Beyond Pottery: Suzanne Staubach on the Ubiquitousness of Clay

Suzanne Staubach

"I think everyone has probably played with clay at some point in their lives, at least when they were kids," said Suzanne Staubach, author of Clay: The History and Evolution of Humankind's Relationship With Earth's Most Primal Element (Berkley, November).

Staubach's own hands-on involvement with clay began some 30 years ago, she said. "Like a lot of people in the '60s and '70s, I was interested in that whole self-sufficient, back-to-the-land kind of stuff. One of the things I got interested in was pottery: I saw a black teapot that I thought was very beautiful and wondered if I could learn to make it. So I took some classes and ended up building a kiln and getting a kick-wheel -- and I've been doing pottery ever since."

At the same time, Staubach, who was born in New Jersey and raised in Connecticut, began acquiring interesting facts and lore about the ubiquitous stuff of which pots are made. "As it turns out," she found, "clay is everywhere. It's one of the most common materials in the earth."

Clay -- cheap and readily available -- has been used by most cultures in all sorts of ways, from the primitive to the high-tech, she said. "There are cob houses and mud houses all over the world ... Kitty litter is clay. Bentonite is a very fine clay used on magazine paper. Clay is used in agriculture in a lot of different ways."

Fired in a kiln, clay is transformed into a durable, rocklike substance with even greater potential. "Cuneiform tablets, of course, were little clay tablets," she noted, adding, "Clay has other relationships to writing -- like inkwells. The Dead Sea Scrolls were kept in clay jars ... Clay jars -- amphorae -- were used for storing goods, like wine, on ships.... The Great Wall of China is made essentially of clay bricks -- some fired, some unfired."

As civilization developed, so did its uses for clay. "The first spark plug was porcelain, thrown on a potter's wheel," said Staubach. Now clay is used in satellite communications, and in the reconstituted-ceramic tiles that sheathe the Columbia space shuttle.

For years, all this fascinating information she gathered remained an adjunct to Staubach's pottery-making, which in turn was a passion separate from her working life.

"I came to bookselling when I thought I needed a 'normal job,'" Staubach recalled. "Little did I know that this is as crazy as everything else I was doing." Today, Staubach is manager of the general books division at the UConn Co-op Bookstore at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. She is also serving in the final year of her second term on the Board of Directors of the American Booksellers Association. Over the years, among other positions in service to the bookselling community, Staubach has also served as ABA Board vice president, as vice president of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, and as president of the New England Booksellers Association.

"I'd always wanted to write, too," said Staubach. And she did: magazine articles for Mother Earth News, Parents, and Garden Way, and, in 1998, a book on Connecticut history (Connecticut: Driving Through History, Douglas Charles). After doing a couple of pottery-related catalogs for the Wooster Craft Center, Staubach finally saw larger possibilities for the "tons of notecards and things with all this information about clay," which she had been gathering for decades. "I talked to an agent, wrote a proposal, and that was that."

The bulk of Clay was written at four in the morning, Staubach said, "before coming in to the store" and on days off.

As a bookseller and reader, Staubach said, she was well aware, while writing her singular work, of such modern titles as Salt and Cod. "I think I've read most of Mark Kurlansky's books; yes, of course, that crossed my mind." But of greater help or inspiration, she said, were many clay-related books she came across in the course of her day-job. "I ended up selling myself tons of books on potters, or a particular period in history where some country had a lot to do with ceramics, or something on archaeology."

In marshaling all this information for Clay, Staubach organized her work around topics. "I thought that was the most interesting thing," she said, "[clay's] role in cooking, the role in sanitation ... areas of life that [clay has] been important in. I tried to focus on that, more than thinking: Okay, now I have to say every little thing about everything I've ever come across."

With the publication of Clay, Staubach will be leaving the confines of her UConn Co-op and seeing the bookselling world from an author's point of view, on a tour that will take her from one of the Harry Schwartz shops in Milwaukee, to the Miami Book Fair, to some New England stores. "I'm a little nervous," she admitted, "but I look forward to being on the other side of an event, and seeing how other stores do things. I'll get to promote my book, but I'll also get to learn some more bookselling things."

The new author will draw on her pottery skills in service of these appearances. "I've made these little amulets, just little small things you can hold in the palm of your hand, that I'll probably give to people who buy the book. And I've also made little presents for the booksellers."

Staubach said she already has nearly enough material and enthusiasm to do a second book. As for her and her publisher's expectations for this one, Staubach answered with a laugh: "Who knows! Of course, working in a bookstore, I think I know too much. I can look up and see what Ingram and Baker & Taylor ordered." --Tom Nolan