Ana Paula Cordeiro is an artist, printer, bookbinder, author of a blog, and teacher, who has been active in the Center's community since 2002. Most recently, she's been working with interns on creating special leather journals, printing a broadside for the poet Erica Hunt, exhibiting her work in the summer Member's Show, and much more. As Ana writes below, the community of the Center is part of what makes it such a fun place to work and create.

- Ana, is there a place around for scraps of wax paper?

It happens more often in the summer, when interns spend more time in the studio than in the office. I can see it coming: usually there is some glue waiting to spill in their hands. They look around, they raise their eyebrows, they search, they sigh. To my knowledge no one has ever found it without asking.

- Yeap, in the flat files by the nipping presses, inside a drawer with yellow label that says "silicone release and tyvek".
- What?

I know, it doesn't make any sense. No wonder! We giggle, The Center for Book Arts is not the neatest spot on earth, really. We look around and burst into laughter: clearly!

Then I see it coming: next thing, another one will come with the same dilemma. I stay out of the scene, and as one tells another I take pleasure to notice how they also giggled in unison. Silicone release and tyvek means wax paper, how much sense does that make?

For a while I thought it was only me being weird with labels (full disclosure: labels make me nervous). Although even I could have fixed that; all it takes is a sharpie, and make it "silicone release tyvek AND wax paper" and that is the end of it. Then how come no one - not even the ones with traces of OCD that go around labeling everything - could fix this?

Seasons have come in and out, though, and now I know better. This is not about anti-adherence materials randomly bundled. That giggling together is welcome, is come on in, is a stepping stone out of the awkward, clumsy, hope-for-the-best moment most of us go through at first, bumping into this rather outdated technology and trying to figure out how to start conversation with these people so focused in handling huge sheets of paper as if there is no tomorrow. Wax paper inside the silicone release and tyvek drawer is insider, is translating, is we are into this together. That giggle and that glance will grow as the summer goes into a partners-in-crime kind of connection, to the point that when they show me what came out of Bookbinding I - a hardcover journal complete with endsheets that somehow got a bit crooked - we burst into laughter without warning. We both agree that this one will be Mom's.

We know that the next one will be better, that life is imperfect and full of labels that don't match their contents, and that we can make things anyway just because we can.