Words of a feather

At the end of a small residential street in Stillwater, calligrapher and book artist Nancy Ruth Leavitt continues to create the illuminated manuscripts for which she has gained an international reputation. Her art books have been acquired by both private collectors and public institutions, including Harvard University’s Houghton Library, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Dartmouth College Rare Book Collection. She has made over 75 one-of-a-kind books in the 19 by 13 foot studio just inside her front door. All have been bought except for a few that her dealer is currently handling.

In a family of eight children, Leavitt grew up in Houlton, where she remembers an idyllic small-town childhood where every home was your home and every mother was your mother; once a year you went to Bangor to spend your potato-picking money on school clothes.

When she graduated from the University of Maine with a BS in biology, she wanted to be a scientist, an entomologist to be precise, but it wasn’t long before her biology degree was sharing space with an art degree and her world was filled with birch boards, dicroic glass, stones, gold leaf, muslin paper, paint, goatskin, pens, quills, ink, and poetry and prose. She has been pushing the boundaries of letter forms in new directions ever since.

Although rooted in history when scribes were the record keepers of the day, Leavitt’s work is contemporary in nature and in subject matter. Her books have titles like Outside the Realm of Time, A Road Alphabet, Juxtaposition, and The Baghdad Papers. The texts may originate in the arias of Handel or Scarlatti, the words of Martin Luther King, a poem by modern-day poets Robin Furth or Samuel Hazo, 19th-century poet Emily Dickinson. They may be made on paper from an old English mill, handmade papers by Maine papermakers Bernie Vinzani or Katie MacGregor, or on plant papers by Kiliane Kell. Her books are currently bound by her niece Joelle Leavitt Webber.

Leavitt has presented at conferences, written articles about book arts, and received grants, including two from the Maine Arts Commission—one to study the history of lettering and another to learn how to properly collect, cut, and prepare quills for lettering. Her work continues to be included in exhibitions across the United States and Europe from Maine to Italy.

Your biology degree seems a far cry from the book arts path you’ve taken.

Well, honestly, there isn’t a better background I could have had. I had to really observe things, and draw them. The difference between this fly and that fly might be one hair between the tarsi on the feet. You had to be objective in collecting data. That is exactly what I do now. Taking art classes hasn’t hurt, but it’s really the science that’s helped me. I use a lot of chemistry, incredible amounts of math, especially algebra and geometry. It’s all connected.

How were you first exposed to the practice of calligraphy?

When I was in high school I worked Saturdays at Plaza Pharmacy. William Cummings was a part-time pharmacist. He was 90 years old. When he started, it was the turn of the century and everything was written by hand—labels, records. In slow times, he would do little demonstrations of calligraphy. I still have some of them.

Did you study calligraphy?

I was mostly self-taught and not that well. Then Peter Halliday came from England and taught in Rockland. I studied with him for two summers. In 1983 I went to England for two months and took four weeks of classes.

What are all the file folders on your shelves for? It looks like a doctor’s patient files.

That’s how I keep track of every project, or even an idea. Right now I have a file folder on zigarots because there aren’t many things that begin with Z and it’s interesting to me. Everything I use to make a book—my mock-ups, the roughs, color samples, the research. Part of creating is recognizing when something is significant. [She takes a folder from her bookshelf.] This is the file for Outside the Realm of Time [a 104-page book with hand-lettered text from lyrics of 18th-century Italian arias and over 1,000 painted stones]. It’s a very untraditional use of letters and images, but I’ve put it in a traditional form. These are geometrical constructs used in early Irish and North Umbrian manuscript books or the Gospel books from 600 to 1,000 AD.

So you have to study a lot of historical information.

Yes. But I have no interest in repeating history. I’m interested in learning from it. I want to transform it. My work is very contemporary, dealing with contemporary issues.

Is what you do preplanned?

Sometimes. It takes a year to make a book, and I work on more than one book at a time. My first thought is often the text and that may drive the color, the images.

Could you give me an example of words driving the color?

I did a book last winter called Snow Garden. It’s all poetry by 19th-century women writers. It started out because one year for Christmas my husband bought me a snow scoop [she laughs] and so I was scooping the yard and all these patterns were emerging. I would make designs and when the snow would blow, it would look like the snow was embossed. It was a “snow garden.” The whole book was about white. It went from early winter to spring when snow is still on the ground and the bulbs are starting to move underneath.

How has your approach changed over time?

I’ve maintained the same themes—I do work on light, stones, a lot with nature, and now early marks and symbols.

One of your grants enabled you to learn how to prepare a quill. How do you do that?

I soak it and then heat it in sand. The heat makes it hard so I can cut it with a “pen knife.” They’re as sharp as a scalpel. Their only purpose is for cutting quills. It’s flat on one side and curved on the other. A quill makes a really sharp writing tool but it’s not so sharp that it will dig into the paper like a metal pen will, and so I can go in any direction when I’m writing.

Lettering can look so very different.

Absolutely. It’s all about what’s called “ductus.” Wasnods: weight, angle, and shape determine the character of the letter; the number of strokes, order of strokes, direction, and speed determine the construction. Every alphabet has its rhythm. I need to have perfect understanding of the form and so I practice the strokes over and over. Then I just have to let it go and write freely, make it look alive.

Is there a thread that runs through your work?

I think so. It’s always what’s on my mind. What I need to solve. Right now it’s personal since my mother died. I need to take solace in poetry and so right now the big book I’m working on is Emily Dickinson. If anybody took solace in poetry it was Emily Dickinson. She wrote her poetry on whatever was at hand—grocery lists, receipts, envelopes, candy wrappers, whatever. So I’ve decided I’m going to do a series of her poems in the same way using the things I have at hand here. Oh, yeah, and I’m also working on a project on scum-sucking bottom feeders.