Spring Comes to the Hill Country - by Sister Mary Jean Dorcy with Dan Paulos

Inspiration comes in many forms, and Spring Comes to the Hill Country displays several of them. The main text of the book is a collection of quotations from sources as obvious (for a book of Madonnas) as the Catholic liturgy and as surprising as Gerard Manly Hopkins and Martin Luther. Only a firmly fixed prejudice against reverence for Mary could prevent the wide-ranging selections from being called inspirational.

The second inspiration if not the first in the beautifully prepared volume is the papercutting. All 51 of Sister Jean's cuttings are Madonnas, and yet the designs are wonderfully different, ranging from the austerity of old-fashioned altarpieces to surprising degrees of warmth that must be shocking to the more stodgy among the devout.

While papercutters and those who appreciate fine papercutting will surely spend many happy hours with this rare collection of cuttings by a master worker in the art, calligraphers will be equally intrigued by Paulos' superb penmanship. There are tiny touches in the writing-out of the passages that are sure to become styles-in-stock for many a hand-letterer: a unique linking of letters here, a slight break with form there.

Spring opens with a page of background about Paulos by Dorcy. Not really a biography, this introductory note does show Sister Jean's appreciation of her friend and collaborator. Then there is a forward by Dan Paulos in which, as you might say, he turns the tables. Unlike the usual notes and forewords in art books, these pages are very interesting.

Spring Comes to the Hill Country does have some weaknesses which we can only hope will be corrected in future editions. For papercutters, the most glaring fault is that the reproductions of Sister Jean's Madonnas are uncaptioned, so we can not know what the original sizes of the cuttings are. Paulos told Papercutting World, however, that they are "generally about 17 inches in their longest dimension." The absence of source references for some of the accompanying quotations may be irritating for some readers.

Whatever the problems may be, though, they are slight, and they do not alter the fact that the book is an invaluable record of Sister Mary Jean Dorcy's outstanding scissor-cutting. Roman's pricing of the book seems to be a result of their usual business being art giftwares rather than books. For the time being, Spring is priced too low to pass up.