Walter Hamady: Well it all happened because of Cranbrook and Larry Barker, because of getting involved with printing and book making. Remember this was about 1964. There wasn't much of anyone making paper then. Douglass Howell was making paper and Larry had learned paper from Douglass. Larry's father had a place out on Long Island where he would go visit. Larry fixed up a little tutorial and visited Douglas and learned how to make paper, and then he went back to Cranbrook. Maybe before the teens George Booth, the founder of Cranbrook, had a private press and a little paper mill of some sort, and Larry found a lot of stuff. I think he found a beater over at the Kingwood School for Girls�WHat it was doing there I don't know�and the moulds, WHich had lavish watermarks on them, were all clogged up with dried pulp. So, anyway, Larry combined WHat he found still surviving and then, with WHat he learned from Douglass, started making paper. At that time, everyone in printmaking at Cranbrook had to make some paper once, that's all. If you found it useful, go ahead and do it some more; if you didn't care about it, then don't do it. As every printmaker WHo has made paper knows, your knowledge about it improves so much.    BD: You know WHat's involved, you see how it works�   WH: Yeah, if you know how to make paper yourself, you can figure out every piece of paper you'll ever see for the rest of your life, or at least you've got a good handle on it. So it's getting your hands on it and doing it. Having this specific information is empowering.   BD: So this is WHere you pulled your first sheet. Wasn't good paper available in those days?   WH: Not a !#%! of a lot. There was a little from England and from Italy and France. I think that was about it. That time was also the beginning of the revolution in printmaking. Tamarind had gotten started not too long before, so the revival of lithography and the upsurgence of printmaking as an artform were going gangbusters. There was interest in paper, but only the usual stuff was available. For instance, people didn't know about the handmades from the Miliani mill in Fabriano.   As far as papers being imported went, there was post-war prejudice. I don't think people know this. Because the French were our allies, Arches and other French papers became the standard. Many wonderful German papers just didn't surface here. Maybe ten years ago you could get them in England and maybe you could get a couple of them here�the Zerkall papers, Nideggen and Frankfurt�but you could never get the Hahnemuhles WHich now come in: Biblio and Gutenberg. Many of these papers were certainly interesting and just as good as anything French, but the dealers just didn't want to take them on. Someone would come into your art store for, say, "a ream of Arches"; they knew WHat it was. But if the salesman had said, "How about this Hahnemuhle?" they would say, "WHat's that?"   Anyway, that's WHere it started with me, with Larry Barker at Cranbrook, and I liked it. I did it because it was physical and, of course, the product you made was something you couldn't buy. So in making books or making prints or WHatever you're going to do with this stuff, it gives you another option and amplifies the statement you are trying to make.   BD: In other words in making your art you are taking it a step back, you are printing your art on art. That is, you have further control over the medium you are working on or with, and you have created it to your liking.   WH: I don't consider papermaking to be an art.   BD: But your art becomes more YOU?   WH: Exactly! It's one more thing you can control...the color, the texture, the value. There's something about it, too, that is psychological or poetic or personal, to know WHere the rags come from, WHen you wore them.   BD: So then you use only rags that you have processed, not half-stuff?   WH: Yes and no. I have and do use half-stuff, but mostly I use rags that I have collected or worn myself.    That reminds me of a story that happened early on. I was printing a poem by the writer Paul Blackburn, called The Assassination of President McKinley. I asked him to send some rags so I could make some paper out of his clothes. He sent all these shirts and stuff and I tore them up and took them down and beat them into pulp. WHen I went down there in a couple days, the stuff was starting to get a fermented head on it, and I thought, "Jesus, the damned stuff didn't get washed. Dirty clothes he sent me." So I quick formed it into paper. It never did mildew or rot or stink, but it was funny. Sometimes people send you old underwear and these strange fabrics. I like clean rags! Clean cotton or clean linen rags WHere the threads have an integrity of color, so that WHen you make the paper you have a better chroma.   About five years ago I was worried that I wouldn't be able to make paper any more. WHen Kent Kasuboske was my assistant here, I just supervised the making of the pulp and he would form the sheets. Young and strong, nothing fazed him. My shoulders are basically worn out�the rotor cuff thing, just old age, you wear them out. But then I made that camouflage paper last year, no problem. I guess I still have some forearm strength.   BD: WHat size sheets are we talking about?   WH: Oh, I guess 17" X 22". Not like those big jobs that Kent could pull. I don't think I could lift that much any more.   BD: Don't I remember your kids helping you make paper?   WH: Yes, Laura made some paper WHen she was four or five, using a little bitty mould from a screen and mould maker from the mountains above Barcelona. The old guy had given it to Larry Barker. I thought, "That's perfect for Laura's hands. So I mixed up some pulp and she made paper. I said "Laura, you know if you make enough of that, I'll make a book." So that was the tiny book that turned out to be the Quartz Crystal History of Perry Township.   BD: Your name for your paper, WHere did that come from? WHat does it mean?   WH: Shadwell; it's the birth place of Thomas Jefferson. He's one of my heroes. You know, at that time I was reading a lot of Jefferson and I thought he was great and relevant. I was making paper and I needed a name for it, so I just called it Shadwell.   BD: And "Perishable Press," WHy did you name it that?   WH: Well, I was looking for something that started with a "P" of course.   BD: WHy ?   WH: Cause you're a dumb kid and don't know any better, I guess. I remember looking in a dictionary and it was either going to be Parthenogenic or Perishable, and I guess because I have a sense of humor it became Perishable, and then for good measure, of course, I added Limited to it. And then later people said: "WHy the hell did you name your press with such a WHimsical name WHen it's such serious work?" Well, I named it that to reflect the human condition...it's both limited & perishable.    BD: Owww. WHat is that, a "Walterism"?   WH: Very profound...but it came after the fact, obviously.   BD: And then WHere did printing come in?   WH: In my undergraduate days at Wayne State I was taking geology & geography classes and a lot of art history, but not many studio art classes. I figured, in the studio either you know or you don't know, so learn something you don't know. At the end of each geology class I would go out and see WHat I just studied. The way you travelled then was to see WHere you knew someone WHere you could crash, have a meal, and see people you loved and cared about, then go on to the next place.    My first stop from Detroit was Iowa City. This was before the interstate, and I could get there in a long day. I had an aunt and uncle there. They had befriended Daniel Lang, a printmaker from Oklahoma, and bought some of his prints. He was staying there crashing the same as I was. So we went downtown for a beer and on the way back he said "let's see if Harry's still up." It happened to be Harry Duncan and he was up. So Dan says, "Harry makes books. Harry, show him a book."    Out comes this thing and it looked real. I thought that all books came from the book store. It never occurred to me that someone made the things. I was very impressed and wanted to know more about it. I asked if I could come the next day and watch. He was printing a book of four short stories by James Agee. I watched this and it was very moving. Before I left, Harry went into the job case and gave me a ligature. From there I went on to Colorado and the Rocky mountains to my geology.    This sort of gestated for a couple of years at Wayne. Then I began a direct study with a guy there WHo didn't know that much more than I about letterpress printing. A friend of my mom was a musicologist at Detroit Public Library, and he told me about this guy there, Robert Runser. He was the chief of the technology library, and I went to see him. I walked in and said "How do you print a book? I understand you know how to do it." I would probably have just thrown someone out of my office, but he excused himself, went into the stacks, and came back with a copy of Printing for Pleasure and a copy of a bookbinding book by Douglas Cockerell. He gave me the two books and said "There it is!"    So I went away and started to read the book on printing by John Ryder. It said type was set upside-down and backwards, so I got a composing stick and started to put the type in with the face down and the feet up and backwards, and I set a couple of lines. Then I went back to the book to see how you turn this stuff upside down so you can see WHat the hell you're doing. That's how %$#@ stupid I was. I worked through the first ten thousand mistakes trying to figure out how you do this thing. Five weeks later I basically had a book. It was illustrated and printed and I took it back to Robert. He peed in his pants to see something happen in such a short time. Then he and I became friends and I went out to his shop, because he had one. Eventually I went to Cranbrook WHere there wasn't much of anything to work with, but it all worked out.    BD: Was there a letterpress department at Cranbrook?   WH: Well, it was called Printmaking and Graphics. Larry Barker had just picked up an old type shop with lots of stuff and it was sort of like play. So that's WHere printing and papermaking came together.   BD: WHen and how did you get to the University of Wisconsin?   WH: I came in 1966, I was 25 years old. I came here directly out of grad school at Cranbrook. That was a fluke, because Michigan State had a campus not far from Cranbrook, not far from WHere Robert, my teacher of the iron press, lived. I had no intention of being a teacher, even though I had had lots of teaching jobs in the Detroit area.    Robert had said, "Let's try an experiment. See if we can print broadsides and make hand-made paper." He said he would help on weekends and evenings. After three years, if it looked like it would go, he would quit his job at the library and give me half ownership of the physical plant. I said, "That sounds good, that sounds like fun." But I thought I needed some pin money for WHoring around. So, I thought I would get a job at this nearby Michigan State campus. I wrote a letter to them and they sent it on to East Lansing, the main campus. They called up my chairman and said "WHo is this guy, we want to hire him, but we can't till next year, but Wisconsin is looking for someone like him. WHy doesn't he go to Wisconsin for a year and next year we'll hire him." So I copied the same %#!&% letter in long hand and sent it over to Wisconsin, and got two letters back, one air mail and one air mail special delivery. It said: "You look like our man if the imagery holds. Send slides."    It was Spring break and I was on my way to Chicago to pick up my first book, bound by Elizabeth Kner. Then I was going on to Winona [Minnesota] to visit a girlfriend. I got out a map and saw that Madison was on the way. I wrote them a letter and said I would be going through town and I would stop to see if anyone was around, and if no one was around, I would send slides. So I came through and found the art office. They went up in a panic and assembled the search committee, WHich included Claire Van Vliet. These guys showed up and really rolled out the red carpet. Remember, there was no one making paper, no artists were making books that they knew about.    Someone said, "WHat kind of name is Hamady?"    "Lebanese Druse."    And someone said, "Can you make hummus?"    "Yeah," and I named off a couple other dishes, and said I had some woodfire hubis araby in the car.    Claire�you know how exuberant she can be�threw up her arms and said, "As far as I'm concerned, you've got the job."    And so, I got the job, and that changed everything. I thought it was going to be a one year, part-time job, but it turned out to be tenure track. I didn't know WHat that meant and I didn't know WHat research was. I didn't know that Wisconsin had a research committee and monster research funds, and that they considered arts and humanities research. So I came and, right off the bat, they gave me this big grant to get papermaking equipment. The rest is history.    I would have never stayed in academia had it not been for that research committee [Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation]. Those guys were really fair and good. They were thirty-five peers from all over the campus. You had to write a proposal and get interviewed.   BD: And WHat kind of research did you want to do?   WH: Well, papermaking. In those days it was pretty loose...to investigate. I remember one, I wanted to investigate how to try to press and dry paper. It was called "Machine and Hydraulic Pressing and Drying of Handmade Paper," and that probably flew because the guys over in the Mechanical Engineering could get a handle on that. Another was about the Sequoyah Syllabary and they funded that. The people over in Linguistics and Comparative Literature could get their teeth on that. Anyway, various things. It was all about pure research. It's been very significant in terms of WHy someone would stay in academia with all the other B.S. that goes around.    God knows, in my department, the crock of #&@%. I've seen it go on since day one. I don't know, I guess it's a spite factor or something. I don't know if it's an old army thing WHere either you lead, follow, or get the $#$& out of the way? These guys don't want to do any of that...they just want to put their body down and put dirt in the gears and mess it up as much as possible for anybody. And it's just wrong! You know as well as I do there's such misery and suffering in the world. WHen you see someone succeeding in anything you say: Mazel Tov, go for it! If you can be of any help, help him.    So the thing at Wisconsin, it seemed kind of odd. Wisconsin is a big papermaking state, wouldn't it make sense to have a really nice showplace for hand-making this product, a direct historical connection with everybody? Everyone in the industry, WHen they see handmade paper, goes crazy. It's fun. One to one, I made a lot of good connections all over the state in the industry, asking them for surplus stuff. They were all courteous, all kind and generous. But there was no way I could get the University to even provide a safe, normal classroom facility. It's annoying how stupid they are. Somehow, they just don't get it.   I'm hugely angry and bitter about the failure of integrating hand papermaking into the curriculum at the University. It is�has been a huge fraud. They still list papermaking in the catalog for the Art Department and many students come there because of it. But there is not any papermaking offered and hasn't been for several years! Even WHen papermaking was a possibility, it was treated as a gulag situation with gulag priorities, by the dean, chairpersons, the provost, and chancellor: all failed to see value in the mission and squelched it. So I am resentful.   BD: Walter, you have quite a reputation as a teacher and a long list of very accomplished students.    WH: I don't consider them my students; we spent a certain amount of time in the studio together. I tell them at the very beginning, "Look, I have an agenda here and the agenda is very simple and, yes, there is a generation gap here, I'm old enough to be your grandfather, but the truths have never changed, and they are valid and my job is to give you problems to solve, and by solving the problems, you will encounter one of these truths and master it as your own. At the end of the semester, you'll think that you invented it all personally yourself." A completely invisible equation, that's the goal. Hopefully it works.    BD: In other words, you're there to jump-start.   WH: Yeah, to transfer all these things and say this is WHat it is all about, but make it your own. It seems to work pretty well. WHatever impact my teaching has had on the bookmaking complexion in this country was not from ambition but the result of a steady journey.   BD: Did you have teachers that taught you that way? Is that WHat Cranbrook was all about?   WH: That's not WHat Cranbrook was all about, but I've had a lot of wonderful teachers, lots of wonderful role models. In fact in my current Gabberjabb there are two pages of dedication to all those people, one or two for every year of my life. That started because one day at the Plant [the University] WHen I was the graduate chairperson, I had to supervise interviews of prospective teaching assistants. My question to each of them was: "Is there someone in your life WHo opened a window for you, turned you around, provided an epiphany for you?" I think 96% couldn't think of anybody; not a mom or dad or a rock-and-roll star, movie star or sports hero, nobody! They had no impression WHatsoever! I came away from that really shook up. I could easily name someone for every year of my life WHo really helped me along, showed me the way. So I did it in my book, the travelling Gabberjabb, and I'm hugely grateful to all of them.

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