In creating a collection of work by San Francisco Bay Area artists, Sido focused on small objects, artists books, and notebooks. Many artists were not able to store installation remnants, and there was little collector interest in installation documentation, so this also was a focus of her collection. Because in the collection building process, Sido worked with artists, she was interested in how artists were supported in the Loire Valley at the time of the Music Box Book of Hours. It was Wednesday afternoon. Caydance and Sido were sitting in Sido's darkened gallery, projecting the images of medieval manuscripts with which Caydance had arrived. Sido's area of art scholarship was contemporary, but when Caydance was studying artists books at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in addition to spending time with medieval manuscripts at the Newberry Library, she had traveled the Loire Valley by boat.

"In residence at Amboise and Chateau de Plessis-lez-Tours, Anne of Brittany and her husbands Charles VIII and later Louis XII, worked with artists who were part of the French court," Caydance said. "Leonardo arrived at Chateau du Clos Luce in 1516, where he lived for three years, died, and was buried nearby. But earlier, the printing press and the Italian Renaissance contributed to a flowering of French books of hours in which images played a larger part in the composition than previously, for instance the multi-panel painting-like full-page miniatures in Jean Bourdichon’s Les Grandes Heures d'Anne de Bretagne.