Cindy and Tom Hollander. (Photo by M. Morgan)

Chief among those contributions is Hollander’s School of Book & Paper Arts, which for almost 20 years has offered workshops, classes and studio space for book artists (my husband among them) and drawn students and teachers from around the country to Ann Arbor. So there is more than a touch of irony in the timing of Sunday’s award: When the 11th annual BookFest rolls around, the school will be no more.

I talked to Tom and Cindy earlier this week about their decision to close the school at the end of the spring 2013 term. In response to what they describe as diminishing enrollment, they say they are stepping away from one branch of a business that has expanded dramatically from the tiny shop on the second floor of Kerrytown Market & Shops in 1991. Today, the main floor of Hollander’s offers a lavish collection of fine papers and stationery, desk sets, decorative boxes and gifts along with bookbinding supplies; Hollander’s Kitchen Store is upstairs.

“When we opened our store,” Cindy said, “I can say I never heard the word ‘book art.’” But by 1994, she and Tom were teaching workshops and by 2002, they were using the lower level of their Kerrytown space for the Hollander’s School of Book & Paper Arts. Tom gives some credit for that expansion to local book artist Barbara Brown, who in the mid-1990s was leading occasional workshops at Hollander’s while also attending summer sessions at the American Academy of Bookbinding in Telluride, Colo.

“She’d come back after taking these classes,” Tom said, “and she really talked it up” – eventually persuading him to check things out for himself. “I’d been around the next level [of book arts] for long enough that I got interested in more than just business – I was ready for something different,” he said. “I wanted to go to the next level myself.”

Tom Hollander went to Telluride; what followed was a partnership with the academy that brought prestigious AAB faculty to Hollander’s from 2002 to 2006 and national recognition for the expanding Hollander’s operation. The store’s rich inventory of bookbinding papers and supplies deepened, the school’s schedule of classes and roster of instructors expanded and enrollment continued to grow. The Hollanders also were among the original organizers of the BookFest, and served on the board for eight years.

But the past couple years have brought some changes to the home front for the Hollanders. They visited their daughter – and grandson Oliver – in Alabama this past Labor Day weekend; that’s a 13-hour drive each way. Their son lives in Washington, D.C.

Their business has seen some changes, too – specifically, they say, a drop in enrollment at the school. While popular teachers are still filling certain paper arts and bookbinding workshops, Tom said, overall student numbers are down and “classes are falling off.”

The school “was a lot of work for me to oversee,” he said. “It always came back to me. And if you’re going to do it, do it right,” he said. “It’s our baby; our name is on it.” And while most of the book arts schools around the country are nonprofits, “we’re not.”

Cindy, whose primary responsibility is running the store, said it flatly: “The full schedule has been a drain.”

The school has drawn customers to the store and its online operation, and Tom acknowledged that the likelihood of a hit to sales of bookbinding papers and supplies was “a consideration” in the decision to close. At the same time, they’ve decided to add art supplies to their inventory – the closing of Michigan Book and Supply earlier this year left local art students without a downtown bricks-and-mortar source for everything from paint to mat board. And they have their hands full with the kitchen store on the third floor – cooking classes will continue.

“We’re not going anywhere anytime soon,” Tom said.

Sign above the entrance to Hollanders School of Book & Paper Arts at Kerrytown Market & Shops, 410 N. Fourth Ave. in Ann Arbor.

Since they announced that the spring term would be the last for the school, Cindy said, “there’s been a spike in enrollment.” She and Tom, together and separately, will teach several of the more than two dozen classes being offered in the current fall term.

“We haven’t ruled out offering occasional classes” after next spring, Cindy said, “but not a schedule of classes.” And Tom said he isn’t sure what will happen to the lower-level space and its impressive collection of antique book presses, page cutters, etching presses and letterpress equipment.

With “the right person, the right circumstances, we can still be involved,” Tom said, “but at a less intense level.”

“I’d love to get to the point where we could make things again,” Cindy said. “Maybe we can take some classes.”

Barbara Brown confirmed that Tom Hollander has approached her about offering classes or operating a studio – but in a new location. She said she has had some serious discussions recently with a number of local book artists about what might come after the Hollander’s school closes its doors. A definite path forward hasn’t been mapped, she said: “We really haven’t had time to sort it out.”

But, she said, “Ann Arbor isn’t done with books yet.”

Evidence of that will be on display from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday at the BookFest. Along with exhibitors that include book dealers, local publishers and printers, and paper and book artists, more than 30 writers will be on hand to talk about their work in panel discussions and presentations throughout the day. (Full disclosure: as he has since 2003, my husband, Alvey Jones, will have a booth at the BookFest.)

“Poetry as It Lives and Breathes,” scheduled for noon in the main tent, looks to cover many of the creative bases: Moderator Keith Taylor and a group of poets will read and discuss their work and a souvenir booklet of their poems will be available – along with the opportunity to create a binding for it.

About the writer: Domenica Trevor lives in Ann Arbor – her columns are published periodically in The Ann Arbor Chronicle. The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our columnists and other contributors. If you’re already supporting The Chronicle, please encourage your friends, neighbors and coworkers to do the same. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle.

An Ann Arbor Book Festival board meeting at the offices of the Ann Arbor State Bank (from left): Peter Schork, Kathy Robenalt, Jeff Kass, Evans Young, Bill Gosling, John Knott.

The starkest of those is the absence of Shaman Drum Bookshop, which closed its doors last summer. The bookstore had been a key sponsor since its owner, Karl Pohrt, took a key role in launching the festival in 2003. The void, for the festival as well as the community, has been deeply felt.

Pohrt’s staff “was extremely helpful in attracting some of our main guest authors,” said festival executive director Kathy Robenalt, “so that was a loss we had to work with.” And the woes of the wider industry have hit home, too: publisher-paid author tours are far from routine anymore, meaning fewer authors who might be able to appear at the festival on, say, HarperCollins’ dime.

Pohrt remains on the 18-member festival board, along with Bill Zirinsky, who owns returning sponsor Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tea Room with his wife, Ruth Schekter.

“It’s been a difficult time for nonprofits, obviously,” Zirinsky wrote in an e-mail Friday sent on his way to a meeting in Birmingham. “And I think the festival board came up with a plan this year to keep the festival thriving, but on a scaled-back basis.”

“Our authors, poets, bloggers, digiterati, readers and assorted literary types deserve this kind of regional festival,” he wrote.

Organizers expect to continue with a smaller event for “a couple of years, when, hopefully, funding will be more consistently available,” Robenalt said. “There are a lot of people in the community who support the festival financially and in other ways, and they want to see it continue.”

No exhibitors this year, indoors or out

The high-profile – and expensive – street fair of previous years gave way in 2009 to a group of exhibitors inside the Michigan League and a few more outside on Ingalls Mall. This year’s event skips that aspect altogether. “We’re hoping things will bounce back and that this won’t always be the case,” Robenalt said.

And while that “festival feeling” might be lacking without exhibitors, she acknowledged, the planning committee decided to “focus on some of our key events that we have had good response to in the past and at the same time earn some revenue. Hopefully,” she says, “that would put us in better shape for next year.”

Hence, the emphasis on the Writer’s Conference.

Kathy Robenalt, executive director of the Ann Arbor Book Festival.

“A strong contingent of people attend it pretty regularly,” Robenalt says. “There aren’t enough of these sorts of events in the area, and people like them.”

The festival kicks off at 7 p.m. Friday, May 14, at the Neutral Zone, 310 Washington St., with “Literama.” It’s a celebration of poetry with readings by Rachel McKibbens and Aracelis Girmay (“Teeth,” Curbstone Press, 2007) as well as an “intergenerational poetry slam.” Admission is $5.

Also on Friday night, the festival will present its LILA Award to two local “Leaders in the Literary Arts”: Nicola Rooney of Nicola’s Books and the Family Book Club, a nonprofit that promotes literacy and the value of reading to children in Washtenaw County.

Saturday starts, appropriately enough, with breakfast: an Author Breakfast, at 8:30 a.m. at the University of Michigan’s Hatcher Graduate Library. Authors and participants will get together with Michigan Radio’s Charity Nebbe and pastries donated by Zingerman’s; there’s a $20 charge.

Festival organizers decided to start this year’s Writer’s Conference at 10:15 a.m. – a little later than in past years, Robenalt said – so area participants driving considerable distances to Ann Arbor (“they really want to come”) could make it in for the whole conference without a killer pre-dawn drive.

Writing workshops – the how and the why

This year’s conference workshops range from writing exercises and the art of revision to magical realism and new approaches to nonfiction – the last led by New York Times auto industry reporter Micheline Maynard (“The End of Detroit: How the Big Three Lost Their Grip on the American Car Market”). Other instructors include local lights Ann Pearlman (“Infidelity,” “The Christmas Cookie Cookbook”); Ann Arbor Observer editor John Hilton; and Margaret Yang, a former restaurant critic for the Observer and winner of the Ann Arbor Writer’s Festival 2009 short story contest. The workshops will meet in the Mason/Haven Halls on UM’s Central Campus.

For the last session of the conference, all participants will gather at the Library Gallery (Room 100 at Hatcher) for a panel discussion on “the sort of question that everyone has” at writing workshops, Robenalt said: How do you find a publisher?

Panelist Bonnie Jo Campbell of Kalamazoo will provide an important perspective, Robenalt pointed out. Her most recent collection of stories, “American Salvage” (Wayne State University Press), was a 2009 National Book Award finalist and a 2010 Michigan Notable Book – and she doesn’t have an agent. Campbell is proof that “you don’t have to have an agent; you don’t have to go through New York City,” Robenalt said.

An Author’s Forum wraps up the festival at 5 p.m., featuring Campbell and Lolita Hernandez, a writing teacher at the University of Michigan Residential College and author of the award-winning short-story collection “Autopsy of an Engine and Other Stories from the Cadillac Plant” (Coffee House Press, 2004). They’ll talk about working-class characters in contemporary fiction.

Interested in the Writer’s Conference? You can register as late as that morning but, obviously, the sooner you sign up, the better the odds of landing in your first-pick sessions.

A community presence

Some of the guest authors will be visiting the Ann Arbor Public Schools in the week leading up to the festival. “It’s a great way to fulfill our mission of continuing to push reading, writing and literacy,” Robenalt said, “and doing that with authors in schools opens up a lot of doors for a lot of kids who may not normally be able to be exposed to an author or an illustrator.”

And the annual Ann Arbor Antiquarian Book Fair returns to the Michigan Union on Sunday, May 16, thanks in great part to Jay Platt and the West Side Book Shop, 113 W. Liberty St. Among some 40 exhibitors will be locals Bessenberg Bindery, UM’s William Clements Library, Third Mind Books and Kaleidoscope Books and Collectibles.

With an overall budget of about $40,000 this year, the festival took smart advantage of free, local online and radio events calendars for the bulk of its promotional efforts. The Ann Arbor Visitors and Convention Bureau also offered meeting space to festival organizers in its building on Huron and Ashley streets, and in-kind contributions came from such local companies as Zingerman’s and Edwards Brothers, which is handling some of the festival’s printing work.

“Unfortunately, we were having to look at the bottom line in deciding how to go forward,” Robenalt said. “Choosing to do the events we are doing will keep us out there.”

About the writer: Domenica Trevor is a voracious reader who lives in Ann Arbor and has been known to attend a writer’s conference from time to time.

"The Sign of the Four" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is included in the collection in multiple forms.

On Monday, April 27, University of Michigan libraries will open an exhibit from a special collection of works by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: “Clues Beyond Sherlock Holmes: The Arthur Conan Doyle Collection at Michigan.” UM will hold an opening reception May 17.

When The Chronicle dropped by on Thursday before the Monday opening, Kathryn Beam and Kate Hutchens, curators of the exhibit, were nailing down the final details of the material to be shown on the seventh floor of Hatcher Library. Most of the glass display cases were already filled with books, many of them resting on custom-crafted cradles, to allow a glimpse inside the volumes. A shop-vac attested to the work in progress. Later in the day, some of the conservationists were to arrive to work on the wall-mounted glass cases.

Where did the material in the university’s Conan Doyle collection come from, and what occasioned the exhibit?

The timing coincides with the 6th Annual Ann Arbor Book Festival, which runs from May 15-17. Dr. Philip Parker of West Bloomfield, Michigan donated the items, which range from rare editions of early books by Conan Doyle to photographs, pewter statues, audio recordings, and a plush dog dressed as Sherlock Holmes. It was Dr. Parker’s father, Hyman Parker, who started the family’s collection. Among the items is a charcoal drawing of Hyman done in 1964, which depicts him dressed as the Sherlock Holmes, and  inscribed by the artist to “Hymie Holmes.” But the collection reflects the breadth of Conan Doyle’s writings, which included far more than just the familiar detective stories. After the elder Parker’s death in 1975, his son expanded the range of materials, with a practicing psychiatrist’s eye towards its research potential, emphasizing Conan Doyle’s interest in spiritualism.

Book cradles are constructed by library conservation staff for each book and configured to highlight the particular pages selected by curators.

When a donor like Parker offers a large volume of material for a UM special collection, how does all that stuff make its way into the library for an exhibit?  The first step is elementary: you box it for transport to the Hatcher Library. In this case it came a relatively short distance – from West Bloomfield – which made it a hands-on process for UM library staff. Kathyrn Beam, curator of humanities collections in the special collections library, did a lot of the boxing.

Beam’s colleague, Kate Hutchens, who’s a reference assistant with the library, then began an intake process that included pencilling very lightly into each book the new owner’s name – the University of Michigan – and the name of the collection. Hutchens confirmed that yes, she’d handled every item in the 120 boxes that Beam had packed up.

As for the task of lightly inscribing the items, she accomplished it with a combination of dexterity (you just don’t press as hard) and a #3 pencil. When The Chronicle pressed Hutchens, she allowed that the inscription task itself was somewhat menial. When pressed even further, however, she described how the placement of the light pencil inscription required some judgment: You don’t want to inscribe a page to which a book might be opened for an exhibit; you want to put it in a logical, easy-to-find place, not just willy-nilly. The title page is often a good candidate, she said.

As for the pages to which books are opened for an exhibit, Beam explained that this was also a decision not made on a random basis. For example, there’s a passage in “The Last Bow,” which Beam said could be interpreted as forecasting World War II.  So the book will be opened to that passage for the exhibit.

In conversation with Beam and Hutchens, it’s apparent that they’re familiar with the biography of Arthur Conan Doyle at a fine level of detail.  Hutchens said she brought little background knowledge to her work on the exhibit, but that by reading a couple of biographies as well as “pausing as you come across things” in processing the materials, she’d amassed quite a bit of knowledge about the author. One of the items in the collection that had caused her to pause was a book of illustrations by Conan Doyle’s uncle, Richard Doyle, showing fairies in a “documentary style,” depicting them doing what fairies naturally do: “torturing butterflies and birds, but in a friendly and mischievous way.”

A print from the "Cottingley Fairies" series.

Hutchens noted the connection between the fairy drawings and the “Cottingley Fairies,” which was an episode in which Conan Doyle came down on the side of believing that photographs made of cut-out paper fairies actually depicted fairies.

In addition to some material on fairies, visitors to the exhibit can expect to see display cases dedicated to Conan Doyle’s writings on the Boer War (for which he was knighted), true crime narratives and historical fiction. Beam said that the Parker family collection covered the breadth of Conan Doyle’s writings, so that by sampling from the collection, the exhibit was sampling from the range of Conan Doyle’s life and work at the same time.

The formal reception celebrating the opening of the exhibit will take place on Sunday, May 17 from 2 to 5 p.m. and will include remarks by Daniel Hack, associate professor of English, as well as the donor, Dr. Philip Parker. The reception – to be held in the Library Gallery, Room 100 on the ground floor of the Hatcher Library – will feature foods mentioned in books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Those foods will be catered by Amanda Fisher of Amanda’s Kitchen.

Attendees are also invited to dress as their favorite Conan Doyle character. Harriet Teller, manager of stewardship and events for the library, is planning to come dressed as Irene Adler from “A Scandal in Bohemia.”

The event is free, but UM libraries would appreciate an RSVP by May 7 to plan for food quantities: Contact LibraryDevelopment@umich.edu  or 734-763-7368.