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An Interview with Dorothy A. Yule Edward H. Hutchins Cairo, New York
You might wonder how a French major who graduated from Barnard College in 1972 ended up producing imaginative miniature pop-up books. Dorothy Yule took some art classes in Japanese and western methods of woodcut printmaking as an undergraduate and then went on to get a post graduate certificate in printmaking at London's St. Martin's School of Art. Back in New York, she took classes in etching and silkscreen at Pratt Graphics Center and bookbinding and letterpress printing classes at the Center for Book Arts. In 1989 she was awarded a Master's degree from the Mills College Book Arts Program. This explains how she learned her craft and technique, but it doesn't explain her creativity and uninhibited approach to books. I was introduced to her books when I discovered "Souvenirs of Great Cities" at the 1995 Washington Book Fair. To learn more, I met Dorothy in San Francisco in 1996 and we've continued our bi-coastal correspondence ever since. One of the first things I wanted to know was how making books became an important part of her life.
VOLUME 6 NUMBER 3
AUGUST 1998
signatures and stapled into little books. I continued to produce these simple books into my teens. I grew very interested in printing and printmaking after college. I was also interested in making books as an expressive art form. Owing to the real-life problems of earning a living, it was many years before I had the opportunity to pick up this study again. Now I work as a designer at a newspaper to support my book work.
How did your art background, miniature books and pop-ups all come together? Several years ago I made a little book for a friend for her birthday. It was a little codex about an inchand-a-half square, bound in marbled paper scraps and illustrated with rubber stamps. When the next big birthday came along, I had long scraps of paper from another book project that I started idly folding into an accordion. Somehow the idea of the rubber-stamp images and the concertina came together and resulted in my first little pop-up book.
Did this lead to more books? The first pop-up books I made were very simple structures. Over time I played with the form. I started pops popping off making more complicated pops other pops, scenes with several layers of pops, pops with little bits of paper sewn onto them. I started to think about how I could make a book in this form that I could print and bind. I thought of making the concertina out of a piece of paper folded in half so that --
when you cut the pops out and pulled them forward there would still be a backing sheet behind them to give the illusion that the pop-up was floating off of the paper. I also decided to make the book read both ways so you could use every valley fold for a pop-up.
How did this become "Souvenirs of Great Cities"?
As I was casting around for a subject I had the opportunity to visit Paris. I sent back a lot of rhyming
Souvenirs of Great Cities I started making books when I was in grade school. My earliest were poems with illustrations, folded into
postcards to friends about places I was seeing and that gave me the idea of making books about cities I had lived in: New York, London, Paris and San Francisco. The more complicated pops in the city books came as a solution to the problem of having to print the books in two sheets and needing to deal with the bulky valley fold where the sheets were joined so that in New --