My work was the subject of a monograph published in Switzerland in 1995 by a small, art book publisher named Editions Victor Attinger S.A. (The "S.A." means "société anonyme" in French and is equivalent to "Inc." meaning "Incorporated" in business lingo in the US.) It's nearly 30 years since it appeared, and the truth is that I haven't thought much about it the last ten or fifteen years. It moved into the past as did so much else that once upon a time held enormous importance and demanded enormous effort, then blurred into memory, no longer relevant to the evolving discourses of craft, or to the day-to-day in my studio, not mattering much.

Recently I stopped into a small midwestern quilt museum that happened to be on a slower and more civilized state-and-county-roads trip routing that we'd opted for instead of the interstate. In its shop doubling as the museum reception area, my eye caught that same Editions Attinger volume at the bottom of a short stack of sale books. "Used book. $3." A deal.

While I hadn't written any of the book's text – authorship, officially, is credited to Patricia Harris, David Lyon, and Patricia Malarcher, each responsible for sections of the book – I'd been heavily involved in its production, in ways too numerous to itemize here. I do claim authorship of all of the work reproduced in the book, though, and as author in that regard, it was humbling to find the book at the bottom of that pile, with a $3 price sticker. Used book indeed. I console myself that, searching for the title at online used and rare book vendors' sites, I find re-sale prices floating respectably between about $25. and $75., reasonable for a book published three decades back.

Creating a monograph of this type and putting it out into the world was a very different proposition in those days before InDesign, before amazon.com and print-on-demand and social media. You can imagine it as a more “acoustic” process. Very hands-on, very material and in this case, very artisanal. Olivier Attinger and his wife Vren made up the Editions Attinger team, a mom-and-pop enterprise if there ever was one. Working with them to produce the book would be predicated on our existing friendship and a mutual respect and trust that set the tone for the entire enterprise.

The Swiss quilt artist Maryline Collioud had first brought me to Switzerland to lecture in 1983. We’d met in Colorado where she’d participated in a workshop I led at a conference there, and she and I and my family became fast friends. When she learned that I had grown up bilingual, she proposed that I come to Switzerland to speak. “But you’ll have to do it in French,” she said, complicating the matter. Though I'd spoken it since I was a child, I hadn’t at that point mouthed much if any French since I left high school fifteen years before. The draw of Alpine landscapes was stronger, though, than my doubts about my language proficiency. Over a couple years’ time I applied myself to recovering the respectable fluency I’d left to my past. It returned, not at “native speaker” level, admittedly, but competent. I gave a lecture in Neuchâtel to a large audience that included the quilt artist Radka Donnell-Vogt, who’d come down from Zurich. Also in the audience was Guy de Montmollin, a gallerist from the area who would in subsequent years mount five solo shows of my work. Vren Attinger was also on hand. My Québecquois accent was well received. Years of professional and personal association with the Neuchâtel area would follow, and when I return there even today, it feels like home.

In the early 90s Guy de Montmollin and Vern and Olivier Attinger first floated the idea of doing a monograph. Two solo shows in Guy’s Galerie Jonas had been very well received and had sold well. The strip piecing work I’d been doing for nearly a decade was reaching its culmination and my body of work, taken together, seemed ripe for documentation. Would I be interested, they asked, in working with Editions Attinger to make this idea a reality?

At left with Guy de Montmollin at Galerie Jonas, 1995; at right with Olivier Attinger

I was, and we did. The book was published in French (titled Michael James: l’art du quilt) and English-language editions, to coincide with my third solo show at Galerie Jonas. Editions Attinger produced a beautiful hardbound volume, “coffee table” in proportions, with a couple of gatefolds that presented groups of works in a compare-and-contrast format, and with a cloth binding, an increasingly rare physical feature even in the 1990s, and rarer still today. I was gratified and more than appreciative. The show’s vernissage served as launch event for the book, and it was very well attended. I felt more than fortunate to have had that opportunity.

Above, one of the book’s gatefolds showing work from the Rhythm/Color series, and the dust jacket slipped back to show the book’s cloth binding. Below, the opening day of my May 1995 exhibition Studio Quilts at Galerie Jonas; at right, signing a copy for Jitka Čáslavská.

Above, installation view of Studio Quilts at Galerie Jonas, May 1995. At left, Energy Field (1995); at right, Roundabout (1994)

Editions Attinger’s publishing reach was primarily Swiss, and central Europe more broadly. They weren’t integrated with the US market and weren’t interested in reaching into it. If the book were to appear there, I would have to find an American publisher to hop on board, a daunting prospect. For a host of reasons, I decided to import and sell the book myself, expecting that would be a more efficient and potentially profitable use of my time. I prepared a careful and detailed business plan for a small publishing operation to be called Whetstone Hill Publications, and submitted it with my application for a business loan to my local bank.

Fortune again shone on the project. The bank gave me the loan on that first application, I was able to import the books, and over the next five years single-handedly managed the sale and distribution of the entire inventory. I successfully repaid the loan and realized a reasonable profit for the effort. Though I no longer have the paperwork at my fingertips and can’t be precise about the total number of books that spent years stacked around my Somerset Village, MA studio, it may have been upwards of 1500 copies. At the time it seemed like a lot. I felt hugely relieved when I finally got down to the last couple of boxes. I wouldn’t have inventory to move with me when I relocated halfway across the country, which as the millennium was ending I knew I would soon be doing.

Above, distribution and sale of Michael James Studio Quilts invades my studio, late summer 1995.

Books such as these function as portfolios of sorts but today have been largely replaced by artists' professional websites. These are far more expandable, far more easily updated, and far more affordable, with a much wider reach. Yet, as with print books generally, holding the thing in one's hands isn't a virtual experience. It's real, it's visceral, it's highly personal. In this case, a $3 memory rush slowly lured me back to hours and days and months and years at work in the studio, to crowded exhibition openings and professional and personal friendships of long standing, to feeling part of like-minded communities of makers and dreamers in the closing years of a century.