How a Codex Is Made: Bookbinding by Hand at Calle Soledad Presa

 

In understanding the book, I had to take it from place to place. Carry it with me. Everywhere I went and everywhere I continue to go, there has always been a book.

As a child, although the book was sometimes thicker than my bags and larger than my backpack, I placed it inside anyway. I took it everywhere. All kinds of books. At any given moment, I could open a page and be taken somewhere else—to a connection I could feel and have felt embedded in me for years. I memorized words. I memorized sentences. I learned to recognize language not only as a process of communication, but as a spiritual object. Something that could hold me. Something that could be held. Something that could reveal itself time and time again. 

I think Calle Soledad Presa comes from these memories.

It comes from carrying books.

It comes from the weight of them.

It comes from the feeling of opening a book and entering a place that did not exist until the page opened.

And it goes into places beyond what I can fully comprehend or say a book is.

I choose to consistently reimagine my relationship with the book.

When I first started Calle Soledad Presa, I began simply by making books by hand. There were no writings inside them. No language. No poems. No instructions for what they were supposed to become.

I called them what they felt most present to be:

Codices.

Codex books.

I was interested in making containers.

Containers for others to carry.

Containers to fill with their own worlds.

Spirit vessels for something not yet known.

I wanted to make a book that could hold something before I knew what that something would be.

This is still at the center of my practice.

I cut the paper.

I fold it.

I pierce it.

I stitch it with waxed cotton thread.

I press it beneath stone.

I place it in the sun.

I wait. 

I charge it. Place it my altar and see many vision prayers for it. In each process is an embodiment of language. Spirit. Guidance. I became a bookmaker out of guidance, care, understanding and love for visions, land, ancestral language beyond written words. 

This is how a handmade codex bookbinding practice begins for me—not with language, but with the body and with material. Before the written word, there is the page. Before the page, there is fiber. Before the fiber, there is a landscape, a plant, a history, a set of hands, a place.

I believe books are witnesses to the vibrations of the Earth.

I have carried this thought through my research and through more than ten years of making, writing, publishing, teaching, and listening to landscapes and spaces. In studying the histories of the codices of the Mexica, Otomi, Purépecha, Maya, and other communities, I have become increasingly interested in the moment before language enters the book—the space of creation, material, gesture, and ritual.

The book begins there.

It begins in the possibility of becoming.

When I make a codex, I am thinking about what happens when paper and thread begin to form a body. I am thinking about texture, fibers, edges, pressure, repetition. I am thinking about what a book can contain before it contains words.

The fold becomes a memory.

The stitch becomes a line.

The thread becomes a path.

The spine becomes a place where separate pieces begin to understand that they belong together.

I am interested in this because I became more of a poet by becoming more of a bookmaker.

For me, poetry could not remain something that existed only in language.

I needed to embody the book.

Even the way I dressed began to change as I became a bookmaker and poet. My relationship to my own body, to materials, to the objects surrounding me, to the way I moved through space—all of it began shifting alongside the work.

Making books changed the way I understood poetry.

The book became a vessel outside of time.

Or perhaps a vessel that could hold imagination until imagination became vision.

This is part of why I continue to make books by hand.

There is something about working with paper that requires me to slow down enough to listen.

I cannot fold a page without touching it.

I cannot stitch a spine without feeling the resistance of the paper.

I cannot press a book without allowing time to participate.

When I place a codex beneath stone, I am allowing weight to become part of the process. The pages settle. The folds change. The book begins to take its form.

Then I place it in the sun.

I let the warmth enter the paper.

I let the book sit.

This slowness matters to me.

We live surrounded by objects that can be produced almost instantaneously, replicated thousands of times, and discarded just as quickly. I am interested in what happens when I refuse that speed.

What happens when I make one book?

What happens when I allow my hands to repeat the same gesture until the gesture becomes its own kind of language?

What happens when the evidence of the hand is not something to correct?

The uneven edge.

The tension of the thread.

The slight difference between one page and another.

The mark left behind by pressure.

These things tell me that the book was here before me and that I was here with it.

I taught my first bookbinding workshop three years ago. I called it Bookbinding Fiction.

I wanted the workshop to become an extension of what I had already been asking myself.

I wanted to invite people into my processes, my creations, my questions—but also into the possibility of reimagining what a book could be.

I began asking the participants:

What is a book?

And then:

What will it become?

I brought Ulises Carrión's thoughts and energy into the space because his work has been fundamental to the way I understand the book. He remains a figure I carry with me in this process—a reminder that the book does not have to remain obedient to what we have decided a book should be.

What has become of the book?

What can an artist book become?

What happens when the book stops being simply a container for text?

What happens when the container itself becomes the work?

These questions continue to move through Calle Soledad Presa.

My handmade codex journals are part of that movement.

So is my publishing practice.

So are the workshops.

So are the books I make for myself and the books I make for someone else to eventually fill.

I have always wanted Calle Soledad Presa to create spaces for people to make and publish their own books—to continue, reinvent, and question the possibilities of the book through their own hands.

This is where rasquachismo has been important to me.

It taught me that I do not need a lot to make a book.

I do not need the perfect studio.

I do not need expensive materials.

I do not need a machine to tell me that something is a book.

I can work within limitation.

I can look at what is available and ask what else it could become.

A piece of paper can become a page.

A piece of thread can become a spine.

A scrap can become a cover.

A mark can become a language.

A limitation can become a method.

This is one of the places where the handmade artist book becomes especially important to me. The artist book gives me permission to work between categories—to move between poetry, sculpture, publishing, image, object, ritual, and archive.

It allows me to ask instead of answer.

What is a book?

What can a book hold?

Who gets to make one?

Who gets to publish?

What happens when we make something with what we already have?

And what does the book remember after we leave it?

My relationship to papermaking and bookbinding continues to grow from these questions. I think about the material traditions that have shaped the histories of books across Mexico and beyond. I think about the Otomi and Maya traditions of paper. I think about codices not simply as historical objects, but as evidence of ways of understanding, recording, remembering, and transmitting knowledge.

I think about the space before language.

I think about the body carrying the book.

I think about the book carrying the body.

And I think about what it means to make an object that another person might carry for years.

That possibility matters to me.

Because I know what it means to carry a book.

I did it as a child.

I carried books that were too large for my bags. I carried them anyway.

I carried them because I needed to know that they were there.

I could open them at any moment.

I could find a sentence.

A word.

A world.

I could return.

Perhaps this is why I make books now.

To make something that can be carried.

Something that can be opened.

Something that can become a world.

The HUUN codex journals come from this desire. I make them as vessels with space still available inside them. They are handmade codex books waiting for someone else's language, marks, memories, images, and questions.

The HUUN MAYAN PAPER COLLECTION extends this relationship into the material of the page itself, asking me to consider paper not simply as a surface but as something with its own presence, texture, history, and relationship to place.

The work continues to change.

I am still working through what the book is.

I am still becoming clearer about what I want it to hold.

Everything is always transforming.

The book transforms.

The maker transforms.

The language transforms.

The relationship between them transforms.

And perhaps that is what I have always loved about the book.

It can become something else without ceasing to be a book.

It can hold contradiction.

It can hold memory.

It can hold a body.

It can hold a landscape.

It can hold a poem that has not yet been written.

It can hold a person who has not yet opened it.

For me, handmade codex bookbinding is not simply a technique.

It is a way of listening.

Cutting.

Folding.

Stitching.

Pressing.

Waiting.

Opening.

It is a way of understanding that making does not always need to move toward completion. Sometimes making is the process of becoming more attentive to what is already there.

I believe books are witnesses to the vibrations of the Earth.

I believe they witness us too.

And every time I make one, I am still trying to understand what a book can be.