They were using as their text a synopsis of Hiroshima Mon Amour, by Marguerite Duras. The papers they made for the book were a beautiful clear pink, with red, brown, and very dark gray pulp images. Kaldewey would make a base sheet of paper, Sperry would apply the pulp image to the front, then the sheet would be couched and another image gently laid on the reverse. By the end of the workshop, they had made several copies of the book.   The following spring Kaldewey invited Prentice to Poestenkill, New York, to direct the installation of his own papermaking studio and to be present while the sheets for the fifty copies for the edition of the Duras book were made. The Kaldewey Press, originally founded in Germany in 1980, moved to this rural Hudson Valley village, two hours north of New York City, in 1984. Kaldewey and Bun-Ching Lam, a composer and artist, live there from April through October. Visiting artists working on the Press's projects stay with them and often help cook the wonderful dinners. During the winter Kaldewey and she move back to New York City and travel.   Situated on a ten acre property in Poestenkill, the large, airy, clapboard house has been altered and added to over the years. A square, two-story tower, which rises unexpectedly behind the house, is a designated landmark and Kaldewey uses an image of it as the Press's watermark. The ground floor of the tower houses an etching press, a lithography press, and a silk screen press. The upper floor of the tower is studio space for visiting artists working on projects. Behind the tower, a renovated horse stable is the print shop, with two Vandercook proof presses and quantities of type.    Back behind a pond is a small red barn. With Prentice's direction, this became the papermaking studio. Pulp vats and couching stations were set up on the ground floor, which has good light and a fine view of the meadows and pond. The upstairs loft provides ample space for a drying system, made from fans and stacks of archival, corrugated cardboard. A well on the property supplies good water but, because the pipes collect sediment during the winter when the house is closed, a filter system has been installed. The studio does not have a beater; since the beginning of paper production at Poestenkill, the Press has purchased cotton rag and linen pulp from Twinrocker. The pulp arrives by United Parcel Service from Indiana, in five gallon pails. Sizing and pigmenting are done at Poestenkill.   Kaldewey enjoys the time he spends each year making paper because it requires a very different set of muscles from those used in setting letterpress type. He makes paper each autumn for the books he will print the next summer. A day's production usually totals sixty sheets, which just fill the drying stack. He says that in the beginning it took him some time to learn to make sheets of even thickness. Imperfect sheets he sets aside and trims later for use in the Press's annual report. The new sheets age over the winter, in preparation for the next summer's printing. Kaldewey finds that cotton rag paper takes letterpress ink very well and also works well with etchings and woodcuts.   The Press issues its books in two groups: those done in collaboration with authors and artists, which appear with the imprint Edition Kaldewey; and those written, illustrated, and printed by Kaldewey himself, which receive the imprint Kaldewey Press. Each artist working on a book at Poestenkill designs his own watermark, which then is used on the paper for his or her book. This personalization of the paper pleases the artists immensely. Part of the energy at Poestenkill comes from the collaboration and problem solving that occur when artists work near each other, eat meals together, and trade ideas over a glass of wine. Sometimes a project takes more than two years to complete. When the printing and images are done, the books have usually been sent for binding to Germany, to Christian Zwang and, more recently, his son, Thomas Zwang. Judi Conant, of Vermont, makes the boxes for most of the Press's books.   Gunnar Kaldewey's world has always been the world of books, although he began his professional life not as an artist or printer but as a rare book dealer. He was apprenticed to a book dealer at age seventeen in Hamburg. The tactile quality of books was always important to him, and he dates his fascination with handmade paper to the beautiful papers used in the 18th century French and German books. Gradually, over many years, he built a collection of special papers, particularly marbled end papers, and learned to distinguish papers made in different parts of Europe. Repairs and restoration were an essential and important part of the rare book business. A binder who worked for Kaldewey used stocks of old papers or sheets taken from damaged or discarded books to mend and refurbish, always striving to match as closely as possible the tone and texture of the book's original paper.   In 1974, Kaldewey met a diplomat in Munich who shared his interest in antique paper and had sources in Japan. Through him Kaldewey was able to purchase a quantity of yellow Imperial Japanese paper made at the turn of the twentieth century. Kaldewey used this elegant paper, which has a wonderful surface and rattle, in the first volume he printed. This book, about a famous French culinary authority, Grimod de la Reniere, was made for fellow members of an all-male cooking club in 1976. By this time, Kaldewey had his own rare book business, with branches in Paris, New York, D�sseldorf, Munich, and Hamburg. He began to show the work of New York artists in a gallery adjacent to the D�sseldorf shop. By the early 1980s, he had published seven collaborative artists' books and two of his own.   Through the years the Press has been a truly international atelier, with books in Russian, Spanish, Italian, Rhaeto-Romance, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese, Tibetan, and English. Artists come from all over the world to work in the Hudson Valley village. In 1997, a workshop called "Making Artist Books Today" was convened at Poestenkill. Twelve small press artists attended. An exhibition of four presses from that workshop�Arte Dos Grafico, Limestone Press, Turkey Press, and Kaldewey Press, collectively called The Rocket Four�will travel to over fifty sites in the United States, South America, Europe, and Japan into the new millennium. A catalog of the workshop, with 197 illustrations, was published in 1998 by Wulf D. von Lucius, of Stuttgart. In his remarks in this publication, Kaldewey makes the following comments about this growing field of expressive work:   Artist books are used as an exchange of information and expression in the artistic community. They stimulate our imagination and curiosity towards foreign languages, cultures and thoughts. They are documents of the awareness of today's world, and often are beautiful because of their spontaneity and the ideas they express.   Much of the richness in the production of Kaldewey Press lies in the wide variety of papers used, both for the printed text and the artist's images. In the book Dreams of a Butterfly, by Chuang Tsu, published in 1995, old Chinese paper is used for the calligraphy by Bun-Ching Lam, the English translation of the poem, and the etchings. The pages are folded diagonally back and forth across each other, forming wings. The thin, silvery, pale gray paper is translucent and a faint image from the page below shines through.   The text of a recent book, The Wind, is a poem by a young, contemporary Tibetan poet, Lha Gyal Tsering, with an English translation by Pema Bhum and twenty woodcuts by Lobsang Wangchu. The text is printed in four colors on handmade paper made in Poestenkill. Between each loose sheet with text is a sheet of brightly colored Tibetan paper, made from the fiber of a variety of daphne, which grows high in the Himalayan Mountains. Each sheet represents a season of the year: blue for winter, green for spring, yellow for summer, and red for autumn. Each verse of the poem depicts the wind in one season. Here are a few lines from the verse about winter:    Oh wind you go freely and wander all about. During the winter now, you cradle in your lap the ancient villages, rocking them back and forth.   In 1996 Kaldewey and Bun-Ching Lam traveled to Tibet and then Nepal, where Tibetan exiles make paper at the Tibetan Handicraft Industry, near Kathmandu. A chance discovery led to a method for making the elegant black covers for The Wind. While observing the papermakers, Kaldewey found some discarded paper pulp that had dried in a basket, giving the paper an embossed wicker pattern. He inquired about the possibility of forming the black cover sheets inside baskets. With great dispatch, a worker went to a basket maker nearby and soon twelve shallow baskets were woven to the right dimensions and became molds for the cover sheets. Several months later the beautifully embossed covers arrived in Poestenkill. The finished book, with its bold, elegant Tibetan script is a good example of the careful blending of two aesthetics. It also exemplifies the wonderful part that chance plays in finding new ways to form paper.   Another rather lengthy trail yielded rich and unusual paper for at least three separate Press books. In the 1980s a three-volume book, Fine Handmade Papers of Japan, by Yasuo Kume, was published in both Japanese and English. It identified approximately four hundred existing paper mills in Japan and gave samples of each mill's paper. Kaldewey obtained the book and went over the papers very carefully. He was especially interested in an unusual, textured brown paper made from the bark of cedar trees. The paper was made by Shusaku Tomi in Wajima. With the help of Japanese sculptor Jun Susuki, Kaldewey wrote a letter and sent it to Mr. Tomi, asking if he would make one thousand sheets of cedar bark paper for him. After a while word came back that the weather had been too hot in the summer, but Mr. Tomi would undertake the order in the fall. Time passed and in the spring another inquiry was sent to Wajima. Word came back that the weather had been very cold and Mr. Tomi's hands had been stiff, so he had not been able to make the paper during the fall or winter. Kaldewey wrote again and assured Mr. Tomi that he was willing to wait. Two years later, Kaldewey returned from a trip to Europe to find eight large wooden boxes waiting for him in the lobby of his New York City apartment building. A note on the customs label advised that if the boxes could not be delivered the contents should be abandoned. Opening the boxes, Kaldewey found a thousand large sheets of cedar bark paper in several thicknesses and three different shades of brown.    Fittingly, the cedar paper was first used as the last page for Jun Susuki's book In the Beginning�. Printed on the richly textured brown paper in both English and Japanese are these words: "Tell me your name please." This is the first sentence of the earliest known work of Japanese literature. Three years later Kaldewey used the cedar paper again, for Pier Paolo Pasolini's book Ciant da li ciampanis, which has five original drawings by Not Vital. The bold black images merge with the text on the heavy brown sheets. Many more sheets of the cedar paper were used in Kaldewey's own book, The Trees. This work has forty-two pages, three on each side of seven long sheets of cedar bark paper. The book folds down and is encased in a narrow wooden box.   The Press continues to have contact with the Tomi family. In 1998, during a three-month stay in Japan, Kaldewey met the Japanese painter Ida Shoichi, who knew the Tomi family well. Several years earlier Shusaku Tomi had been designated a "National Treasure" and an exhibit of his work had toured the country. Kaldewey and Ida went to Wajima, a town on a narrow peninsula reaching out into the Sea of Japan, and met Mr. Tomi's daughter-in-law and grandson, who have carried on the work at the papermill since his death. Kaldewey was warmly welcomed as the patron who many years earlier had placed the biggest order Shusaku Tomi had ever had.   At Poestenkill Kaldewey keeps one room just for paper. Newly made paper for the next year's books lies there, along with papers obtained from presses that have closed and sold their paper with their letterpress type. A large quantity of a silvery gray Chinese paper from the 1940s, which takes ink well, came from a New York press, now closed. Color images of the Chinese director and actor, Chen Shi Zeng, for the forthcoming book, One Voice in Four Parts, by Richard Tuttle, are silk screened on this paper. The transparent image is layered with thin yellow architecture paper behind it, with the text, printed on Poestenkill paper, at the back. The book's circular accordion structure opens to form a lantern-like shape and is accompanied by a video of the actor performing.    Gradually much of the Press's older paper has been used up. A small store of forty sheets of French gold leaf paper made in 1840 was recently used as endsheets for the deluxe edition of 15 Kyoto Gardens, by Kaldewey, published in 1998.    One special book uses paper that is neither old, rare, nor handmade, but is important because it is heavy, standard European Braille paper, made in Hanover. The book is Paul Celan's Der Sand aus den Urnen (Ashes Out of Urns), with drawings by Mischa Kuball. Celan's poems, about the holocaust and the loss of his parents, reflect a search for meaning, as we trace with our finger a message to be read by those in darkness.   Year by year new artists come to work at Poestenkill, while others, like Kuball, will return in the new century to do yet another collaboration. A true collaboration is achieved if the artist and the printer share the same sensibility and enjoy the problem solving. Today our world moves with increasing speed. Coming together to talk and work in a place like Kaldewey's in Poestenkill creates an energy that is nourishing and rare.