How did the students take all this? They, like all authors, were pleased to see their poems set in type. They were impressed by the easy flow of gorgeous letters from calligraphers' pens, and they were endlessly thrilled, as was I, when sheets of paper were pulled from the vat. But every year, midway through a semester, the moment of truth arrived when the imaginative projects we conceived encountered the exacting technical demands of each of the crafts. Frustrated students would stand before me with a hopelessly warped and buckling book or a fistful of fallen type and I would realize that I had failed them. Certainly some wonderful projects came out of those workshops, but as I found increasing numbers of failed projects stuffed behind drawing boards in studio closets, I began my own back-to-basics movement. I more clearly delineated areas where rigorous attention to technique was required from those where free-wheeling experiment was encouraged, and I began to stress the virtues of simplicity and craft. Paper Pleasures is the kind of book I might have consulted in planning my classes, or kept in the school's library, or recommended to someone interested in the paper and book arts. A half-hour browse through this profusely-illustrated book reveals the great versatility of the medium. Stopping just short of the most exuberant forms of paper art, it includes sections on simple papermaking, paper decoration, bookbinding, and complex three-dimensional projects like boxes and screens. The author, who is herself a teacher at the Brighton Polytechnic in Sussex, England, presents her material in a breezy, unintimidating fashion that emphasizes an experimental, non-technical approach, and stresses the use of ordinary household materials and tools. This approach is complemented by loose and colorful watercolor sketches of tools and working methods. Perhaps most notable is a stunning set of photographs by Peter Marshall, displaying all the abstract and functional beauty of paper. The reproduction of these photographs and, indeed, the entire design and production of the book are very well done, and, at $16.95, the book is reasonably priced. The weakness of Paper Pleasures lies, as it did in my classes, in a casual approach that is not always equal to the difficulties involved in making and working with paper. The reader will rarely find sufficiently detailed information on procedures and the problems a novice is likely to encounter. One reason for this may be publishing decisions that traded depth in a few areas for breadth across many, or that opted to devote a relatively greater amount of space to illustration than to text. Another reason lies with Ms. Shannon's belief that experience, not written instructions, should guide one's work. Whatever the reasons, the result is that instructions frequently are vague or incomplete. In a section on making plant papers, for instance, there are five pages of photographs of papers made with such things as wildflowers and leeks, but very little hard information on the quantities of plant materials needed to get started, the boiling times needed to break down fibers, or the use of caustic sodas when making paper pulp. The book's organization contributes to the problem of incomplete information. The six autonomous sections encourage a reader to jump in anywhere; this is fine, in some regards. The difficulty comes when important principles, such as the grain of paper and how to work with it, are not discussed in the section chosen. Few things are more fundamental to a book of this sort than paper grain, and although instructions for determining grain direction in a sheet of paper are given in an introductory section, it is never fully explained, nor, to my mind, is its importance stated forcefully enough. "As far as possible", the reader is told, "match the grain direction of the cardboard and paper you're pasting." It was a similar casualness on the part of my students that resulted in ruined projects. If the author wished to avoid repeating herself on this subject, the illustrations could have included a simple arrow referent to grain direction, as a reminder that it must always be carefully considered. Misinformation, caused in part by sloppy proofreading, is presented in the papermaking section. Step 1 in "Forming the Sheets" reads: "Fill the vat with pulp so that the mould and deckle can be immersed easily....". This is wrong. Should a novice follow these instructions rather than filling the vat first with water and then adding the requisite amount of pulp, she or he will have much more pulp than is needed in the vat and will be unable to make even one sheet of paper with it. Step 6 of these same instruction, which describes how to shake the mold as it is pulled from the vat, is badly garbled. Several lines about "throwing off the wave", something not done in Western papermaking, have inexplicably found their way into the instructions, thoroughly confusing matters. The illustrations, which show a disembodied mold and deckle swinging through the slurry, do not cast a lot of light on the situation. Here, a few photos of a papermaker in action would be more useful. I have reservations about the ability of any book to guide students through the complexities of papermaking and some of the other projects presented here. Building a mold and deckle and learning how to use them are daunting tasks with or without a teacher. Fortunately, papermaking classes are now widely available and it will rarely be necessary for the student to go it alone. But if a teacher cannot be found, a student needs at least a book with lots of information in it. Such a book need not take a stultifying recipe-book approach: Jules Heller's classic Papermaking is an example of a book that fosters experimentation by detailing the various inventive methods used by America's master papermakers. Tim Barrett's Japanese Papermaking ingeniously presents parallel descriptions of traditional and simplified methods, so that the reader has an alternative perspective each step of the way. These books and the best of the craft books take nothing for granted around students. They go overboard documenting procedures and trouble-shooting problems, and they come into their own in the heat of battle, when there is water and pulp everywhere and the size will not dissolve. In such situations, Paper Pleasures might just as well be left on the shelf. Its title, after all, is most succinct: this is a beautiful book meant to dazzle and stimulate. It is best used by someone who has been around a paper studio or book bindery, is adept in the basic processes, and wishes to lean back and get a few new ideas.
