To start, I set the text in Latin in Rudolph Koch's Wallau. Then I made a dummy using white machine-made paper in what worked out to be seven folios, each twelve inches high by ten inches wide when open. I pasted the type into position, drew pulp painting ideas, and worked out some of the pop-ups. Dummy in hand, I went to Whiting, Maine, to work with Katie. She created the base sheet color and formula for a paper that would be both rigid and thick enough to stand up under the pull of pop-ups and still have excellent folding strength. With the base sheet established, Katie made the colors of overbeaten pulp for the pulp painting. We tested the colors and then were ready for the production of 120 copies. We made the sheets starting with the blue sky of the first folio. These and the sky in the tree folio were made by freely pouring the pulp. The lily and the rose folios we made freehand using pulp in squirt bottles. For the other folios we laid down polyethylene stencils to protect the text area. The two green folios had skies and mountains poured horizontally with squirt bottles. The fire page was also done with a squirt bottle, with a stencil over the text area. For the fire pop-up Katie pulled thinner sheets, which I also squirt bottled using more colors. When I received the finished, dried sheets I calendered them on a Meeker-McFee etching press that has stainless steel rollers. This gave the paper a smooth, silky, vellum-like feel. Katie prepared the orange pulp for the tree pop-up together with the overbeaten greens for decorating. I brought these home and made the sheets with Stephanie Westnedge. Both tree pieces could be cut out of an oval shape inset into an 8½ x 11 inch deckle. The tree shapes were squirted against stencils on the mould and then green was poured on the couched sheet, as the back side of the pop-up trees is visible when the folio is first opened. Also at home, I worked on color samples for the other pop-ups using Katie's pulps, from which she then produced the editioned sheets. Two Barcham Green papers, Royal Watercolour Society and Cairo, were used for pop-up structures along with the bright yellow Taxicab from Twinrocker. I calendered most of the pop-up sheets so that they would slide easily and coated some of them with Golden Gloss Varnish with super sparkle added to it. This was particularly important for the fountain folio, to have the cascade look wet and glistering. Several of the folios were printed with linoleum blocks and have chiyogami paper collaged. For the flowers on the fountain folio, I backed chiyogami sheets with Fusion 4000 and then cut out the flowers with scissors. About a dozen or so are dry mounted on each folio. This step definitely met the goal of a labor intensive project (also met by Audrey Holden, who cut out all of the pop-up components by hand). The text sheets were too strong to risk printing the foundry Wallau (which was imported in 1936 by Arthur Rushmore at The Golden Hind Press and which I got from John Anderson), so I took reproduction proofs and had polymer plates made. The Notes I printed from the actual metal type. Everything was printed dry because all the print surfaces had been calendered.  The text folios and cover were too strong to glue the fore-edge flaps together, as originally planned; the two folds were awkwardly bulky as well. So we stitched the folios together much as we had done in an earlier book (Compound Frame). The foldback of one folio was left in place and the second folio was trimmed to the fore-edge, providing a thin (1/8") strip to use like a thread for the stitching. The strip matched up with the image colors so the stitches would not be intrusive. This proved to be a very strong structure when tested but it required twenty-eight thousand holes to be punched. Lulie Larus did this, eschewing books on tape and meditating instead on her own thoughts. Lulie also stitched all the folios together, so she probably came closest to our medieval model (she could have been the person in the scriptorium who ruled the faint guide lines onto vellum). We attached the cover in the same way; the book works well in the hand and opens out fully, accordion-style. The cover has the words "Circulus Sapientiae" spelled out in Hildegard's secret alphabet (secret languages and alphabets were common among religious visionaries in the Middle Ages). I pasted the letters up and had a polymer plate made for printing. The Notes were printed on calendered Barcham Green Dover with a thin cover paper made by Katie. The thinness was necessary because the cover is French-folded head and tail to form an overlap on the outside that acts as a pocket for the compact disc. The fore-edges have a ¼" flap and the inside and outside cover flaps are glued to each other, making the pocket secure. The compact disc sleeve is made with gold Elephant Hide that was paste-decorated in gold on the yellow side of the paper. (The interlocking design of the sleeve is the same one I made for Dido and Aeneas in 1989.) The compact disc sleeve slips into the Notes pocket and the Notes slip into a pocket made with Barcham Green Nefertiti inside the front cover of the chemise. The chemise is covered with flame-patterned linen and lined out with either Twinrocker Lilac Wind or MacGregor-Vinzani ochre. The slipcase, in turn, is covered with Barcham Green Renaissance IV that was coated with Golden Gloss Varnish to enhance the skin-like quality of the hemp paper. For the same reason, it was drummed around two-ply board on the sides and spine. Judi Conant and Mary Richardson made the chemises and slipcases in Maidstone, Vermont. This project was possible because of the great variety of papers that are available from hand papermakers. Most important was Katie MacGregor's willingness to make special papers expressly for this book. The variety of papers and surface treatments brought the richness to the book that I sought, giving it some of the sumptuousness of a manuscript.  Making the Paper for Circulus SapientiaeKatie MacGregor In the fall of 1999, after months of talking about creating papers for a pop-up book, Claire Van Vliet and I began to make paper for her Hildegard von Bingen project. We spent two weeks together, developing and producing paper for the main pages and the sheets with laminated pulp. I produced the plain colored sheets for the dimensional components and the cover sheets later. Claire had specific requirements for the paper. All of the sheets needed structural integrity to allow for repeated folding, with enough rigidity and weight to work effectively as either supporting structure or freestanding pop-up. They also had to compress into a book format and be printed on. Therefore, our first consideration became the fiber composition and mechanics of the paper. I dipped prototype sheets on a 12" x 18" wove mould, Western-style, using various fibers. We started with cotton muslin rag, processed for 2½ hours of normal beating in a Hollander. This gave us a strong sheet, but it lacked the snap and thickness we required for a pop-up. To the muslin we added unbleached abaca and unbleached linen half-stuff. These fibers increased the folding strength and added to the weight of the sheets. Beating times for the abaca and linen were just enough to hydrate the fiber and create a smooth pulp without dramatically cutting the fiber length (1½ hours). Claire used our test sheets to perfect the folding mechanics and determine the final weight. Knowing that the sheets would be calendered, we decided on a thickness of 0.016 inches. Based on Claire's prototype illustrations, I developed color formulas, starting with a base sheet color and ending with a palette to be used for the surface laminations. I sized all of the fiber with an internal dimer sizing and colored it with aqua-dispersed pigments. I used a small amount of retention aid with each color. For our editioning, we used an 18" x 24" wove mould, Western-style. The sheets drained slowly, due to their weight and the long fiber. In order to not break the edge of the sheets, I couched flat, without rolling the mould across the felts. Using heavy woven wool felts, we limited the posts to twenty-five sheets. This prevented broken sheets and allowed us to check our batches for consistency. The sheets were then restraint-dried in a stack drier. The covers and three-dimensional pop-up sheets also had custom fiber and coloring formulas. Using different proportions of the original fibers, I developed more test sheets for Claire. In the end, the pop-up sheets had slightly more abaca, for strength. They were dipped on a 12" x 18" wove mould, Western-style, with the paper 0.014 inches thick. Luckily Claire wanted intense colors for these sheets; the color of the pulp itself would have significantly influenced anything paler. I dried these sheets like the others. My usual day-to-day sheet production involves maintaining consistency in my tried and true paper formulas. This book tapped my skills and creative energy in unique ways. I enjoyed the challenge as much as the results.