08/12/2026
One of those finds that gets more extraordinary the longer you spend with it.
We recently acquired three handmade Otomí (Ñähñu) amate manuscript books by Alfonso Margarito García Téllez, the influential artist, papermaker and ritual specialist from San Pablito, Pahuatlán, Puebla, Mexico.
Closed, they are wonderfully modest objects: rough bark-paper covers, handwritten Spanish and enigmatic cut-paper figures.
Then you open them.
And open them.
And keep opening them.
Each unfolds accordion-style into a long narrative landscape populated by people, animals, plants, spirits and supernatural beings. García Téllez wrote directly onto the handmade amate and populated the pages with individually cut bark-paper figures. Some are simple and elemental; others form elaborate scenes of ritual, healing, offerings, fire and transformation.
These figures weren’t merely illustrations. For centuries, Otomí ritual specialists have cut muñecos from bark paper to embody spiritual beings and forces of the natural world for ceremonies involving healing, rain, agriculture, protection and sorcery.
García Téllez grew up within this tradition. His father, Santos García, was himself a ritual specialist. Beginning in the 1970s, Alfonso transformed that inherited knowledge into an extraordinary form: the handmade artist’s book.
The result defies easy categorization. Book? Folk art? Spiritual document? Ethnographic record? Contemporary descendant of the ancient Mexican codex?
In some measure, all of them.
Multiple examples of García Téllez’s narratives were created over several decades, but these weren’t printed editions. Each was made by hand, and no two are precisely alike.
His work is now held and studied by major institutions. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes García Téllez as the most accomplished of only three Otomí artists known to have created these bound amate manuscripts, and the Met’s Watson Library holds several examples.
Our three remarkably intact manuscripts stretch nearly the length of our big table when unfolded together.
The bark was beaten into paper. The pages folded by hand. The stories written across their surfaces. And the spirits cut from amate and placed into the narrative one at a time.
Small books containing very large worlds.
