For years, "The Tamarind Papers" has provided a forum for the examination of issues related to printmaking. This collection of essays by printers, artists, curators, and historians, the first issue of "The Tamarind Papers" to be produced in book form, focuses on issues surrounding the interaction of the printmaker with the political realities of society
The New Deal, with its WPA art projects, was a golden age for lithographic printmakers. In this collection are found a tribute to Gustave von Groschwitz, a central figure in the federal Graphhic Arts Division of the WPA in New York; an essay on the imagery in the 1936 calendar of the American League Against War and Fascism; and an essay on and checklist of the prints of Robert Gwathmey, active in the Philadelphia WPA project and concerned with conditions of African Americans in the South.

Included with this volume is an original lithograph by Eric Avery. In addition, there are interviews with Eric Avery and Patrick Nagatani, both artists concerned with current social issues, an overview of the evolution of social awarenss in nineteenth-century French prints, and articles by two Tamarind Master Printers on a new technique known as waterless lithography.
Includes an original print by Eric Avery.

Eric Avery (American, born 1948) While Eric Avery was working towards his Bachelor's Degree in Art at the University of Arizona, one of his professors encouraged him to apply for medical school, explaining that "since [he] would always be making art and since art comes from life, [he] should make [his] life interesting." Avery chose to pursue an M.D. in Psychiatry at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB), which he completed in 1974, and from then on his work as an artist has been intimately connected to his experiences in the medical profession.In 1991, he turned his attention to medical education, particularly in connection with the AIDS pandemic, which he did through his professorship at UTMB and through his art. In the medical field, Avery currently specializes in HIV/AIDS patient mental health care, correctional mental health care, and transgender health. As an artist, he is primarily a printmaker, producing prints about human rights abuses, disease, death, sexuality, and the body, though he has also completed a series of what he calls "art/medicine actions" - public performances of medical knowledge in unconventional spaces