Peter and Donna Thomas - Career

Career

From 1974-1989 Peter and Donna Thomas made and sold books and paper at the Living History Center’s Renaissance Pleasure Faire of Southern California. In 1977 Peter and Donna Thomas established a private press in 1976 and have worked individually and collaboratively on creating books, making paper, letterpress printing and book binding. Their books have been shown in the United States and abroad and purchased for collections around the world. In 1977 Peter and Donna Thomas founded the Good Book Press and in 1978 they printed their first book. It was their aim to create books in the tradition of the great private presses: limited editions, made of the finest materials and produced to the highest standards of quality. They spent the next ten years producing "fine press" books in both full size and miniature format, making the paper, printing, and binding the books themselves.

In the late 1980s Peter and Donna began working in new formats made possible by access to personal computer technology, exploring non-traditional book structures and shaped book objects, as both limited editions and one-of-a-kind books. In 1988 they reorganized under the imprint Peter and Donna Thomas: Santa Cruz. In 1992 they printed Good Books, a bibliography of their work, listing over fifty titles representing many authors and a wide range of subjects. They lectured and taught workshops internationally and published articles on papermaking and other aspects of the book arts.

Beginning in the 1990s, they focused their energy on documenting the history and techniques of hand papermaking as a contribution to the renaissance of the craft—through lectures, video productions about the ergonomics and techniques of traditional vat mill hand papermakers in Europe and a traveling exhibition based around A Collection of Paper Samples Handmade in the USA (1993). This book features individual papermakers’ statements about the papers they make, each printed letterpress on a sample of that person’s paper. Paper from Plants followed in 1999.

In 2005 Peter and Donna published The History of Papermaking in the Philippines, which was the culmination of almost twenty years of work. It began with Peter attending a one-day papermaking workshop in Santa Cruz, California taught by Nida Dumsang from the Philippines. Upon learning that there was no written history of papermaking in the Philippines, the idea of writing the first history of Filipino papermaking was born. He first visited the Philippines in February 1990 and gathered various information over the following ten years. The book includes discussions of the pre-historic precursors to paper, including Philippine bark cloth. It contains a survey of the first printed books made in the Philippines and the paper they were printed on. It ends with a chronological history of both commercial and hand paper making in the Philippines up to 2000.

In 2012 they placed their collection of books and other materials on the subject of papermaking in the library at the University of Iowa.