By John Henry Adams
One of the things that we often try to convey in special collections instructional sessions is the concept of the “book as object” rather than as a vessel for text. Text can live in many places and in many forms, but a book can only be in one place at once, even if there are thousands of other copies, and each book is unique in its physicality. By incorporating book arts into the classroom, we can not only expose students to a new art form, but we can also give them a fresh perspective on how they see the books they use and experience.
In September 2023, I partnered with a local book conservator and artist to offer a paper marbling workshop to a handful of faculty and graduate students at the University of Missouri, mainly from the School of Visual Studies. The faculty member in charge of the Fiber Studio attended and subsequently bought equipment for paper marbling for the Fiber Studio. This was my first experience with marbling, and I was immediately hooked. I asked for and received access to the Fiber Studio, and starting in the spring of 2024, I began marbling paper on a regular basis. As my proficiency grew, I broached the possibility of offering a paper marbling workshop on campus. Emily Smith, a graduate student enrolled in the Fibers program, and I decided to collaborate on a pair of interconnected events: an open-air demonstration in September and another workshop in October, this time open to undergraduate students.
Emily and I did our paper marbling demonstration on Tuesday, September 17, 2024 from 10am to 2:30pm. We chose this day and time because it would be a time when there would be many students out and about on campus, and rather than marbling in the Fiber Studio, we chose to do this outdoors in a heavily trafficked area between the library and the student center. The goal was to lower the barriers to entry and make sure that as many students would have a chance to see it as possible. In the weeks leading up to the event, we advertised it with posts on social media, using both the Libraries’ and the School of Visual Studies’ accounts, and also posted a calendar event for it on the university’s events calendar. By the time we started to pack up our equipment 4.5 hours later, we had marbled 39 sheets and had 77 visitors. Taking into account a few breaks and the time needed to get more water from the library, we were probably marbling a fresh sheet every four to five minutes.
Marbling is almost tailor-made for demonstrations: it takes only a few minutes to marble a single sheet, and the effect of seeing the paint transfer to the paper is almost magical. We often offered visitors the option to choose the colors that would be used next or to decide when the pattern was “finished” and ready for the paper. Most of our visitors were students, but we had a few faculty, librarians, and community members stop to watch. The visitors tended to come in waves coinciding with the end of classes. (I had expected a similar surge of visitors around noon as students either came to the student center to eat lunch or left after finishing a meal, but if there was such a surge, it was subsumed into the post-class arrivals.) We found that most visitors would linger to watch several sheets of paper being marbled and that some would ask questions while others would simply watch the process.
Marbling is almost tailor-made for demonstrations: it takes only a few minutes to marble a single sheet, and the effect of seeing the paint transfer to the paper is almost magical.
Of the 77 visitors to our demonstration, 22 signed up for a workshop to be held three weeks later on Saturday, October 5 in the Fiber Studio. Emily and I therefore planned accordingly: we set up three marbling stations for the students where students would work in three teams of eight to nine. Half of each team would be mordanting the paper with alum under Emily’s supervision while I would cycle between the other three teams teaching them different patterns. By the time I was finished teaching the third group, it would be time for the first group’s mordanting team to switch places with the marblers, and the whole cycle would repeat again. The plan was ambitious but also necessary given the number of instructors involved as compared to the number of students who had signed up. We did not plan to advertise the workshop online after the demonstration since we did not want to risk getting overwhelmed and 22 participants seemed like a lot to handle.
When we asked for RSVPs the week before the workshop, 10 students confirmed their attendance. We then decided to make it more widely available and advertised it online via an email to the School of Visual Studies. When the actual date came, four students came to participate: two undergraduates, a recent graduate, and an MFA student. It is possible that better advertisement or timing might have resulted in a higher attendance: this was the first book arts workshop that I have personally offered, and most of the events that I have done in the past have been class-related.
In lieu of the complicated plan that I outlined above, Emily and I decided on a different plan. Emily handled the mordanting herself, and I took the students through the marbling patterns in alternating groups of two. Because the actual attendance at the workshop was limited, it is hard to gauge how effective the plans that Emily and I developed in order to accommodate a larger number of students would have been. My sense is that we would probably have moved much slower, and there would have been less time for the students to experiment. Rather than having to compete for time at the vat and for the instructors’ attention, the students were able to move through the patterns quickly and then try each one multiple times. The workshop as it actually took place reinforced the old wisdom that a low student-to-instructor ratio results in a superior learning experience, but it highlights that the major expenditure for these events is not materials but labor.
Staff time is the most precious resource for any organization. A multi-hour event is a heavy investment of that resource, particularly if multiple staff members work on it. Emily and I each put in six and a half hours on the demonstration (four and a half hours for the demonstration, two hours for the set-up and clean-up) and six hours for the workshop (four hours for the workshop, two for set-up and clean-up). The demonstration therefore used 13 hours of staff time and the workshop required 12. If we take the total amount of staff time spent on each activity, the demonstration had 77 unique visitors, meaning that on average it reached a new participant every 10 minutes; the workshop meanwhile had a new participant on average every three hours. (For comparison, a 50-minute class session with 15 students, taught by a single instructor who takes 40 minutes for set-up and clean-up, will have a “new” participant every six minutes.)
I think that this particular metric is mainly effective at determining the feasibility of an event: can we afford to spend our limited staff time on a given project? There are many factors that are not being taken into account through this sort of staff-time mathematics: the quality of the experience, the learning objectives being achieved, the visibility of the event to people who are not participating… the list could easily go on. At the same time, however, we cannot discount the challenge of finding the staff to run events like these.
With these criteria in mind, my general impression of the two events that Emily and I put on was twofold: first, that students are genuinely interested and intrigued by book arts and the opportunity to learn about them; second, that demonstrations are an effective way to reach a large audience in a way that workshops are not. In an ideal world, we could offer book arts workshops on a regular basis, but failing that, demonstrations of book arts can serve a similar pedagogical purpose. The demonstration offers an arguably shallower experience — although some students lingered for longer periods of time and asked many questions, they were not themselves marbling — but it reached many more students not only in terms of raw numbers but also in terms of participants per minute of staff time.
With these criteria in mind, my general impression of the two events that Emily and I put on was twofold: first, that students are genuinely interested and intrigued by book arts and the opportunity to learn about them; second, that demonstrations are an effective way to reach a large audience in a way that workshops are not.
The students who participated in both events seemed thrilled by the experience. One of the participants said that they had wanted to do this sort of thing ever since they had seen it being offered in a park, but that there, it had cost $20 to marble one piece of silk whereas here they could do a dozen sheets in different patterns. It is hard to overestimate the value and importance of joy in learning, and I think there is also a special quality for those events that students seek out themselves. The students who stopped by to see the demonstration or signed up for the workshop did so because they were personally interested or intrigued. I think that the overall learning objective of demystifying the process of paper marbling was achieved. I also think that the demonstration in particular is worth repeating as a sustainable way to offer instruction in book arts outside the classroom.
John Henry Adams is the Research & Instruction Librarian for Special Collections at the University of Missouri. He specializes in print and manuscript history, though he has recently returned to the book arts with a renewed interest in bookbinding and paper marbling.