We are doing our best to turn in early tonight, because tomorrow we are heading to Baltimore to do a talk/reading/Q&A session with some illustration students at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), one of the nation’s finest art schools.

We were asked to speak by MICA professor and illustrator Jaime Zollars, who we met at SPX a few years back. Here is one of her paintings, The Maze. Beautiful stuff.

We’re going to take a fairly casual approach, talking about what we do, how we got started, how we run our press, etc. Then we’ll read a few books and answer questions. Hopefully there will be some.

Because our slideshow of home/children/studio shots was such a hit with the elementary school kids at White Marsh last week, we’ve put together a similar show for the college kids. But we’ve upped the ante, showing the darker side of the life of a barn-based bookmaker. We’ll be sharing a sequence of shots detailing the “art fit” I had in the midst of producing our first book, Facial Features of French Explorers. Something went horribly awry with the printer, all of the books were ruined, and I failed to maintain my composure.

Robbi put together a short animation to commemorate the event.

If you’re interested, here is the full accounting of that fateful day.

I am under strict instructions from Robbi to avoid similar incident tomorrow. As always, I will do my best. As always, I can make no promises.

Addendum: Robbi just read this post and told me that I shouldn’t include the photos of the art fit—not because it was unseemly and unprofessional, mind you, but because it was possible that one of the students who will be at tomorrow’s presentation might, in the name of thorough preparation, read our blog tonight, see the photos, and thus have a less satisfying experience tomorrow. Though I think it highly unlikely that this will happen, I’m willing to humor the possibility that it could. To compensate (and reward) those of you who read this post tonight, the first three people who raise their hands tomorrow and say “artichoke” will get a free book. For real.

I can’t wait to see if it happens.