It reads: You come upon them sometimes folded away into trunks lined with paper, fragile and dry as blue hydrangea, or you find them stuffed in a wad at the base of a wardrobe, old quilts, color reduced to an idea, stained with love or death, nothing that can be rubbed away. They appear as interstitial tissue linking us to someone else's labor. Sometimes, whole pieces fall away no matter how carefully you take them up - they shred into nothing, leaving thin ribbons, a ribbon, a space, a nothing, as if, in serious conversation, the other falls silent, leaves it up to you. And you could, in a dark mood, say that's all any of it comes to, shreds, fluff, fragments, but this is not the mood that connects, not what makes you spread the quilts to light when you find them cast away. You hesitate before brooming spiders' webs, you save old letters, pin up children's crayon drawings, lay out the best silver every day. Beauty lies not only in the making of a thing but in its use, not in its preservation but in its wearing down. This poem recently became the basis of a publishing/paperwork collaboration by two artists. Claire Van Vliet is the printer/printmaker proprietor of Janus Press in West Burke, Vermont. Since the 1960's she has created illustrated letterpress editions of fiction, poetry, and plays, and, for a dozen years, has collaborated with papermakers on paperworks containing texts. Amanda Degener teaches papermaking at Minnesota College of Art and Design and the Minnesota Center for Book Arts (MCBA) in Minneapolis. While Degener's primary interest is in large sculptural paperworks, she has collaborated with several printer/publishers to make smaller, two-dimensional works. In 1988, the two artists began discussing a collaborative paperwork and selected Kaufman's poem as the focus. After working out preliminary design decisions in letters, they met at the MCBA paper studio in April, 1988, to produce the edition. Both artists contributed to the design and production of the piece, although Van Vliet took responsibility for the typography and Degener for making the paper and the final assembly. In the best tradition of quilters, numerous friends assisted the artists, most notably Barbara Schubring, a Minneapolis photographer, and Michael Tarachow of Pentagram Press. The finished paperwork is in keeping with the poem's made-to-be-used sensibility. It is a broadside, measuring 17 in. x 22 in., which combines image and text on one side of the sheet so that the poem can be hung on the wall, rather than shelved with books. The image is as literal as what it describes---a quilt---made up of fourteen pale blue, terra-cotta, and black squares and triangles on a muslin-colored basesheet. Long and translucent kozo fibers which were used to make and bond the papers echo the ideas of fading and tattering in the poem. The poem is printed in shades of blue on tengujo-shi and then pieced into the quilt along with the other squares. This technique is ingenious in its consistency with quilting and in enabling the artists to circumvent the difficulties of printing on a paper made of many overlapping layers, but it certainly was not easy. The watery medium of papermaking defies the kind of precise placement the design depends upon. The accompanying photographs detail the methods the artists devised. Integrating a text with an image on a broadside is tricky: the poem must be readable, of course, but it also must work graphically, as one element of a design. Here, Van Vliet's solution was to work the poem right into the quilt, which is certainly a more interesting approach than printing it off to one side. She had limitations, however, because the stanzas of the poem are not as regular nor as easily juggled around as patches of color, and so, unavoidably, some of the symmetry of the quilt is sacrificed. The transparency of the tengujo-shi minimizes the loss, although this issue would have been avoided altogether by a less symmetrical quilt. Initially, I had some reservations about the crispness of the finished piece, about its look of just having been taken from the quilting frame. Although there is some variation in the edition, the colors are quite strong and the edges are neatly turned and flat. This does not allude to fragility or shredding away as the poem does. After looking at the piece for the last few weeks, however, I am glad it looks new and is not a phony antique. This is more honest and more true to the spirit of the poem. The beauty of its wearing down, after all, is yet to come. Old Quilts, published in an edition of one hundred forty, is available from Janus Press, West Burke, VT 05871.             Having made their initial design decisions before meeting at the MCBA paper studio, Degener and Van Vliet immediately began making colored kozo papers for the quilt pattern. Degener formed the sheets while Van Vliet worked at the dryer. Once dry, the colored papers were torn or cut into triangles and squares. Van Vliet printed the type letterpress with a Vandercook proof press on sheets of transparent tengujo-shi paper and then cut the sheets into quilt pieces. Minneapolis fine printer Michael Tarachow had handset the poem's stanzas to fit the quilt's pattern. During editioning, Barbara Schubring assisted Degener in assembling the piece. Here, she lays out the fourteen pieces that make up the image, shown with a set of positioning templates. For each copy in the edition, a gampi basesheet was formed. The sheet was couched onto cotton sheeting on a felt. While still wet, the dry patches were laid into place on the basesheet, using the templates to mark the edges and center of the piece. Pulp was dribbled between overlapping dry patches to create a bond. When all the pieces were in position, another layer of diluted pulp was poured over all, to tone down the colors and achieve the effect of shredding cloth. As each copy was finished, it was pressed in a hydraulic press for fifteen minutes to remove water and adhere the layers. Finally, the broadsides were brushed onto the dryer face up. Drying was done very slowly to ensure that the layers would dry evenly and not buckle.     l. Copyright 1989, Margaret Kaufman.

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