book called? Exquisite something. SL: Yeah, it was called, I think that's what it was called, corpse. And then 00:42:00 there was one, another one that was the Exquisite Horse. WT: Correct. Exquisite Horse, right. Exquisite Corpse. So I visited her after the book came out, after that project came out. And we were sitting in the Silver Buckle and we sort of dreamed up this-because we had worked together on books unofficially. If you read the colophons, you'll see that it's very incestuous. Thanks to so and so. So we had done things not directly together. But we decided, let's make it official. So the model was the exquisite corpse-why do I think that's wrong? Anyway, exquisite-and we came up with the project just sitting across from each other like this. SL: Okay. 59:49 WT: And again, it goes back to the landlocked salmon. So we had three elements: the text, the fish and then something underneath that. And that came together fairly quickly. And she came out to Maine with her printed pages. I was still on the press. She came out for a week in '93, I believe. Then we had to decide how to bind it. We'd already decided it was going 00:43:00 to be an accordion. But she'd just received a Fulbright to go to Leipzig. So she wasn't going to be around to bind the book. And that structure is fussy. It has to be very precise. And we had met a binder, Dan Kelm, who lives out in the Easthampton-Northampton, Northampton-no, Easthampton. Easthampton. We knew who he was, and that was his specialty. So we invited him up to visit while we were in Maine together. And that's when we worked out he was going to bind it for us. But that was a huge step, because it was, back then it was fifty dollars a copy, as it turned out. That was a lot of money. One thing about binding your own books is you don't have to pay anybody. And then she was gone at Leipzig. So it was a good thing to hand it off to somebody. That's the first time I'd ever handed a binding off, or book off to somebody. So that was a bit scary. We had to write big checks. But again, it was just one of those happy things. Someone wrote a review of that book and said in these kinds of projects that can end in tears. Because we weren't looking over each other's shoulders. We left after this 00:44:00 initial consultation. We knew where things had to fit, and that was it. It wasn't till we got together I think a year later that we saw what we'd come up with. And it was also the first time that I had illustrated anything. I certainly had lots of memories about what I had printed before. See, I always did the printing. The artist wood give me the plates, woodcuts. I would do the printing. So I was not uncomfortable printing. And I hadn't really thought about it. Because I had done my contribution for the project. I'd done the head. But then I thought well I actually have to knuckle down here and come up with 12 different images, and they all have to work. So that was a big scary. So I had, each page in my mind, I envisioned it, okay, this is my Lissitzky page, this is my Tom Phillips page, this is my Dada page. So I had in my mind, how am I going to figure out what kind of imagery I'm going to come up with? So that's how I did it. I thought, okay. And then I got a text, one of the title page is a text from Jeanette Winterson. It's a line, it has to do with the salmon. You can barely read it. Because I didn't have permission to publish it. So it's kind of obscured. So that was a little bit unnerving. But at the end of it, I thought well, I guess it worked out all right. So that was the first book I really had provided the illustrations for. SL: And where was the review? 01:03:34 WT: It was in Bookways. And there was a picture of the book. So I had reviews in 00:45:00 Fine Print and Bookways. And I think in that issue, there was another issue that was started by Bonnie Stahlecker, I think, about collaboration. We were supposed to write about the collaborative process. And I had written an article for a magazine called Abracadabra which came out of the west coast, about a collaboration I'd done with a woman in Maine, "The Seafarer." It's an Anglo-Saxon text. I didn't have any trouble writing that. But when it came to writing this, it's like, I don't think I want to do this. (SL laughs) But Karl Young said, "Well, if you don't do it, I will." So he's the one who wrote the article. Everyone else wrote about their collaboration. So Karl wrote this wonderful piece about how that "Seafarer" came together. And then there was another article about an exhibition of Hamady's at Columbia College, of student work. And I was in that show as one of his students. SL: You want to talk a little bit about that? WT: I didn't see the show. There was a big show at the Weston called Room, I invert numbers. I think it was called 645. It was the room number for the type shop. And that was a very, they had a nice catalog, a big catalog. And I flew out. My dad was living in Milwaukee. See my dad and go to the opening. So that was a big deal. And we all wrote about our experience in Madison. So that's a good place to start. But this one in Columbia was about design problems. And I never saw the show. But I'd alerted the collector, a collector in Massachusetts, that only collected books from New England book makers. So when I moved out there, I didn't raise my hand and start saying, 00:46:00 "Here I am." Because a lot of people out there didn't have the advantage I did of going to a place like Madison and meeting someone like Walter. They were kind of bumping along on their own. And I felt like I'd gotten a critical jumpstart. I mean, I was able to leap, make a great leap forward, just being here. It was great. I called it a vortex. It's a wonderful period, really from '80 to '84. Probably the best years to have been here for books. So I didn't have any urge to shout about who I was. So that little review of that show alerted this collector in Massachusetts that I was in New England now. So he bought all the books that I was making in Bangor. That was important to him. And then my introduction to the Maine book world was a curator at the Portland Museum of Art. She was the assistant curator of prints and photographs. She was given a turn to have a show. They called it Perspectives. I think it was a way to encourage their scholarship. So she started in Portland. She met, she knew some printers in Portland. And the printers in Portland said, "Well then, if you're going to do that, 00:47:00 you should meet so and so." So it went from a four-person show to about a 12-person show that covered the whole state. So she came up to see me and to meet me. And that was in '89, I think, '88 or '89. And that sort of announced to, there are these book makers. There were some fine binders. [Greg Perot?], who's a classic book binder. And then some people like me. So that was the first time that I was really openly declared as a Maine book maker. SL: Okay. 01:07:30 WT: But I try and stay out of the, because underneath every other rock in Maine is a writer. And as soon as you say you're printing books, again that whole ooh, how could I get something published? And one of the ways I avoid that is I have never set myself up to print things on commission. I've always wanted to have complete control over that. SL: Well you mentioned that it was hard to sell poetry books. And you did have background as a bookseller. 00:48:00 I'm curious, did you ever, and you mentioned Woodland Pattern. Did you ever try selling books in bookstores, or did you- WT: Well, I would go to book fairs. And as my books became more elaborate, I realized that these book fairs, the absolute threshold someone is going to impulsively spend is a hundred, at the maximum. So when I show up with two, three, four, five hundred dollar books, they get a lot of interest. So I went to as many book fairs as I could, because I felt that was the responsible thing to do. And it was also educational. Because when we were, in '79 and '80, when we were starting out, our fellow art students were like, "Well, what do you do?" And then when you said what you did, they'd say, "Well, what else do you do?" And I said well, this keeps me plenty busy. So there was really no book arts world, so to speak. It was confined in the more traditional fine arts. And yet our biggest customers were the New York, Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, people in the graphic design field who'd come up that way. They knew all about, they loved the fact we were using letterpress type. And that someone was carrying the torch. So that worked out, those were our biggest customers were people in the design world, graphic art world. But as they'd 00:49:00 start to retire and die off, they weren't replaced. So I started to think well, what's the next generation? And I think a lot of people, as my books naturally became more involved structurally, I thought it would kind of really present itself in a myriad way. Beautifully printed type alone isn't going to carry, isn't going to be sustaining. And so part of it, it wasn't motivated commercially. By then I was thinking personally, this is the kind of book I want to make. I thought well this might interest the new generation. Because it's so much easier now to get, we used to have to typeset things by hand. Then the computer came. That really changed everything. When you could suddenly keyboard different typefaces, and software, you know, PageMaker. I thought, this is the future. But it didn't happen right away. But I think it's starting to happen now. I think Ruth has seen that in New York, these young kids that are thoroughly versed in the computer. And then they see something like a Hamady book or a book that Ruth's done or anything by Patty or any one of us, and they think, ooh, now this is interesting. So it took a lot longer to get to the point that I thought, I thought it would go 00:50:00 from the old guard to the new guard. But it took a while. It took quite a while. And then the book arts world changed. Dealers were comfortable giving, letting them give you a 10 to 20 percent, they all want 50 percent now. So that makes the books more expensive. And then there was just a tsunami of artist books, mostly one of a kinds. And it kind of swamped out the books that I'm interested in making. And those are fabulously expensive. I saw that in the book fair at Pyramid Atlantic the year that Congress shut down. And it was at the Corcoran Gallery. And I had been to the first Pyramid Atlantic book fair. And then I think a couple of years, two or three years had lapsed. And I could see what was coming next was going to be this tidal wave of artist books, that were big, elaborate productions, very expensive, and the dealers behind them. And I thought, that's not the direction I want to go in. And that's also the same period that people like Julie Chen, they came out of that, or Hedi Kyle. Certainly Claire was always making books all along. But her books started to change as well. The structure was one way to go. And 00:51:00 yet they were still, still had their foot in the sort of fine press. So I saw that there were still plenty of good books being made. But I could see this, if you go on, I think it's Vamp and Tramp, you see their list of books. And you scroll through. There is a certain kind of book now that is the artist book. And I've always been encouraged by my peers to keep making the books I make, because it's the text. And it's again those three writers, Joe Napora, Mark Rutter, but especially Karl Young was such a, and he was translating Mexican texts, Anglo-Saxon, Chinese. So he was, that again appealed to my sort of classical side, the text. They kept saying, "Keep making the books you're making." SL: Well, since you're talking about different kinds of artist books, I wonder if maybe you could tell me in your own words what you think an artist book is. 01:13:17 WT: Well, when we did Breaking the Bindings, I think there were two metaphors. One was the standard Hamady, "A book is a multiple sequential picture plane that cannot be altered by the viewer or reader." And then someone said well, Ezra Pound described a book as being a ball of light in one's hand. And Karl Young would say, "What the hell did he mean by that?" But I always took it, it should 00:52:00 just open your eyes. A book should open your eyes. And I think I revert to those definitions now. Because I'm very broad. Because the fine press, you know, there was fine press, they were very skeptical of what do you mean, a book artist? I'm not uncomfortable saying I'm a book artist. So if backed into a corner, I pull out the printer/publisher. So I think I'm more, I was such a good printer and type, I loved setting type. I love printing type. And not a lot of the people who were printmakers enjoyed that. So they were very happy to have me come along and say, "Would you help me with this book?" Because it meant I was doing the typeset, which I loved to do. So I was a really good printer. But I could also say, there was a side of this that I call the cult of the perfect impression. That's really what it's all about. How well is it printed? And Hamady taught us how to typeset. That's what distinguishes the Hamady students. Because not only are we good printers, but we know how to 00:53:00 handset type. And the old guard could see that. You know, we letter space things, papers, things, brasses. And that really, once you start doing that, it really opens your eyes to the ways letterforms fit. So I think my impression of, my definition of an artist book is as wide open as it ever has been. But I do recognize that there is a certain kind of book that dealers love because they're expensive, and they're going to get 50 percent. So I'm more interested in going to book fairs now. My threshold is three to five hundred, which is still a lot of money. But I like selling directly to people. So if a dealer wants to buy a book from me, I'm saying, you're going to pay the same price as anyone else. I'm not giving you a discount. And that hasn't been a problem. Because my editions have gotten smaller. See, by the time I give 20 percent to the writer, and depending on the artist, I might give 20 percent there. And I've been, the editions get smaller. So I don't have as many to sell as-the books I've done with Mark, I'm always like, when I get done, I finish binding them, I'm like, is this all there is? (SL laughs) There's only 45? I thought we did 80. So that's kind of crushing to think there's only 44 of these. Damn! But by the time we 00:54:00 print these sessions, you know, you get a lot of wastage. Not wastage, but you want things, you want every book to be the same. SL: Sure. 01:16:25 WT: And I'm surprised how often I get that question. Why is there this necessity that they should all look the same? I say, that's just part of the tradition. And that would sometimes happen when you would help someone hang a show, the grad students, and they would give you a print. Or the rare time that you felt like you wanted to buy a print. And then you'd get the print and you'd see the one that was in the show and they're radically different. And you think hmm, this isn't really the print, I want that print, but this is the print I have. (SL laughs) I realized, that's why you try to make them all the same. "Now, I put that in the show because it's a better print." Oh. Okay. I didn't know that. (laughter) SL: Well how would you say that your 00:55:00 time as a UW student affected your career as an artist? WT: Oh, it was transforming. It was absolutely transforming. And I think that window I was here, '79 to '84, was the best, probably the best time. There were other people that certainly came through before and since. But I think there was such a crunch of activity. It was on autopilot. Hamady was the pied piper. And I think the Breaking the Bindings was really institutionally, because he was getting a lot of resistance in the art department. Well, what are you doing in that room? It was a locked room. They were very suspicious. Paper making? And setting type? They were very suspicious of it. That's more of a craft. So I don't think-and then- SL: Who were "they?" WT: His colleagues. SL: Okay. WT: And truthfully, I know how academia works more now, because my wife's 30 years. A lot of the faculty would go out and do workshops. Damer, especially Colescott, and, I'm sure, Meeker. And they would bring in the young blood. They would go out and spread the word and they'd get undergraduates to come here to get their graduate degree. 00:56:00 So there was always that possessive quality. "This is my grad student." And then they would see some of these grad students would get diverted, or distracted, by, "Ooh, I'm going to make books." So I think there was always some of this colleague tension. SL: Okay. WT: And Walter certainly did his share of that as well. But it was a good gene pool for him to draw on. Because each area had this pool of grad students. And I don't think it's ever been the same since then, having so many-I think at one point, there were over 50 print grads. And I don't know what it is now, but I bet it's a fraction of that. So I think the whole structure of art education has changed. They'd retired, and they were all from a different generation. Many of them had gone to traditional art schools, like Wilde, oh, the other painter. They'd sort of been to commercial schools, where they actually teach them things. 00:57:00 And it was kind of nebulous. I remember taking some class, painting classes and some design classes, where the professors were really loosey goosey. Like, "Okay, I just want you to know, you're all going to get an A." (SL laughs) And I was like, what?! Because you didn't get an A from Walter unless you deserved it. And I had a drawing teacher who was, Richard Long, who was, if you got an A from him, boy, you had worked your ass off. So there was that sort of loosey goosey side of it. And yet there was a whole side of the department that I wasn't aware of, other than hearing the dink, dink, dink, the metal department was really-and then I took for granted they had woodworking, they had two full professors teaching woodworking. And it was only one of seven programs in the whole country. So the fact that I was at Madison, they had this really famous metal, they had Fenster and Eleanor Moty. And then you had the two, Breckinridge and oh, what was his name? I've met people who say, "Oh, you went to Madison?" They think of wood or they think of metals. So it was a great place to be. And again, it was just blind luck. I hope that answers your question. SL: Yeah. Yeah, it does. Is there anything else that you'd like to add? WT: Well, it is interesting to look back and just say how damn lucky I was. I mean, you earn your luck. But the fact that I'm in Milwaukee for a family reason. And I booked an extra day so I could come up to see Jim. We all do that for each other. I think we're very close. And I think it frustrates some people. There's some printers who think, you guys are nothing but a cult! (SL laughs) They say it with some affection. SL: Well thank you so much, Walter. WT: That was my pleasure. 1:21:42 [End