No matter the weather outside, the air-conditioning is always on full blast inside the very cozy confines of Yodel Pe’s studio, which is also her childhood bedroom.

Aside from mitigating the baking effect of a half-a-century-old house’s brick walls, the temperature control is to protect Pe’s extensive collection of paper products, which range from expensive and luxurious stationery sourced from Europe and Japan to antique books that are no bigger than the palm, gold-edged, and bound in leather. There are also her bookbinding projects that expand the boundaries of the craft: journals covered with Chiyogama paper, a Dunlop dining guide that has been transformed into a hardbound concertina booklet with cut-outs and magnets, old hardbound books that have been hollowed out to provide storage.

For two years now, bookbinding has been a major preoccupation for Pe. Not only does these projects’ demand for her total focus and manual dexterity provide respite from a computer-bound job as a freelance art director and graphic designer, they also provide her with an avenue to turn the book form into a functional piece of art that has just as much impact as the text it contains.

“I’m of that age that straddles two different worlds,” Pe explains her lifelong fascination with paper. “I had never wanted to work with a computer.” It was an atypical stance for someone with a degree in Graphic Design and Illustration from the University of the Arts London, and Pe had to adjust that perspective upon joining the Manila workforce. “I was in art school in the ‘90s, a time when a whole generation was moving on to a new way of doing things. Back then, I refused to touch a computer; the most I would use was a photocopying machine. So when I started working, I had to tell my employer [design agency B+C Design, Inc.] that I didn’t know how to use one. They were shocked.”

With the company quite small, Pe got the chance to learn not only how to use a computer but “basically everything” involved in designing and printing books, magazines, and flyers, then later on putting together a website. After three years, she decided to set out on her own. “You get burned out when you stay too long somewhere. I realized that I could do work on my own after learning everything I could from them.”

Somehow, Pe has continued to resist succumbing to the blatant digital promotion and self-marketing that are now part and parcel of any creative career. She’s quite difficult to track online (“I still haven’t gotten around to fixing my own website”), and most of her clients are connections from people she’s already known and worked with. “I’ve seldom pitched to clients on spec; I’ve done that once or twice only,” she admits. “Word of mouth turned out to work best for me. Since my clients already knew me or I was referred to them by someone they know, they understand the design I do.” Among this group are writer Jessica Zafra, designer Cecile Zamora, artists Freddie and Isabel Aquilizan, and the Lopez Museum. “A lot of them come from the art and fashion circles, because my earliest clients were artists.”

There is an “Old-y World-y” appeal to Pe’s work. “My work always reflects that handmade aspect, even with the graphic design stuff.” she says. “Today, you can find textures, patterns, and other stuff easily online, but I still prefer to scan things that I’ve found and use them instead.” Besides, her ever-increasing hoard of old books and magazines provides plenty of material, what with her illustrations not so much as drawings but more of collages. “It kind of feels like cheating if I were to simply go to a website and purchase something that’s already available.”  

Her desire to go back to hand-crafting and working with paper got particularly strong around five years ago. More than creating designs for paper products, she had wanted to dive into working with the actual paper itself, so in 2013, Pe and a friend put together EVRYWHR, a paper product company that carried the kind of paper they would want to buy. “Letter-pressed, engraved, embossed, with four-color printing or mono-print—luxe, in short. We weren’t sure if people would buy them, because our product was quite expensive.”

It was a short-lived endeavor, with EVRYWHR releasing only one collection, but it gave Pe the opportunity to do the kind of work that she was interested in, despite having a limited market. “People did buy our stuff, but they didn’t use them or give them away; they simply collected them, so how would that work for the business? I guess what we were trying to do was too early for the time. Also, there’s really no history to paper here, given our weather. Not everyone can set up a space with temperature control to protect their books, so print doesn’t have the pedigree that it has in other countries.”

But Pe believes that the local market would come around to print again, maybe even with a deeper appreciation for the medium. During an Artbooks.ph bookbinding workshop that she facilitated in 2016, she met artists who were also reverting to the more traditional ways of creating: painstakingly slow, exacting, both creatively and manually laborious. “There’s a precision called for with the old school way of doing things, which I think artists, especially the younger ones, could use to learn,” she says.

In fact, this is what she had tried to impart to students when she taught at the College of Saint Benilde 10 years ago; ironically, her subjects were Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. “Everyone was on their computers, but I wanted to talk to the students and see what they know, the context from which they create, because it’s not the computer that would develop their eyes and their perspective. Now this was when deviantart was popular. Not to put down the artists who used that platform, but I wanted my students to look at the works of painters, of classical artists. ‘Things on deviantart are copies of copies,’ I told them. Some of them listened, some didn’t.” At the very least, Pe instilled the necessity of having their own pen and sketchbook with them at all times.

Today, through her brand Manila Paper Trail, Pe tries to raise the public’s appreciation for print and paper through the bookmarks she inserts in between the pages of her manually bound journals. “They tell a buyer what the paper is made of and where the materials are sourced: ‘This is made with marbleized paper with book cloth, sourced from London.’ It’s just to remind them of the artistry, hard work, and history behind each item.”

She herself used to see bookbinding as a hobby, but experiencing firsthand how technically difficult it is—not to mention expensive—made her realize its depth as an art form and the possibilities it holds. “Even though I know in theory all the steps involved in the process, I find myself still making decisions on the fly to make it easier or even better. Bookbinding takes serious skill, so anyone who is going to get into it has to have a really good reason to do so. This craft—this art—has its own personality.”  

This story was published in the January - March 2020 issue of Northern Living. Lead image is from Manila Paper Trail’s Instagram account.