Duncan Tonatiuh: Hi everyone. My name is Duncan, or Duncan Tonatiuh, and I am the author of A Land of Books: Dreams of Young Mexihcah Word Painters. A Land of Books is about the tlacuiloque, which were people that painted books. In Mesoamerican times, the Mexihcah or Aztecs as we know them, the Mayas, the Mixtecs, different groups were creators of books.

I grew up in Mexico, but I came to the US, and when I came to the US I began to miss things about Mexico, and I became very interested in the art of Mexico. And I became very interested in Mesoamerican and in pre-Columbian art. And I've been drawing in a style that's influenced by the artwork that people made in Mesoamerican times. But at some point, I thought I should know more about this, and maybe it'll be interesting to do a book about this, about this artwork that has influenced me for many years now. And so, I decided to learn about these codices, as we call them nowadays, these books that were made hundreds of years ago, who made them, why they made them, how they made them, and trying to learn as much as I could, then I tried to distill that information and hopefully present it in an interesting and appealing way to young readers.

So the first challenge for me was trying to narrow in on what the book should be about. And I thought that one way of doing it, and that would hopefully be interesting for young readers is this young girl who is going to become a tlacuiloque in the future, a painter of words, a painter of books, talking with her brother, and guiding him along the process of making a book and what the books are about. One reason why I wanted to make this book is because I don't think a lot of people realized that there was this rich book-making tradition in the Americas and in Mesoamerica before the Europeans came, before the Spanish came. And so hopefully, this will just help introduce this idea that there existed this rich book-making tradition in the Americas before the Europeans and others came to this part of the world.

And so, the spreads that I'd like to talk about is this dream sequence where this sister and this brother, they're going to bed and the sister tells her brother to dream of books. And so, in the first spread, we see them from above and we see their full bodies, and she tells them to dream of books that are about the different gods. But then we get closer and we kind of zoom in into her. And then she tells them to dream of books that are about the legends, the different history of their peoples, like the legend of how their ancestors went on this pilgrimage to search for a sign of where they should settle and build their mighty city, the city of Tenochtitlan.

And then we zoom again, and it talks about books that are about different governors and different tributes that need to be sent. But each time, it's like a camera that zooms closer into the images, and then we pan to the brother and he's dreaming of books that are Almanacs, calendar books. And then we zoom out and see him dreaming of books that are about plants and the stars.

And so hopefully, it's an interesting way of talking about what Mesoamerican books were about, what the codices were about, but also we start zooming, we start seeing them, the brother and the sister from afar, and then we get close and closer into their mind, and then we pull away.