Interview with Claire Van Vliet

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM Interview # 1885 VAN VLIET, CLAIRE VAN VLIET, CLAIRE (1933-) Book Artist At UW: 1965-1966 Interviewed: 2019 Interviewer: Sarah Lange Index by: Transcribed by: Teresa Bergen Length: 59 minutes First Interview Session (March 8, 2019): Digital File 00:00:01 SL: So today is Friday, March 8, 2019. I'm Sarah Lange with the oral history program at UW Madison. And I'm talking with Claire Van Vliet, printmaker, typographer and founder and proprietor of Janus Press, which has been publishing handmade books since 1955. Claire is in Newark, Vermont, and I'm at the University Archives in Steenbock Library. Claire, you began teaching at the UW in 1965. Would you be able to tell us the story about how you came to teach here? CV: Yes. I was teaching at the, what's now the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. It was called, I think, the Philadelphia College of Art at that time. And Warrington Colescott came to Philadelphia. I think he must have been having an exhibition at the Print Club, which was only a couple of blocks away from the printmaking department at the Philadelphia College of Art. And I think we must have met at his opening, because I went to all the openings. And invited him over to see what we were doing. And he came. And he was quite impressed particularly with the typographic lab that was being run basically by Jim McWilliams, but also the printmaking students were very involved with it as well. And so we invited Warrington and he came, and he was very enthusiastic. And I believe he had, perhaps had applied or received notice that he was going to have a Guggenheim the following year. So he asked me to apply to the University of Wisconsin for a one-year replacement faculty job, or, actually it was a double sort of thing. Because they were at that point also looking for a lithography 00:01:00 teacher. And so I applied. And he really wanted a book program to be started for the students at the University of Wisconsin. And of course I had quite a background in the industry with bookmaking. So I applied. And he got his Guggenheim. And I went to Madison with Warrington's blessing, and with his also request that I organize the printmaking area, particularly the etching situation, which was a little bit on the chaotic side. And that, I'd say, was why I came to Wisconsin. Also, I have to say, I got paid three and a half times more than I was being paid at the Philadelphia College of Art. So it was a real opportunity for me. One of the things that was great about 00:02:00 Warrington was that he insisted that people who replaced him also get his level of salary. SL: Okay. And Claire, what did you think of Madison when you got here? CV: Well, I thought Madison was pretty nice. You know, my family is from, my mother's side from across the line from northern Minnesota in northern Ontario. So I was quite, the landscape reminded me a lot of Fort Francis. And you know, kind of flat. (laughs) And lots of water and trees. And of course being on the shield there, it had some pretty wild weather. I'm sure it still does. It seemed to me the storm front went through 00:03:00 about every three days. And my sinuses had a hard time keeping up with it. (laughs) SL: Oh, really? CV: Yes. But anyway, I thought Madison was certainly a very attractive town. And I had an apartment that was within walking distance, because I didn't drive. And so I had an apartment on top of a building at the end of Pinckney Street right above Lake Mendota. It was lovely. So that was my impression of Madison. It was good, because I was right up there near the Capitol Square. And there was grocery shopping and all that kind of thing there. And so it was easy for me to get back and forth to the university. The art department itself seemed to be a bit at sixes and sevens. Certainly 00:04:00 the etching area was. And I had to go up to the department store and get some acid baths, some I forget what they're called. (laughs) Senior moment. Anyway, to get so that we had an acid room that was functional. So there was acid on the floor and had to be cleaned up. It was, let's say, not really very well-organized. And coming from a school like the Philadelphia College of Art, which did not have any endowment, I have very strong feeling that when you're a teacher, the students are your customers. So I really wanted to get everything very shipshape for the first days of class. So I kind of rushed around and got everything cleaned up and ready. SL: Can you talk a little bit more about what you did in the space? CV: Pardon? SL: Can you talk a little bit more about what you did in the space to get it ready? CV: Well, mainly it was just a huge amount of cleanup. For printmaking, one needs to have a clean space. I mean you can't really, if you're trying to create, or let's say you're trying 00:05:00 to encourage people to be professional, they have to have a space that they can put their paper down on and not get it covered with dirt. SL: Sure. And what about some of the students that you taught while you were here? Could you recall some of them? CV: Well, I would say that the students at the graduate level were of a very high caliber. The students at the undergraduate level had, and I think this is a problem in most university art departments. If you're going to do prints, it's really a good idea if you know how to draw. So I thought that they were not prepared for making their own images. So I had to really encourage them to get and keep sketchbooks and develop 00:06:00 ideas. Of course, printmaking is different from a lot of the other classes that undergraduates take because in printmaking, the students have to come up with their own ideas. What you're doing is teaching them the technical part, but you're not making still life set ups and models and giving them specific color problems and other sorts of things that tend to happen with undergraduate art classes. Quite appropriately so. But with printmaking, people have to kind of figure out what their own ideas are, and how they're going to use the medium to express those ideas. So that was a challenge. They weren't used to that. But the graduate students were fine. And I taught a graduate seminar in printmaking for the year. And that's the class that we really developed the book making in. And we did that on the basis of them learning to both integrate their images with text, which there's a long tradition of that, of course. And the other thing was is to introduce them to different forms of printmaking for fine arts. Particularly the use of business machines for that. And for that we got a 00:07:00 grant from the Graduate Research Committee. SL: Okay. CV: Yeah. SL: And can you talk a little bit more about how you got the book arts program going here? Because that was one of the things that you did while you were here. So it sounds like- CV: Well, that was at the request of Warrington. Warrington Colescott. He really wanted that to happen. So he asked me would I please do that. So I was able to pretty much hit the ground running, because I'd already worked in the industry and knew what we needed. So within a couple of weeks I had a proposal in front of the Graduate Research Committee. And they were very receptive to the whole idea. And I must say that the secretarial staff in the art department was also very good. Because once we got approval and the grant, they were very good at getting purchase orders, and walking them from this place to that place so that things happened very, very quickly. So I will say that in terms of the regular staff, like the maintenance people and the secretaries and the research committee, I 00:08:00 have to say, my impressions of the university couldn't have been better. SL: And Claire, I know that you got some additional equipment, right? CV: Oh, yeah. They had no equipment. SL: Okay, they didn't have any. CV: They didn't have anything for book making. So we got an AB Dick offset press. We got a Newark plate maker. We had a mimeograph machine. And we got a Vandercook. And we got type. It had all the things that needed to go with it, with the Vandercook proofing press. I got three different typefaces which I thought would give them-because we had to be careful with our money-but that it would give the students a, you know, a lot of leeway with how they were going to work with it. So we got the sentry expanded, which is a very kind of a 00:09:00 pedestrian face. But that could be good with artwork that was kind of lean and mean. (laughs) And also the Palatino, which is very classic. And then go the optima, which is a very legible sans serif. And so those three typefaces are what we started with. And we had to get type cabinets. Of course one thing to remember is back in 1965, letterpress was still a very viable, commercial way of printing. So these materials were not unusual to get. SL: Okay. CV: And so we did have to, once all those kinds of normal printing 00:10:00 materials started going through the purchasing department, they wanted to make sure that we were not in any way going to impose on the state printing contract. They wanted to be assured, which we could assure them, that pretty much everything that we were doing was going to be done by hand, and we certainly weren't going to be interfering with the commercial printing that was necessary for the university. Which was totally appropriate for them to question what we were doing with this equipment. SL: And Claire, could we talk a little bit more about maybe some of the specific students that were in your courses? Like maybe Bill Weege, or I don't know if you knew John Risseeuw? CV: Bill Weege was in graduate seminar. And of course he was extremely useful and helpful for us, using the small ABD offset press. And the offset press used paper plates, which we-oh, we also had a Xerox machine. Back in those days, Xerox machines had to be rented. And I still think that they do rent quite a bit. But anyway, you leased your Xerox machine. So we had that as well. And so the paper plates were made, I think, on the Xerox machine. Because we didn't have like a real dark room situation for making metal plates for the AB Dick. But Bill was very helpful. And one of the students that was in the class 00:11:00 was Lois Johnson. And of course she really took to the offset press like crazy, and ended up using that throughout her career a great deal for her printmaking, and also when she later started teaching at the Philadelphia College of Art. Was very instrumental in them also offering offset as well as letterpress in the printmaking department. And setting up the Baroski Center, which has a big Heidelberg press. And they do artist prints in that at the University of the Arts. So it was pretty seminal for her. And for Bill, he was working as a printer, as an offset printer. So his capabilities were very welcome in the group. Another, I can't remember who some of 00:12:00 the other students were. You know, it's fifty years ago now, isn't it? (laughs) SL: Sure. CV: But those are the two that stand out the most for the graduate seminar. SL: And what about, just kind of setting the scene here. Who else was on faculty? We know that you were replacing Warrington Colescott. Who else was teaching? CV: Right. Well, Jack Damer came. He got the litho job. He'd just graduated from Carnegie Mellon. He's a very, very good lithographer. But all of his equipment was out in the hallway. And I stepped on quite a few toes in being very forward. I was only going to be there a year. But Jack was building a career. So I was very forward in pushing for them to find space for his classes. Because he could hardly be conducting litho classes in a hallway. I mean, the presses were in the hallway, the stones. There was no classroom. (laughs) So that was a little remarkable. But I think they were in the hallway because nobody had taken the time to set them up. And maybe they had been in there with the etching studio before, which would have made everything pretty crowded. 00:13:00SL: Oh, sure. CV: So I think that might be the reason why it was out in the hallway. Though around the corner, there was a smallish room--you know, smallish, like the size of a large bedroom-that seemed to be empty. And I immediately found out about that room. It wasn't enough for Jack. Also, it didn't have water, which you absolutely need for lithography. And the maintenance man said, "I don't think that's assigned." I thought oh my goodness, that's a good place for the typographic studio. And they said, "Put a big piece of paper over the glass in the door." (laughs) Which I did until our equipment got there. And let's see. The other faculty were, it was Don Anderson and Phil Hamilton. Those were both in sort of the 00:14:00 lettering and advertising and that kind of area. Of course, all of this was so much more primitive than that kind of thing is now. Now, of course, with the digital art departments have almost been completely subsumed into the graphic arts. But that was not true at that time. And so I think Phil Hamilton was pretty, and so was Don Anderson, they were pretty happy to have the letterpress be part of the program. And then there were a lot of painters and potters and that kind of thing. SL: I know that ultimately you decided not to stay at the UW. CV: I did. SL: And you were on the committee for, I guess, somebody new to come onboard. And they ultimately decided to bring on Walter Hamady. Could you talk a little bit about why you decided to move on? And then a little bit about your role on that committee? CV: Well, it was a strange place to be teaching. There were 29 men on the faculty and one woman, Marjorie Kreilic. So it was very, it was not very collegial. I think my feelings would have been very different if I had not replaced Warrington. If Warrington would have been there, I think that would have been fine. Because he's a very collegial-he was a very collegial person. And so it wasn't very much fun. Because the faculty seemed to be pretty much, as I say, not 00:15:00 very collegial. And also, my job was just a one-year appointment. They wanted me to stay a second year because Warrington got a second year on his Guggenheim in Rome. But I kind of had had enough of-it was pretty lonely. Though I'm not saying, Marjorie Kreilic. was very welcoming and very pleasant. I also, I had some difficulties with them because they, I thought I went there as a visiting lecturer. And I was already tenured at the University of the Arts. So they changed my title to something like a, what was it, it was sort of like, I can't remember now. But anyway, it was a definite demotion. Whereas a visiting lecturer can be anything. But I think they made me like a visiting 00:16:00 assistant professor, which was the kind of job that usually was given at the university at that time to somebody who was hired but who hadn't completed their PhD but had high hopes. And so I was a little miffed with the overall administration because of that. And that had kind of soured me a bit in trying to fight for me having what I thought I was hired as be what I was hired as. Because it didn't speak very well for a tenured faculty person to-(laughs) I mean, I had my graduate degrees and had been teaching for seven years at the University of the Arts. So it was all, let's say it 00:17:00 was a little sticky, a little bureaucratic. (laughs) And that's the kind of thing that institutions, unfortunately, keep shooting themselves in the foot about. Because they end up disenchanting people. SL: Sure. CV: So that was part of it. The other part was I sort of had lots of money in my pocket as far as I was concerned. And I found somebody to take my replacement, it was Moshe Smith, who was a visiting faculty in Menomonie. So he was really happy to come down to Madison because he felt like he was languishing up in Menomonie. I think he was used to living in big cities. SL: And you were on the committee for a new faculty member, is that right? CV: Yes. They set up that they were hiring. I mean, they hadn't told me, it's not like I was considered for the job. So they wanted to have somebody who was going to teach the typography. So the only person they had was Walter Hamady. And he was largely self-taught, and had just graduated from Cranbrook. But I thought he would be fine. I'm not sure they had any other applicants, either. SL: Oh, really? CV: At least not any that I knew of. SL: So it 00:18:00 was, do you think it was hard to- CV: He was the only person that I was in on an interview of. SL: Do you think it was hard to find teachers of the book arts at that time CV: Well, you know, in a college situation, probably. There weren't that many places. There might have been somebody from Indiana, because Terry Anderson was teaching there and he was a very, very good teacher. But to get somebody who had an MFA, which the university might have required, would have been more difficult, I think. There would be plenty of people who had undergraduate experience. I mean, Scripps College had its book printing program going forever, and so had Mills and then of course they had a bunch of presses in the various houses at Yale and at Harvard and Dartmouth, of course, had. But these were all basically undergraduate programs. So there might have been people who knew how to do the work. But they didn't, weren't really, didn't probably have the degrees. That would be my guess. SL: And then you decided 00:19:00 to become an independent artist, and not to rely on teaching as a primary source of income. CV: Right. SL: Could you talk a little bit about how you made that choice? CV: Well, at that time, you know, there was a very active print market. And it was a print market that they would buy the prints wholesale. Galleries and also people who went around the country, like Ferdinand Roten and then Marson Graphics and Lakeside. There was a lot of activity at that time in prints for people, in a sense. And so I was able to sell editions. I was just distributing some of the last bits of my prints this last year. And I look at them, I say oh, I got two copies of that. How big is the edition? 00:20:00 Oh, three hundred! Oh, for heaven's sakes. They're all gone! (laughter) And so there were a lot of, there was a lot of printmaking activity. And of course I was used to that. I'd been on the board of the Print Club of Philadelphia, because they always had a couple of artists on the board. And so I was used to selling prints. Making prints and selling them. And I will say that from 1955 to, before that, because I started making prints in '51, that my prints supported my book habit. SL: Okay. CV: And of course I was not in a position to do more than basically live out of a trunk. Because I hadn't really settled on any one place or any one property, and had lived in a number of different countries. So pretty much my, I was very portable. But you can't be portable if you want to have printing presses. (laughs) So then when I moved here, it was to buy a house. And I moved here because I like the clouds. It is one of the cloudiest, with most variety of clouds in the United States right here on this 00:21:00 plateau in northern Vermont. So I was very taken with the clouds. And wanted to be somewhere where that would be my subject matter. So then I got a printing press. And slowly the books took over. So I would say from 1975 on, the books have supported my print habit. So that's, and there was a big shift once the big contract shops started printing and working with important artists, celebrity artists from New York. And I remember talking to Ken Tyler because he was kind of interested in getting into doing some books until he realized how kind of un-economic they are. (laughs) But he told me, and this was back, oh, it must have been around 1978 or nine when he was down outside of New York City. We went around his shop. And he'd invited me down. And he'd invited me to come down and stay overnight and all that kind of thing. It was 00:22:00 very nice. And he was just starting to set up paper. And I'd been making paper at Twinrocker. And he showed me a print. He said, "Well this print is going to have to retail for 350 dollars. Because this is, we can't make a print for less than that and maintain ourselves." And I remember getting on the train that night with the 00:23:00 person who'd gone down there with me and saying, "Wow. He doesn't have any freedom. We can make ten dollar prints." So, anyway, once the print dealers stopped running around the country to all the print clubs and the museums and getting out their wares. And to the colleges. When I was at the University of Wisconsin, the person from Roten came through. And I know I bought Glia and a Radoff from him. And he had all his wonderful prints out there. And they did master prints as well as 00:24:00 contemporary prints. So it was a much more freewheeling and open, but snooty time, in terms of prices and all that kind of thing. So, when I moved here and got a press, I started making the books and also was selling the prints. And I was just on leave from University of the Arts. And I had made $4500 that year. And I went back and they said, well, and of course this is a little bit of sexism, they said, "Well, we can hire you back for what you were making when you left here, which was $4500." So I looked at my husband and said, "I think I'll just stay home and make prints." (laughter) And keep going. So that was fine. So the next basically eight or nine years, 00:25:00 I would say the prints were supporting the bookmaking operation. Which had been, you know, kind of going along. But it took me a long time to figure out sort of more innovative ways of making the books. Because things were pretty cut and dried, because the industry, which was where I had started, was pretty cut and dried. And so to make more experimental things took some time to build up. And I remember my husband was a glassblower at Madison. And he said, "My God, the students are learning in the first two weeks what it took us two years to figure out." SL: Oh, wow. CV: In Harvey's studio, when they set up the studio glass movement in Madison. And sort of the same things with the books. I think it's, in terms of the books it's pretty amazing what people can learn in the workshops. I mean, all these different centers for the book all over the country that give wonderful, wonderful workshops. SL: 00:26:00 Well speaking of the different book structures, your book Woven and Interlocking Book Structures, in that book you describe how to make books with various structures. CV: Right. SL: And one of the examples refers to your book Aunt Sallie's Lament. Could you talk a little bit about how you developed that book, and kind of the issues related to the design and printing of it? CV: Well, Aunt Sallie's Lament, I would say, was-well, let me step back. In 1980 there was a conference that was run by Terry Ballinger at the library school at Columbia. And it was getting a whole bunch of printers together. You had to be a printer or a binder or a typographer, somebody who was casting type, that kind of thing, to be invited to this conference. And they invited Hedi Kyle who was at that time working, I think, at the, I think it was the, I can't remember whether she was at the Bronx Botanical Gardens. I think that's where she was. But anyway, she showed a way to make a slip case that was without glue. And that, for me, was a real wow moment. Because I had had difficulties with the, with any commercial binding. Because of the kind of glue they use. The hot glue. It's very destructive. And that had been a disaster on a book I printed in 1962, The Country Doctor, by Kafka. So that opened a real door. So when I wanted to do Aunt Sallie's 00:27:00 Lament, I had been, so this is quite a few years later, I was in New York at the Center for the Book. And I think I had done a workshop. But Hedi came in, this was when she was still living in New York, and had opened up a package that she had just gotten back from an exhibition. And it was a Japanese kimono dolls that she had made a woven piece that went through them so that you could either have them stacked or you could open them out. But they would stand up, unlike mostly paper dolls, or those strings of dolls that one can make. So anyway, I thought, oh. So we experimented with doing something. And she made a number of models. And I did, too. And then on my way-because one of the things that I had wanted to do with Aunt Sallie's Lament was to reveal the mutterances, 00:28:00 that the mutterances are very symmetrical. Which is something, I mean, I'm not all that parsing poetry. And it had taken me a while to realize that the mutterances did come around full circle on themselves, and they were very symmetrical. So I had wanted to make it into a quilt book. But to have it be that there were cutouts so that one was aware of these mutterances and aware of the fact that they came around full circle. Well, we were fooling around with it, using the kimono dolls. But we were staying within the standard rectangle. On train home I thought, why don't I just cut off one corner and turn it into a diamond? And that's what happened. And that's how come that got made. And so that way one could have the symmetry of those mutterances. Like, "Fool of a woman," and, "Oh, lord." And then there is, when you get to the high point, it's "ahh." Which is of course when she is with the medicine man. (laughs) And so, and I made it out of handmade paper. Luckily I'd been working with Katie MacGregor and Bernie Vinzani and we could make paper that was made out of abaca, which could really withstand all that folding. Very strong. And so designed it in a number of different colors. Might as well, since it was not 00:29:00 possible to make a strip that was long enough for the whole book. And so that allowed us to change the mood by changing that strip color from I think pink to kind of a purple to a gray at the end. Which is when she's an old lady looking back. So I would say that the structures have been very, very dependent on the hand papermaking. And the research that people like Kathy and Howie Clark have done, and also Katie MacGregor, who is really amazing with how she developed while she was at Twinrocker, making the colors work well in the fibers. She just kind of has a magic touch for suspending the pigments. Because the things are not dyed. It's pigments that are suspended in the fibrils of 00:30:00 the macerated cotton. So that really opened a lot of doors to have these different non-acidic papers available. And papers that were essentially lightfast. And also papers that were strong enough to be paper bindings. I've always been somewhat skeptical of cloth bindings. They rub on the shelf. And the leather bindings, unless they're allamtod pig or goat or something like that, or just standard vellum, they don't stand up very well from use. And certainly calf dries out badly in our centrally heated houses. And so it was just a miracle for me to have this improved paper palette, and to be able to start making the paper, making the books with handmade paper, instead of machine-made paper, which of course has a strong grain and is usually made out of wood 00:31:00 pulp. And while, I mean, certainly the Mohawk papers were archival. But a lot of other papers were not. They certainly were not lightfast. So I mean, that's kind of long-winded. But anyway, Aunt Sallie's Lament, making it out of the handmade paper was great. But it meant that as you turned the page, it was still the same color. And the when they asked me to do an edition of it for Chronicle Books, I thought, well, and this is, of course, one of the reasons it's very nice to come up through the 00:32:00 printing industry, rather than just having learned it in school. I thought well, you know, you print the other side at a different time. (laughs) So let's make it, let's change the colors as we go through. But let's not make the book impossible to make by using the same structure. We will use a different structure. And the structure I used is the one that is in Sam's Sandwich, which is by David Pelham. And it's the most fantastic book. You open up and it's all these wonderful things that you keep opening up until finally you've got this sandwich. So it basically turns it into a block book. But it doesn't have to be a full page 00:33:00 block folio on top of each other. You can have a cutout that pastes down onto the next one. And so that's what we did at Chronicle Books. We made a cutout so there was a tab, a large tab, that went down to the, or onto the next page, rather than the, it had been made like the normal kids' block book. And so that was fun. And then there are 23,000 of those printed. (laughs) And I got to go to Hong Kong. Because we did not print them with four-color process. We printed them with actual colors. And luckily there was a big stack of Permalyn cover that was sitting in Hong Kong. And I don't know whether, maybe I shouldn't make this as an aside, but you can always edit it out. In the United States, we talk about people dumping, like dumping steel and dumping 00:34:00 stuff. We dump paper. And so there was this wonderful Permalyn sitting over there. So the interior of the book was printed on the Permalyn. So if you look at it carefully, you'll see that it's really nice paper on the inside of the Chronicle Books. And it has a little pattern in it. It's very, very nice. So I thought well, gee, let's not do four-color process for this book. That might get a little muddy in and around the fact that I wanted it to be the stitches, which are the words, that those would be reversed. So we don't want to get any kind of, if things get a little bit out of sync on the press, that could become not so clear. And that was a challenge to 00:35:00 figure out how to do the sheets with these solid colors. Because we could only print four colors on each side. So that also meant things had to be kind of figured out. So I went to Hong Kong, and that was very, very interesting to do, for press checks. And then Chronicle Books, I think, had a hard time figuring out how to sell the books, and they remaindered them. So I bought about three thousand on remainder from them. And before we would, I think one of the reasons, the problem, that they did have a problem, it came out the same year as the last of the Griffin and Sabine books. So the Griffin and Sabine 00:36:00 was the one that got put up on the counter. You know. SL: Okay. Sure. CV: Because it was very popular for Chronicle Books. So probably we should have waited a year. (laughs) SL: I'm curious, Claire, how did you get connected with Chronicle in the first place? CV: Well, Nancy Reed, who had been an assistant at the Print club, became one of their, what was she? Let's see. Sort of their, hmm. What was her title there? She had an MBA and she had been a student at the Philadelphia College of Art in the book making department, in the book making program or class, I should call it. Because it was printmaking department but book making class. And she was sort of a financial officer there. And of course she was very familiar with the Janus Press. And so she suggested-they did a previous book. They did the Bread and Puppet: St. Francis Preaches to the Birds. So this was the second book that I did with Chronicle Books. So anyway, we got the remainder. And before I would ship them out from here to people, I would go through and, they weren't very craftsmanly, the craftsmanship of the production was not very tip top. But every time I came across a book that I didn't have to do a lot of little fiddling with and trim here, and that kind of stuff, and trim there, so that everything lined up, I would set it aside. And we accumulated about 120 of these ones that were really good. And the cover of Aunt Sallie's Lament is, you know, a plastic cover paper. And not the same as the interior. And so my coworker, Audrey Holden, and I started fantasizing about playing with these books. And maybe adding papers to them and making more complex cutouts and maybe making a special edition. And so that's how Aunt Sallie's Altered came about. And partly because I was 00:37:00 really kind of in the long run not happy with the binding that they had done in China on the commercial edition. SL: And Claire, how do you think your customers and maybe your readers responded to these different versions of Aunt Sallie's Lament? CV: I don't know. (laughter) SL: Okay. Well I wondered if we could talk a little bit about the Kohler Art Library. They have a standing order for your books. CV: They do. But when I was at the university, I did not sell the books there. They were sold to the Memorial Library. SL: Okay. CV: To the rare book department. And the Kohler Art Library, 00:38:00 I mean, I just figured they bought art books. SL: Sure. Mm hmm. CV: And it was only when I would go back to Wisconsin and visit that Marjorie Kreilic was a very good friend of Bill Bunce's. So that's when I met Bill. SL: Okay. Can you tell us a little bit about that? CV: Well, just that he was very enthusiastic. But you know, I wasn't around that much. We might have had dinner together or gone in and visited and he showed me other books, and that kind of thing. But it was all pretty much kind of 00:39:00 beginning back in 1965. And I might have been visiting up through the '70s when Bill was there. But it was a very formal relationship. But he was wonderfully enthusiastic. SL: And they continue to now, I guess, did he start buying your books then? He started that relationship. Is that how it happened? CV: Yes. Yes, he set up the standing order. SL: Perfect. CV: And some of the earlier books that I had done before I came to Madison, I think I made an appointment with the rare book librarian while I was there. And they might have gotten the early Kafka books. The Country Doctor, and The Parables and Paradoxes, I'm not sure. SL: Okay. And I guess kind of, unless 00:40:00 there's anything else you'd like to add, I wondered if we could maybe wrap up by kind of maybe any final thoughts that you might have about your time here at the UW, or how it impacted your career? CV: Well, it certainly impacted my career in that I was very careful with my money. I mean, I had been living pretty close for many years. And it gave me the wherewithal to come here and to put a down payment on real estate so that I could start accumulating all the heavy things that go with printing. (laughs) They aren't so heavy now, I know, but they certainly were back in 1965. And so I would say that economic boost was really important. I mean, I've had one other big 00:41:00 economic boost, which was the MacArthur, which also came along a couple of years after Aunt Sallie. I think only two years. And allowed, and that allowed me to develop even more of the woven and interlocking book structures. And so that artists and printmakers could start to make books that are made with single sheets and put them together in ways that can also, they can be taken apart and then put back together again if they want to. Just sort of the whole idea of working with the book in a more organic way. But I would say that the most important thing that the University of Wisconsin gave me was that, and 00:42:00 that's thanks to Warrington pushing so hard for me to be paid exactly what he was paid, was that I was able to save well over half that money. I mean, such small numbers then as now. (laughs) It's just sort of crazy. But anyway, I had about eight thousand dollars in my pocket and was able to put four thousand dollars on a house here that didn't have any water or electricity. (laughs) Or any of those things, but at least it had a roof. It had a new roof. SL: Well, thank you so much Claire. This has been very nice talking with you. CV: Well, and if there's something else that you 00:43:00 want to expand on or anything or fill in, feel free, Sarah, to call me. SL: Okay, thank