Plugging away on Paper Should Not Always Be White. Double & triple checking all ideas & plans before we actually start tearing down the paper, and as a result some of the logistics have been revised.
We'd initially intended to print the sheets in quartos (four-up), allowing us to print work-and-turn (i.e immediately back a sheet up). But some of the paper can't be torn down into quartos, which would have meant printing those two-up, which would in turn have meant changing the forme. Since the premise of the project is to change nothing but the paper upon which the text is printed, that threatened to be a problem. It'll take longer, but we're resigned to printing two-up.
Since we have no experience printing many of these papers, and we have very few sheets to work with, we've also abandoned the idea of deciding at the start how big the edition will be, or what additional papers will be included in the deluxe edition. We'll get through all the printing, take a look at what we have that's good enough to issue, and then make decisions. But our hope continues to be an edition of about 30 copies, each containing at least 15 different papers; with perhaps as many as half of the edition being a deluxe variant (deluxe because it has between 5 and 10 additional papers).
Part of the work this past week has been identifying or confirming the types of paper we have on hand. Some came to us with the makers' original labels and details, while others have been hiding in drawers for decades, with nothing more than a watermark for identification (and in two cases, not even that). It's been fun pulling out our various references books for paper, and even more fun using this as an excuse to buy a new one (more about that in a week or so, when it arrives). Meanwhile, the little Cadenza Press volume is full of useful information, & kudos to the printer for printing it on an Adana 5 x 8. We know from experience how much fun printing a book on those tabletops can be...
The Horne & Co. book isn't very useful for this project, as it is about machine-made papers available for commercial printing c.1950, but it's still fun to flip through all the samples.
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