ruth - bearden

more walnut ink and it looks like she dropped some blue gouache into it while it was still wet. i like the inventive letters. i can imagine her writing my name and then thinking, it needs something else...and then adding the second JEAN below. once again, a simple repetition is a very quick and easy design element to make a fun envelope design.
on monday, you get to see the last of the series from ruth. it's spectacular.
 
yesterday i drove over to see ruth and jeri in iowa city.


  this is a digression about a book, and not about envelopes, but may be of interest to some of you.

we went to the special collection at the u of iowa library and perused a 15th century book of hours. it was so beautiful. you have to see a handwritten book in person to really appreciate the delicate writing, illumination and illustration. there was a price written on the inside front cover $185...which seemed absurd. it has to be worth a lot more than that.

we also looked at books from their collection of miniatures and some other artist books. we had our coats on and were ready to leave when jeri suddenly remembered a book she had not yet seen  - but had read about. it is 10,000 pages of poetry. the pages are 8.5x11 and it is about 2 feet thick. if you google *world's thickest book,* it does not pop up immediately, and maybe it is in a different category because it is poetry. but it seems to be the only one that is two feet thick.

you can see a photo of it and read more about it at this link.


http://www.booktryst.com/2011/02/biggest-most-humongous-book-of-poetry.html


we flipped through it and actually found some pages that were pretty amusing.
the article above has a link to the full text - although i did not click on it to see if it works.

if you want to visit the special collection, you need to send them a list of the books you wish to see.
you can't just browse. so that's a bit of a problem. how do you know what you want to see, if you don't know what they have. i guess you have to delve into the catalog and figure it out. but.....i put on my sad puppy dog face and they took pity on me and pulled some great stuff. the newest artist books were on one shelf up front, so those were easy to look at.

great road trip. it was fun to see my pen pals.