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Let’s give a warm welcome to Dave Buchen!
Hello all and thanks for this opportunity to share my work. I started making books on my printing press back in 2000, hand-printing, coloring, and binding 100 books at a time. As the books I wanted to make got more complex, I moved to self-publishing in various forms.
My newest book is Why is an Apple an Apple? A Garden of Etymology. It tells the story of how our words for fruits and vegetables have evolved over the years with 50+ papercut illustrations. The story of words like rice, rhubarb, and rutabaga led me down many rabbit holes of where fruits were first grown and how they traveled the world. For example, rhubarb can be translated as “Russian Barbarian” or “Wet Barbarian.” I make children’s books, but as a father and former teacher who has read countless children’s books, I try to write them in a way that any age can read them and be neither bored or overwhelmed.
This book is a sequel to Why is a Tiger a Tiger? A Bestiary of Etymology which I published years ago. My fascination with etymology was really sparked back in Chicago when I found a great dictionary with etymologies in the garbage. It’s its own way of studying culture and language that reveals connections and meanings that one wouldn’t have otherwise deduced. I then published a Spanish version which included new animals and some other animals taken out. An interesting etymology in one language does not guarantee an equally fascinating story in the other!
In many ways, my books have evolved as my children have grown up. I made Bilingual ABC Bilingüe back when they were small, and I was faced with a dilemma. I moved to Puerto Rico in 1999, and my children were both born here and are bilingual. Finding a decent bilingual ABC was way harder than it should have been. Too many books had pages like “A is for Apple [ M es para Manzana]”! So I made my own in which the letters actually match the words in English and Spanish (Acrobat/Acróbata, Bubbles/Burbujas etc.). This was originally hand-printed, but after they sold out I resurrected it as a print-on-demand book.
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I still make books by hand as well as an annual calendar. I have a Vandercook #1 press in my laundry shed. Hush Little Baby is a version that I used to sing to my kids in semi-improvised variations to get them to sleep. For a model of parent and child, I was able to turn to my nephew and his new daughter. I have also used the press to make an annual calendar since 1999. It began as the Bestiary Calendar and has evolved over the years to have such themes as the French Revolutionary Calendar, dancing, masks in the first year of covid, and people embracing in covid’s aftermath. This year’s theme was going to be birds you can see from my garden, but I broadened it to Puerto Rico in general to get some more striking birds other than the ones that visit me.
For the calendar, my daughter, now an adult, contributed three of the prints including the hummingbird.
The print-on-demand books are available at Amazon, which has a de facto monopoly on the kind of self-publishing I do, sigh.
Info about my hand-printed books and calendars can be found on my website.
