Ediciones Vigía: A Cuban Artists’ Collective Reimagining the Paperback Book

Earlier this year I curated a pop-up exhibition of Ediciones Vigía artists’ books as part of my Ellin M. Kelly Internship in Special Collections and Archives. The exhibit, which ran from May 21st—22nd, featured twenty-two Cuban artists’ books from the 1990s.

In Cuba during the 1980s, mass-produced paperbacks were the primary form of accessible literature. Alfredo Zaldívar Muño and Rolando Estévez Jordán sought to change that, believing that “Cuba was in need of beautiful books, books that themselves would be works of art.”¹ In 1985, Zaldívar and Estévez founded an artists’ book collective in Matanzas, Cuba, called Ediciones Vigía. The primary goal of Ediciones Vigía was to publish books that were functional and worth displaying as artwork, merging literature and visual arts.

At the time of its founding, Ediciones Vigía created unique artists’ books out of donated materials and found objects; using a borrowed typewriter and an old Soviet mimeograph machine to create reproductions. Many of the books are made out of butcher paper, (which Zaldívar and Estévez were able to acquire for free) and this became a recognizable feature of the Vigía books.

“The humble brown paper became the trademark of Ediciones Vigía. Made of bagasse, a fibrous byproduct processed from sugarcane pulp, it was a quintessentially Cuban form of paper. Sugar, the island’s major crop throughout its history, was the backbone for the handmade books.”²

Each book published by the collective has a run of 200 copies, which are first given to the collaborators involved in the making of the book, before being available for purchase by the public. In an effort to maintain a level of accessibility for community members, the collective established a two-tier payment plan, which made Vigía books more expensive to tourists than to Cubans. This payment plan ensures the collection’s longevity without going against their core value of creating beautiful and accessible books for Cuba.

In the early years of Ediciones Vigía, the collective focused on uplifting unknown Cuban authors but, over time, Vigía’s scope expanded to include international authors as well. This is reflected in the collection of thirty-eight Ediciones Vigía artists’ books held by DePaul Special Collections and Archives. Published between 1994–1998, the collection primarily features poetry, as well as songs, letters, and short stories.

The collection contains a mix of Cuban and international authors, such as Jorge Borges, Emily Dickinson, Serguei Esenin, Édouard Glissant, Rafael Hernández, Gerhard Kofler, Dulce María Loynaz, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Nancy Morejón, and Wisława Szymborska. Many of the books are formatted as traditional books, but many of the materials in the collection deviate from that, notably featuring books in alternative formats such as hanging scrolls; an envelope of letters; and even a cardboard house with an openable roof that contains a book and props.

For further reading about Ediciones Vigía, Handmade in Cuba: Rolando Estévez and the Beautiful Books of Ediciones Vigía is the most comprehensive source available. All thirty-eight Ediciones Vigía books are available for in-person research at DePaul’s Special Collections and Archives, located in room 314 of the John T. Richardson Library. Everyone is welcome.

Citations:

¹Ruth Behar, Juanamaría Cordones-Cook, and Kristin Schwain, eds., Handmade in Cuba: Rolando Estévez and the Beautiful Books of Ediciones Vigía (University Press of Florida, 2022), 18.

¹Ruth Behar, Juanamaría Cordones-Cook, and Kristin Schwain, eds., Handmade in Cuba: Rolando Estévez and the Beautiful Books of Ediciones Vigía (University Press of Florida, 2022), 2.