Thomas, Peter (Peter R.)

Peter Thomas was born in 1954 in Los Angeles, and Donna (Millar) Thomas was born in 1957 in San Francisco, California. Peter and Donna Thomas established a private press in 1976 and have worked individually and collaboratively on creating books, making paper, letterpress printing and book binding. In 2005 Peter and Donna published The history of papermaking in the Philippines, which was the culmination of almost twenty years of work. It began with Peter attending a one-day papermaking workshop in Santa Cruz taught by Nida Dumsang from the Philippines. Upon learning that there was no written history of papermaking in the Philippines, the idea of writing the first history of Filipino papermaking was born. He first visited the Philippines in February of 1990 and gathered various information over the following ten years. The book includes discussions of the pre-historic precursors to paper, including Philippine bark cloth. It contains a survey of the first printed books made in the Philippines and the paper they were printed on. It ends with a chronological history of both commercial and hand paper making in the Philippines up to 2000.