Heavenly Monkey

The Long Run #5: Chill

2012-02-20T17:01:00.000-08:00

Don't know what all the drama was about. Everything got done. Sheets all pressing between boards. But a new record for the studio: one sheet kept damp & printed upon over four consecutive days, more than 500 impressions. Just three more sheets to finish the book, then the two endsheets; on schedule to wrap things up within the next two weeks.

The Long Run #4: Red All Over

2012-02-19T21:47:00.001-08:00

Up & atom. 8 a.m. started the red run on the title page. Finished by 2 p.m. Spent an hour changing the lock-up and getting the two 36-pt alphabets positioned. Lots of putzing. Had to figure the finer points out on the bed, once everything was in place. Used Bembo and Jim Rimmer's Duensing.

Mixed up the gray (i.e. about 25% black, 75% transparent white). Underway with the second run around 4:30. Didn't think to check that the alphabets had actually been recited properly until just starting the Arches run (i.e. after 70 impressions on Guarro) - d'oh! Luckily all seems okey. Finished at 8:01 p.m., just in time for Simpsons #500 - wuhoo! A new studio record: 200 impressions in one day.

Last run tomorrow. Will have to see if the plan to print a large area of transparent gray over today's alphabets will work. Can be difficult to print large areas on damp paper - too much adhesion. Didn't spray the sheets after printing today, so by tomorrow they will have started to dry a bit. We'll see if it's enough, but not too much.

The Long Run #3: Back to Back

2012-02-18T19:14:00.000-08:00

Backing up the sheet with the page 6 (foreword con't) and page 3 (title page). First run, black. Below is the imposition chart, printing schedule, and dummy of the title page - what we're shooting for.

Started at 8 a.m. The excellent gloom continued outside:

Except for an hour in the afternoon when the sun (which we hates) came out, but then the clouds & rain (which we likes) rolled back in. No particular dramas with the sheet. Had a bit of trouble with the ink when we got to the handmades, but figured it out. Finished at 6 p.m.

Also got the two majuscule alphabets ready for tomorrow. The galley below holds, at left, one of the two 60-pt alphabets that will be printed on the endsheets (below is De Roos); the middle (a few sorts sporting red) is 36-pt Duensing and far left (36-pt Bembo), both of which will be printed tomorrow on the title page's top right and bottom left quadrants, in opaque gray. After the red run. Long day.

The Long Run #2: One Side Down

2012-02-17T22:36:00.000-08:00

Started printing the sheet with the title page for Types/Paper/Print. Today the inner forme: start of the foreword, with the facing verso a blank. The stack of paper spent the night in a thick plastic bag, pressing. Shown above is what it looked like in the morning, all nicely relaxed. The Guarro gets printed first: 70 sheets for this run, allowing for spoilage (i.e. cock-ups) during the five runs; then the Arches (15) and HM Text (15). Below is one of the handmades, after printing. You can see the edges lifting as they already start to dry in just the few minutes out from under the heavy damp cloth covering the stack. Because the sheets have to remain damp for three more days of printing, each one was lightly sprayed after printing, then covered with a damp cloth. When the run was finished, the stack went back in the bag.

Began the day listening to Ryuichi Sakamoto's elegiac Discord, the four movements appropriately named for the stages endured during a day of printing: Grief, Anger, Prayer, and Salvation. Started printing at 9 a.m., finished at 7 p.m. (Couple of short breaks in there, but worked pretty steady.) Tomorrow we start backing up with the outer forme: first page of the foreword (the verso) and the black of the title page.

Couple of new additions to the HM handpress library arriving over the next few days. Will name names next week, after we finish this sheet (unless it finishes us first).

The Long Run

2012-02-16T19:09:00.000-08:00

Halfway through printing the new type specimen book...interesting results with the three different papers so far: the Arches Wove wants a bit more ink than the Guarro laid, and the handmade wants less....10 - 10:30 a.m. today spent getting the paper ready for the book's most complicated run, with the title page: 5 different runs. Normally we dampen the paper in the late afternoon of the day before starting to print, but this latest batch of the HM Text wants extra time to fully relax, so we wet things in the morning. Here's the stack immediately after wetting & stacking. Into the plastic bag it went for six hours, then restacked & back into the bag, pressed, for the evening. Will post an image of printing the inner forme tomorrow. Saturday the fun starts, with the title page on the outer forme: the black run. A full two-page spread, 100 impressions, take 10-12 hours. Sunday will be two runs, red and blind (= 200 impressions), so things could get trippy after the 150 mark. Monday is gray. Never tried keeping paper (evenly) damp for this long. If the book appears with a plain black title page, you'll know we didn't pull it off.

p.s. the three HM Drop Boxes have been sold.

HM Drop Box Drops

2012-02-01T13:01:00.000-08:00

Having managed to stretch the HM decaversary over two years, and dispose of much of the flotsam that had accumulated during those years, the end of 2011 required some studio clean-up & -out. Despite our best efforts with the detritus, some remained; miscellaneous leaves from books, ephemera, etc etc. Meanwhile, the requests for "a sample of your printing, whatever bits you might have lying around" continue to trickle in. And so,

we put all the remaining flotsam in a pile & started sorting. There was enough to make up three uniform sets of what we have called the HM Drop Box. Each set, contained within a clamshell box made in the bindery of our friend Adele Shaak, contains five complete, bound publications; sample sheets from five projects; and an additional 14 pieces of printed ephemera. And finally, each box contains a piece unique, something of which we don't have even three copies. A detailed listing of the contents can be found on the HM site's Drop Box page.

To make some sense of it all, each set includes a detailed description of the contents written out by the publisher. Although the boxes are uniform in their number of pieces and the source projects, the actual samples vary, and the introductory notes are specific to the samples in each box. These notes are written inside a bifolium sheet, on the outside of which has been printed a title page and press-numbered colophon.

The cloth-covered boxes measure 13.75 x 9.5 x 2 inches. In their randomness and lack of any curation, these boxes probably give as fair & accurate an overview of (or introduction to) HM's work with the handpress over the past decade. Therefore, we think these three collections might be of most interest to people or places who are not already following HM's progress, especially those who are interested in printing samples, handpress printing, or general press ephemera. The price is $925.

Eyeball Calibration & Nuisance Printing

2012-01-26T16:56:00.000-08:00

Last April we started printing the text pages for Oddballs. After a few weeks, when we were about a quarter of the way through, we looked at the six completed sheets and decided the printing was consistently too light (impression good, ink weak). Friends said they thought we were being fanatical again, and they were right, and so were we in being fanatical. So, the completed pages were put aside & the whole thing begun again.

When cleaning up the project last fall, we couldn't bring ourselves to throw away the first run pages. All of them remained in the order they had been printed, last back to first. Flipping through any given one, it was interesting to see where the color started, what we adjusted it to, and how well we maintained that color (this being particularly challenging when inking by hand). Even though the pages were printed too light in color, that in itself can be a useful reference. Overall, we found flipping through a set of the sheets an effective way of calibrating our eyes before a printing session. But only if each set of pages remained in order they were printed. So, we chopped the sheets down the center fold, leaving us with two leaves, each printed verso only: a pile of Frozen Dead Guys, a pile of Bill Miners, etc etc. About 60 sheets (pages) in each pile.

We did a quick perfect bind with some sunken cords, and used odd sheets of heavy handmade paper for wraps. Just before sticking each glued-up set in their wraps, we wondered, what would someone think this is, if they stumble upon it in a hundred years? (Besides a waste of time & good paper.) We were committed to doing a few days of long-overdue nuisance printing, and so made up a simple title sheet to go in the Oddballs pages, and a spine label. More on the nuisance printing to follow...

Cervantes Gets Corked, & Other Oddities

2012-01-17T09:37:00.000-08:00

Boston's storied Bromer Booksellers were sufficiently inspired by Jim Westergard's Oddballs to create an entire catalogue around the concept. From the introduction to the just-released e-catalogue #19:

"Odd is interesting. Not only is this true in human society, in which the eccentric and extraordinary are examined as objects of curiosity, but it is especially true of the vehicles for human expression. That last term was used with great deliberation, as the assortment of oddities in our latest offering are not limited to books: indeed, they do not even have to be on paper, as the set of erotic porcelain lithophanes demonstrates. Optical devices such as lithophanes, and zoetropes seem odd to us now, but were some of the only forms of entertainment available to a world without electricity; from this perspective, one can easily imagine that current trends in entertainment will seem equally odd to future generations.

"The books found within our eccentric gathering work just a little harder than their straightforward counterparts in trying to gain our attention. Witness, for instance, a two-volume edition of Cervantes' stories printed on cork [shown above; why would anyone do this?]; a miniature panoramic alphabet of insects etched so finely, one would mistake them for actual specimens; or the book that lent its title to this catalogue - a beautifully printed and illustrated work by the Heavenly Monkey Press [sic] on those characters from history whose personalities and antics keep us from averting our collective eyes."

We won't get too worked up about them appending the word "press" to the imprint's name, because Anne, David, Phil & the gang are our friends; and because we appreciate being considered sufficiently odd for inclusion. They also have a good (but tempting, so be careful) blog.

Westergard's Up To Something Fishy

2012-01-09T15:05:00.000-08:00

Jim Westergard's site recently posted six new engravings he's editioned, the blocks having been commissioned for an upcoming book from Deep Woods Press. The one above, "John's Browns," is our particular favorite. The six engravings will be included in The Intruder, a chapter from Robert Traver's (a.k.a. John Voelker's) 1960 book Trout Madness. Publication is slated for later this year.

Each of the six engravings measures approximately 4 x 6 inches, and has been printed by Jim in an edition of 20 copies. His original prints remain among the best art deals available, especially for work from an artist of his caliber.

Printing Damp, One Way & Another

2012-01-06T09:21:00.000-08:00

We were recently introduced to the site and blog of poet/artist/handpress printer Alan Loney (our very late arrival being yet more proof that we're never up on things). He has recently become interested in gathering details on the various techniques printers use for printing damp. Someone tipped him to the description we posted while printing Oddballs last summer. As contributor Sebastian Carter writes in his entry, "There is no comparison with dry paper from the point of view of quality of impression." He also touches on some of the technical challenges posed by things like wood engravings and large areas of black. These accounts, plus Loney's own adventures in printing and publishing, make for interesting ready.

Loney's blog also includes a brief mention of a new book of his poems published by Ninja Press, titled The Sirens.

Oh the Places Cthu Will Go

2012-01-02T10:56:00.000-08:00

Anik See over in Amsterdam tipped us to this brilliant project: artist Dr FaustusAU is running H.P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Chthulu" through what looks to be a fully functional Seussifier. An earlier version of the cover listed the author as R.J. Ivankovic; not sure if that's a pseudonym for the artist or someone else who actually converted the prose to verse. Regardless, what a brilliant project, and done so well. Dr F's site reports that he has received numerous offers to publish the work when it is completed. Kids are never too young to be introduced to the Great Old Ones.

Love Felt at Shakespeare & Co

2011-12-27T09:34:00.000-08:00

Shakespeare & Co. founder George Whitman died two weeks ago. In the L.A. Times' obituary, he's quoted saying "I never had any money, and never needed it. I've been a bum all my life," which sounds about right for anyone involved in selling books.

Related only by chance, this past fall Spike Jonze released a short stop-animation film that takes place in Whitman's shop (Mourir Auprès de Toi). The film is a collaboration with designer Olympia Le-Tan, whose cut-felt and embroidered book bags inspired the story. No better way to be immortalized than in film.

You Should Collect

2011-12-22T07:41:00.000-08:00

The Globe & Mail recently ran an article about Michael Torosian and his Lumiere Press. Online commenters (photo above of one caught in action; source unknown) being one of the lowest forms of (arguably) sentient life, as a rule we ignore their existence, but in this case our eyes happened across their blather. It was no surprise that their theme was the predictable "how can us regular folks afford books like this?" Profiles of painters, weavers, sculptors etc. never seem to generate this immediate & singular focus on the price of their works, but books do. They're just commodities, one no different than the next. A price that reflects the materials, craft and labor involved is elitist.

The Globe & Mail commenters also perpetuate the fallacy that book collectors are necessarily rolling in extra cash. Most of the people we know of who collect books are just working stiffs who make choices and sacrifices to obtain the books they have. As Gertrude Stein told Hemingway in Paris, if you don't eat out too often, and buy second-hand clothes, you'll have money to buy art and books.

And so, in the hope of recruiting a few from the hordes who think book collecting is only for the likes of Nelson Rockefeller and Montgomery Burns, some suggestions on where to jump in. Really good and interesting book collections often are the result not of capital resources but time, effort and creativity. It's easy to buy modern firsts or signed copies (and in this day & age, anyone who "collects" contemporary books that aren't signed is wasting their money); what's more interesting is figuring out something that people don't value or care about, but which will be of interest in the future. Our suggestion for an inexpensive collection in a field full of cheap pickings: pop-up and activity books (also, apparently, known as "feelies"). Some of the most inventive design and packaging work is being done here, but the books' interactivity (and usual focus toward a younger audience) often results in comparatively short lives. Just like the volvelle in George Wither's book.

A few examples: The Murder at Wayne Mansion, a sort-of comic containing various clues and items to help the reader join Batman in sleuthing. This kind of crime dossier was popular in the '30s. Dennis Wheatley did a few, including Murder Off Miami. No surprise that we were introduced to them by Barbara Hodgson, who has a couple of cool ones.

The Lady Gaga paper doll book. Just don't punch out any of the designer outfits. Or buy two copies, one to play with & one to shelve.

Recent tours through the bargain & discount sections of several local bookstores turned up a number of candidates for this kind of collecting, all priced under $10. So, the next time you hear someone whine about the price of a book, ask them when they last actually bought a book.

Pixie Meat is Good

2011-12-14T08:19:00.000-08:00

Not much to say lately, no new books to show off, just stuck in the studio working away at Occupied By Colour. Today it finishes, we run the last sheet, an odd-sized insert that requires we tear apart the frisket window & completely change the lock-up.

And so, while enjoying the morning coffee, we spent a few minutes poking around for information on a comic called Pixie Meat, and found this post about the book. (That blog, The Oxen of the Sun, looks to have a lot of interesting posts on books & design.) It was printed by our friend Robert R. Reid and his partner, Terry Berger, in 1990, and features the combined talents of Gary Panter, Charles Burns and Tom DeHaven. The pages were reproduced with metal relief blocks and printed on Bob's Vandercook. He struck upon the idea of livening up the spreads by interleaving sheets of clear, colored cellophane (some copies are red, some yellow). A few more images from the book can be found on Bob's micro-site, here.

Most people who bought copies were impressed simply by the creators' signatures; people who would recognize and appreciate how the book was designed and printed, i.e. the usual "fine press" crowd, were much too proper to be interested in the content ("A comic?"). All this reminded us of our own plans to one day do a fine press comic, the narrative taken from a track on MC 900 Ft Jesus' album Hell With the Lid Off (which, coincidentally, features art by Charles Burns on the cover). We'll get to it eventually; have to track down the MC first and get permission. He's been MIA for many years, last reported working in air traffic control in Texas...

This all came up because Terry recently sent a spare copy of Pixie Meat, and asked us to sell it to a good home. So if you know anyone...

Playing Games with Geo. Wither's Emblems

2011-12-05T10:06:00.000-08:00

Next year HM will be publishing a book featuring leaves taken from a broken and incomplete copy of George Wither's A Collections of Emblemes (London, 1635). The book's full title is

A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne Quickened With Metricall Illustrations, both Morall and Divine: And disposed into Lotteries, That Instruction, and Good Counsell, may bee furthered by an Honest and Pleasant Recreation

and those lotteries will be a featured part of our project. The book consists of four parts, each containing 50 "emblemes," which were exhortations in prose on various aspects of living a good and moral life. Each emblem (one per page) was printed beneath a detailed intaglio illustration. The page shown below is from Book 1.

At the publisher's (i.e. booksellers') request, Wither created a game ("recreation") that pointed readers first to one of the four books, and then to a specific emblem. This was done by using two volvelles with spinning pointers, printed on one page and bound into the back of each copy (sounds like something from a Hodgson/Cohen book...). Wither also provided instructions for how to play the lottery. Not surprisingly, most existing copies of the book lack the volvelle, which probably often was torn out for use.

The broken copy that will supply the leaves for HM's project came to us via Rare Books & Special Collections at the University of British Columbia, which received it as part of a donation. As the library already has a complete copy in a lovely early binding, with the volvelles, and has long been a supporter of HM's work, they suggested the broken copy might make an interesting leaf book.

We're still finalizing plans for the HM project, but it will definitely include a facsimile of the volvelle page, presented along with Wither's two introductory notes to the Reader (the first about the book in general, the second an apologetic explanation for how the lottery came to be included - to make the book more appealing to potential buyers!), and his instructions for playing the lottery.

The broken copy's leaves measure about 6 x 12 inches (they were brutally trimmed at some point in time, with loss to the head), so our page will be slightly larger than that. As per usual the edition will hover around 50 copies, with between two and four leaves included in each copy. Claudia Cohen has signed on to bind the edition. We hope to have copies issued before the end of 2012.

Colo[u]r Keeping Us Occupied

2011-11-29T13:43:00.000-08:00

Spent the last bunch of weeks printing the third volume in Barbara Hodgson & Claudia Cohen's color series. (Apologies for the inconsistent use of the superfluous Oxford u in the title word on this blog and the HM site. We're Webster all the way, but Barbara is Canadian, & Canadians like to straddle Oxford and Webster. Claudia doesn't care either way.) Occupied By Colour is the first volume in the series to be printed at HM on the handpress; the first two were printed by David Clifford at Black Stone Press with a Heidelberg.

Like the previous two volumes in the series, the book is designed and set (in Fournier) by Barbara, and printed from polymer plates. Numerous illustrations are incorporated throughout, and once printed essentially serve as keylines for the subsequent coloring and embellishment Barbara does by hand for each page. The second volume in the series, After Image, required about three months of handwork after printing (and before binding; that was another few months of work); Occupied By Colour is expected to take at least the same amount of time to complete.

We're working off two sheets a week. Most are single black runs, but a few have illustrations with large black areas, so those are broken into two runs. Last weekend we printed a page that included a spectral representation of light. The text was printed first, then (same day) we lathered the ink onto the slab & printed the black bands. Printing on dampened paper allows one to use much less ink than printing dry, and so when amping up for large black areas it can be alarming how much more ink than usual is required.

Semi-related, the CBC Radio show Ideas is currently running a three-part documentary on color. (Being the CBC, they'd probably want the u.) It's available by podcast from the show's site.

Oddball in Toronto

2011-11-26T10:47:00.000-08:00

Oddball's author & artist Jim Westergard takes his show on the road this weekend, appearing at an event in Toronto tomorrow (Sunday 27 November). Jim will take part in panel discussions with author Jon Evans, whose book Beasts of New York Jim illustrated with original wood engravings; and with Toronto printmaker George Walker, about the art and craft of wood engraving. Details can be found here.

Beasts of New York was published by Porcupine's Quill, with the wood engravings reproduced offset. Fans of wood engraving, and Jim's wood engravings in particular, should note that copies of the original prints, pulled and signed by him (in editions of 25), are available. He also assembled ten complete sets of the prints, along with an original drawing, in a slipcase. A few of these are still available directly from Jim.

A Thoroughly Bad Decision at Oxford

2011-11-23T10:54:00.000-08:00

Earlier this week book dealer Oliver Clark sent out an exhaustive report from the recent Oxford Fine Press Fair, highlighting the books that received recognition, and providing his own thoughts on what the judges got right and what they got wrong. "The Parrot prize for the best illustration in any medium is worth a real and sweaty £500 and this year was awarded by Leo de Freitas and John “Fawkes” Vernon Lord in what was a thoroughly bad decision." The newsletter is not directly downloadable from his site, so you'll have to send an email request to get on the list to read the rest of his thoughts on the Parrot Prize.

Oliver also reports that the organizer, "based on return slips, [said] this fair did better than the last – but only just. That was not the impression many had. Indeed, with some presses trying every trick short of gluing feathers onto their books in order to get them noticed in recessionary Oxford, many felt that the fair was struggling just a little in money terms, a shame for what is normally a hot-ticket event."

Whether fully plumed or plucked, press fairs usually seem to be dominated by the usual suspects, and so it was with Oxford. But Oliver's missive also includes notes on a few names that might be less widely known, at least on this side of the Atlantic. He mentions a new book from Susan Allix (Myth, shown above), whose work has been generating much interest & enthusiasm among those deeply in the know for some time.

Printing in the Third Dimension

2011-11-17T19:56:00.000-08:00

This post isn't about impression, although most of you should be printing with a bit more impression than you are. If it was good enough for Harold McGrath (him up there)...

Before launching into the printing of Occupied By Colour, we finally got around to an upgrade of the speaker system in the studio. Retrieving one of the many old speakers from the attic, we ginned up this trick first learned from our vinyl copy of Eno's On Land, way back when it came out:

The two stereo speakers in the HM studio are over the bench, at the end opposite from the press. Printing a sheet entails two round trips from the press to the bench & back (getting the roller, returning with the roller & getting a sheet). We placed the third speaker over the press, playing the mixed signal back at the stereo pair. So now, while walking to and from the press, the aural mix of a song changes as you move through the space, and the overall sound is more three-dimensional (no more walking towards & away from the music).

Music is the fuel that keeps the press running at HM. This probably is true for most printers. (Or at least some distraction: for Jim Rimmer, it was VHS copies of movies from the '30s and '40s.) At HM, there actually are two categories of music, depending on what's happening. While setting things up, doing makeready, figuring out problems etc, we prefer glacial and expansive compositions. Stars of the Lid, most of Harold Budd's albums (check out his latest, above; an inspiration for those who strive to never repeat themselves), Johann Johannsson & William Basinksi are frequently called upon. When all cylinders are firing and we're just into production (remember, however, that "production" on a handpress in a one-man shop is still a pretty sedate activity), the BPM can creep up to a saunter, and the pace can liquify from permafrast to tundra. Harold's album with Eraldo Bernocchi, Music for "Fragments from the Inside" keeps things moving. So does the Orb. On particularly belligerent days, G!YBE.

There are a few artists whose work can fit both needs. All of Loscil's recordings. Bill Laswell, but you have to pick your albums carefully. And now we have a new double-CD for the shortlist: Bloemfontein's The Longer Now. This was a $1 gamble from a shop's discard bin, noted for its sleeve design, chosen because the mix of instruments promised to appeal (especially the lack of vocals). Wonderful stuff. Eight compositions, each about 15 minutes long. All of them can be heard here. Sadly, it seems the band ceased to exist with no other releases.

A New Magazine Called Codex

2011-11-09T21:50:00.000-08:00

Moving at the speed of a handpress (which is this & only this:

Not this, [which is a common press, i.e. similar design & operation, but made from wood]:

Nor any of these, which are presses operated by hand, but that does not make them a handpress:

A handpress is something like this, made from iron, with whatever you're printing inked by hand and then rolled under a platen lowered by pulling a bar:

And preferably it's something exactly like the above, what we use at HM, an Ostrander-Seymour Extra-Heavy. But that photo isn't ours. It's much prettier than ours. Probably not a spot of oil or grease on the thing...)

ANYHOW, moving at the speed of a handpress, our friend David at Black Stone Press tipped us to the arrival on the scene of a new mag about type, printing, calligraphy etc etc titled Codex. At the risk of confirming exactly how hors courant we are by posting this a few months after its publication, here's the site. Take a look, think about ordering a copy. All of us who appreciate the printed word have to admire a group of people who go the old-fashioned, ink-on-paper route.

Ink Should Be Sticky, Not Bouncy

2011-11-04T10:34:00.000-07:00

Surprised and a little alarmed to recently learn that a number of "fine press" (awful term) printers are using rubber-based inks. Some claim they achieve better results than with oil-based ink (hmmm), some admit they just like being able to leave the ink on the rollers for a few days.

Ink, as a contributing element to printing, probably doesn't get as much attention as it should. Wondering if our prejudice against rubber ink was warranted or not, we did some snooping around. Preliminary results tumbled us to Brian Donnell's excellent primer site on letterpress, which includes a short but insightful comment on oil vs rubber inks:

"Use oil-base inks for quality work. Rubber-base inks may print satisfactorily, but their drying properties make them suitable only for imprinting business forms, numbering, proofing, etc., and they do not dry on coated stock."

That's just an excerpt; the site offers more details. Coated stock isn't really a concern or issue at HM, but we wonder if the same drying problem would result on the highly sized paper we prefer for printing damp.

We'll be spending the rest of 2011 printing the third volume in the Hodgson/Cohen color series, Occupied By Colour. (The self-portrait above was taken while rolling out the ink for today's run, a page on the development of hair dyes.) But when we get a few days off, we're thinking of getting a can of rubber ink and doing some comparison printing. Be interesting to see how the rubber stuff works when printing damp... Meanwhile, we will reread Colin Bloy's A History of Printing Ink.

Lumiere's Shining New Light

2011-10-28T09:11:00.000-07:00

Received notice of a new book from Michael Torosian's Lumiere Press, Steichen: Eduard et Voulangis. The book publishes for the first time 16 photographs taken by Edward Steichen between 1915 and 1923, with an accompanying text by Torosian. (Factoid: Steichen was the most-published photographer in Alfred Stieglitz's journal Camera Work, for which he also designed a logo and typeface.)

Over the past three decades Lumiere Press has established a reputation for publishing books with and about 20th century photographers, designed, printed letterpress and bound by Torosian at his Toronto shop. Although Lumiere Press doesn't seem to come up often within the narrow context of discussions about contemporary fine press activity in Canada (a short discussion at best), Torosian has been consistently publishing some of the country's most interesting and beautiful limited edition letterpress books. He's also one of very few people combining a passion for traditional book arts with a deep interest in photography, a field that has been at the center of contemporary art in exactly the way "fine press" publishing hasn't. The Lumiere Press site also has excellent images and information about its books and methods of work. Worth a look.

Making an Exhibition of Ourselves

2011-10-25T20:15:00.000-07:00

Another post from last weekend's Wayzgoose printing fair, this one all about us (mostly). Jim Westergard and his wife flew in from Red Deer to accompany Oddballs' first (& only, at least by us) exhibition in Canada, and it was brilliant to have them on hand. As previously mentioned, we printed up 10 copies of a poster ganging all 40 (plus one) of the oddballs together, which Jim signed and numbered with assistance from the HM devil, before the doors opened. These are 22 x 30 inches (image area is about 12 x 21 inches), giclée printed on 180 g all-rag paper. A few copies of these remain, priced at $60.

Barbara Hodgson was on hand to discuss The WunderCabinet, a display of which occupied most of HM's second table. As shown above, she didn't get a minute's rest all day, in large part due to an interview with her about the project which aired on CBC Radio's North By Northwest show that morning. As proven in previous years, a mention of the wayzgoose on Sheryl McKay's show assures a significant boost in attendance at the show, and this year was no different: many people came in specifically to see the book and meet Barbara, having heard the interview that morning. A podcast of can be found here.

Jim was diligent about pulling his weight as an exhibitor, but he did manage to make a few circuits of the room over the course of the day. Below he's talking to HM's secret weapon, Reg Lissel, who was demonstrating how to make paste papers.

Jim brought along a number of the trade books that feature his artwork, and lucky people snapped these up (and got them signed). Jim's off to Toronto in late November for an event organized by Beasts of New York publisher The Porcupine's Quill. It will be an evening's discussion between/among Jim, author Jon Evans, and Toronto printmaker George Walker.

Things We Saw

2011-10-23T13:05:00.000-07:00

A few things we saw at the Wayzgoose printing fair in Vancouver....

Marlene Yuen's A Haunting History of Vancouver. A collection of short ghost stories that Marlene culled from and about neighborhoods in Vancouver (the book, published this year, also commemorates the city's 125th anniversary). The text and images were silkscreened, with additional glow-in-the-dark colors printed on the images. Marlene had a haunted house set up on her table, with a dormer window that let you peek in and see one of her pages glowing. Very cool. Accordion fold in printed boards, edition of just eight copies, a steal at $300. See more about the book and Marlene's other work here.

Peter Braune created an etching that he and Lesley Anderson editioned at their table (next to HM). Quite lovely. An addition to Peter's large collection of frog art. (We must ask him about the origins of his frog fascination.) Among the many imaginative cut-outs and pop-ups at Judy Ng's table, the HM devil (below, being shown by Peter how to ink the plate) found a card that opens to reveal a croaking frog, so she got it for Peter.

Emma Lehto's work stood out from the crowd (look under Typography, page 2). In concept and execution, it reminded us of the books Cara Barer creates for her photographs. While the Danielle Steel paperbacks that had been blasted with shotgun and rifle (the spent shells on display in a Lucite box) where dramatic (the paperbacks proved surprisingly resilient), her most sublime work on display with a completely deconstructed copy of a Lemony Snicket book: she cut out each individual work in the book (she must have used two copies, one for the recto words and one for the verso), and then assembled these on letter-sized sheets of paper in alphabetical order, i.e. all of the word "after" glued down in neat rows, then "and," then... Thus, the entire story was there to flip through.

Polly Elsted, daughter of Jan & Crispin (a.k.a. Barbarian Press) was there with a prospectus for a new book from her Horse Whisper Press, featuring wood engravings by former BP collaborator Peter Lazarov. Balancing production with her undergrad in English, she hopes to have the book completed in early 2012... Greenboathouse Press was there with copies of the latest books on hand, including poet Robert Kroetsch's last work... Reg Lissel was making paste papers, and a mess... Phyllis Greenwood was making marbled papers, and a bit of a mess but not as much as Reg... Finally met Marcus Fahrner. He had a small book on hand called Hell Box - The Book, which, if we got the story straight, is a sort-of reduced reprint version of an extensively illustrated text detailing the development of printing technologies. That's probably not quite right. It looked intriguing, but the Fahrner & Farhner Web site is somewhat inscrutable, so we'll have to track Marcus down again in person... The Bowler Press continues its descent into the depths of Jane Austen, a voyage that is heading toward a three-volume edition (with text set by hand) of Pride and Prejudice... Lucie Lambert has a new book, but every time we went by her table there were people clustered around, so we didn't get a chance to see it or talk to her... Andrea Taylor had just completed her second suite of prints in the Artists' Portrait series. HM assisted with production of the first suite, in 2009, but our schedules didn't match up for this one, so Andrea set and printed the text pages herself. More beautiful intaglio portraits of (mostly) 20th century artists. Lucien, shown below, is from the first series.

There was more to see, but attending to our own tables prevented us from getting around to everyone. Perhaps in future years we can think of a way to introduce a social aspect to the event, to allow us to mix and mingle more. For whatever reason, Vancouver seems to have book arts silos, as opposed to a book arts community.

Get Your 'Goose

2011-10-19T15:33:00.000-07:00

The bi-annual Alcuin Society Wayzgoose in Vancouver this coming weekend. Seems to be some attrition among the local printing scene, never a good thing but most particularly unfortunate here that it's among the younger (i.e. under 40) members. But HM will be there: Barbara Hodgson will be laying out a mini-exhibit with a copy of The WunderCabinet on one table, and Jim Westergard will be traveling in from Red Deer to show off Oddballs. Our Oddballs poster (10 copies, signed & numbered by Jim) will be on display & available. The New Leaf Editions crew will be there, pulling copies of an original etching created for the fair, and showing copies of a new book created by artist Kitty Blandy. Reg Lissel will be there, showing people simple ways to create paste papers. Saturday 22 October, main branch of the public library, 10 a.m. - 4 p.m.. Free admission to all.

Oddballs (sold) Out

2011-10-12T13:01:00.000-07:00

The first tranche of the Oddballs edition - about 20 of the 35 copies - was retrieved from Claudia Cohen's bindery last weekend. Half of those were immediately taken down to the Seattle Book Fair and delivered to exhibitors who had ordered copies. It was strange having no time to digest the completed, bound book - after over two years of planning and work - before placing it in the hands of our customers. But it was also fun flipping through it with them, watching reactions and seeing how different oddballs stood out to different people.

The binding, as previously described (but not as initially described, way back when) is full Japanese cloth over boards. Befitting the book's size, and to act as a counterpoint to the binding's simplicity, we wanted an imposing spine. It actually is a leather label, which Claudia managed to match very closely with the blue of the cloth. The endsheets are Guarro laid, like the text, but in a blue-gray color. As Claudia pointed out, the book becomes more monochromatic as you get into it (with the exception of the title page, the book is entirely white and black).

The tipped-in prints required building up the spine with paper shims - a total of 26 per copy - to even things out. It's still an awful lot of tip ins, and not our preferred approach, but as described in the Publisher's afterword, it was the only way to combine Jim's paper preference for his engravings, with HM's preference for printing text. The size of the book also required strong hinges, which were made of the same cloth. For the pastedowns, Claudia used a generic sans serif D to echo the book's double-D design in gilt.

In our last post we reported that a few copies remained available from the edition. Since the book's debut in Seattle, we're happy to report that it is now sold out. Most copies, however, went to our regular booksellers, and copies are available from them.

A final note: the book was issued with a glassine wrap. This should not be considered part of the book proper; it's intended only to protect the book while in transit to a new home.

Oddballs Creeping Out

2011-10-05T10:27:00.000-07:00

The Seattle book fair is this weekend, and copies of Oddballs are being picked up from Claudia Cohen's bindery on Saturday morning and taken directly to exhibitors who have placed orders. So we'll have the drive from Claudia's chateau to downtown to become acquainted with the completed project before sending it out to the world. (Even Jim Westergard and Barry Moser won't get their copies until next week, by which time it'll be too late to remove their names from the thing.) Most of the edition has been spoken for, but we'll still have a couple of copies on hand available at the publication price of $1,800.

A copy will be on exhibit - along with the artist himself! - at the upcoming Alcuin Society Wayzgoose, to be held in Vancouver on October 22. It's a one-day printing and book arts fair, open to the public. We also plan on having a few copies of the print shown above available for purchase. The print expands on a preliminary concept for the book's title page, abandoned for a variety of technical and common sense reasons. But it works as a print, and so we're doing a few up, printed a la giclée (French for ink jet) on rag paper. The image measures 10.5 by 21.5 inches (about twice what it would have been in the book), on a sheet 20 by 30 inches.

And so the very long road travelled by the Oddballs, starting with a visit to Vancouver by Jim and his wife Carol in the summer of 2009, is coming to an end. Next in the press: the third volume in Claudia Cohen and Barbara Hodgson's colo(u)r series, Occupied by Colour - The Palette at Work.

Booksellers Flourish

2011-09-28T10:36:00.000-07:00

Been a while since there's been a headline like that, so we're taking the opportunity. Two bits of retail news...

Collinge & Clark of London has (finally) got a Web site up and running, featuring both items from its extensive inventory (fine press, book arts & the like) and the opportunity for the sometimes withering, always entertaining comments from Oliver Clark. (Those of you who've seen the store front may recognize it from the exterior shots of Black Books, a show that never fully mined the potential for absurd humor in the world of book collecting).

Meanwhile, a third of the world away in Los Angeles, Jesse Rossa has opened the doors of Triolet Rare Books, specializing in primarily 20th century literature but promising also a focus on photo books, contemporary art, "and other areas of interest" (which probably means anything cool that comes his way). The site includes a blog that promises to feature interesting finds and generally interesting items. Swimming against the constant tide of obituaries for the book, Rossa writes that "I would like to think that no matter how much of a niche it becomes (and those who value the book as an object have always been, as Leonard Baskin said, 'the tiniest lunatic fringe in the nation'), there will always be those who want to own a beautiful book, whether for its typographic qualities, the binding and paper, a signature or inscription, the illustrations, or just for its sheer physicality."

The Boundless Variety of Letters

2011-09-20T10:43:00.000-07:00

Spent the weekend printing a pair of broadsides displaying the font of 24-pt Reiner Script majuscules given to us last month. Found a couple of quotes from designer Imre Reiner that suited our need. There wasn't enough type to set everything (particularly the story of how the type came to us, included in the colophon), and so the text portions were printed from polymer.

Initially we couldn't decide which of the two quotes we'd found to use; the sentiments are very different (one being cheerful, the other existential). After much pondering, we decided to print both simultaneously, two up, on a single foolscap sheet of Reg Lissel's paper (seconds and extras left over from previous projects). Trimmed down, the final broadsides are 8.5 by 12.5 inches.

The red was printed on Saturday, the black on Sunday. Setting Imre's name in all caps would have been too heavy for the page, so that line is polymer. We had to trick up a base for these single lines, which we did by turning a piece of aluminum furniture on its side and raising it to the appropriate height with one 2-pt lead, one 1-pt lead, and a slip of tissue paper.

This was the first printing we've done since the joyous arrival of our newest piece of equipment, a second folio-sized press for use in the dampening and drying of paper. Up till now we'd had just the one on the left, and this sometimes became the bottleneck during printing: after being dampened, sheets are pressed over night. Once printed, sheets are pressed (between drying boards) to dry (those are the completed Reiner broadsides in the photo). Thus, on the day a sheet is completed, it needs to go into a press. But that's also the day paper is being prepared for the next run. You can see the problem. With the second press, we now have one dedicated to dampening, and one to drying.

Most of the copies of the broadsides will be issued by Wessel & Lieberman, Booksellers (through whom the Reiner font came to us). HM will be issuing ten set of the two broadsides (which are titled "Reiner Script at Heavenly Monkey #1" and "Reiner Script at Heavenly Monkey #2") in a printed paper portfolio. The image below shows the limitation statement printed inside the portfolio, not yet numbered as we have to get some new red ink for our pen.

Pasted Again

2011-09-14T09:33:00.000-07:00

This fall Kat Ran Press will be issuing an interesting little book reproducing samples of paste papers made by 19 bookbinders, collected and presented by binder David Bourbeau.

"In his introduction to [Paste Papers of the Pioneer Valley], the late David P. Bourbeau gives a fascinating history of fine printing and binding in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts, with special attention paid to decorated and paste papers. This precedes full-page reproductions of nineteen paste papers with short biographies of their makers—many of whom are the unsung hero-binders of books from fine press publishers such as Gehenna Press, Pennyroyal Press, Cheloniidae Press, Warwick Press, ELM Press, The Lone Oak Press, and Double Elephant Press."

The book (48 pp, 6 x 8.25 inches, $30) reproduces one paper by each binder (including HM's friends Claudia Cohen and Sarah Creighton). It is published in collaboration with Catawba Press, which a quick Google search suggests is the imprint of binder Barbara Blumenthal (a handful of titles were issued in the first half of the 1980s, but it seems to have been in abeyance since). This would make sense since she is making the boxes for the deluxe edition of 20 copies, issued with large, matted samples of each paper reproduced in the book ($950).

Handpress Library #5 - Ward Ritchie's Laguna Verde

2011-09-10T10:12:00.000-07:00

"I was sixty-seven years old in 1972 when I decided I would retire from the responsibilities of the firm I had started so modestly in a nook in the back of my family home forty years before...I had a dream of recovering those early pleasant experiences I had had in printing."

This is how Ward Ritchie recounted the genesis of Laguna Verde Imprenta, which culminated 16 years later with the publication of an eponymous bibliography tracing his work with an Albion handpress between 1975 and 1987. Anyone who has made the commitment to printing with a handpress will sympathize with his account in the book's foreword of the challenges he faced first in finding a press that he could afford, and then its precarious installation to his beach-side house.

The foreword also briefly repeats the well-known story of how Ritchie travelled to Paris in 1930 to learn the craft of printing at the atelier of Francois-Louis Schmied, where his apprenticeship included pulling proofs on a Stanhope-type press. When he returned to California in 1931, intent on establishing his own printing business, "my first purchase of equipment was a Washington hand press. I printed on it only one small book, John J. Slocum's schoolboy poem, "The Youth of Hamlet," before conceding that I'd have to have a more productive mechanical press if I hoped to survive as a printer." The Washington remained his tool for creating, through "trial and error" the title pages of books he designed. But it was another four decades years before he could return to the handpress, where he could be both "creator and designer" of what he printed, rather than just "a mere station on the assembly line."

Laguna Verde Imprenta is set in Goudy Thirty type, with various other types used in the display pages. The edition is 50 signed copies, uniformly bound in quarter red morocco with printed Nideggen papers over boards. Rather than sample pages, a brief bibliographic description and some comments for each project are accompanied by a resetting (i.e. reprinted) page from the book, usually on the spread's facing recto.

As a sample of handpress printing, it's not great: the inking in much of the body text is weak and inconsistent. It appears Ritchie was not damping his paper, which is a shame since it's a lovely Barcham Green handmade that would have yielded wonderful results if dampened. In this matter Ritchie seems to have committed the common mistake of not fully appreciating the differences between printing with a handpress and commercial printing with a mechanized press. He writes in the foreword that his initial intent had been to use the handpress for "experimental printing," but that soon "the text became more important to me than the experimentations." Thus, the title and interior pages reproduced in the bibliography are immediately recognizable for the style that characterized Ritchie's justifiably renowned commercial career. They enjoy the additional benefit, however, of being like those trial title pages he pinned to his shop walls, the immediate expression of designs created by his hands on the bed of a press.

Like Pepler's book, Ritchie's challenges with inking and impression don't lessen the joy of book. (Nor do the many inky thumbprints on the corners of leaves.) As Ritchie himself notes, his "fingers are not quite as agile now as they were when I was crowding only seventy and began this bizarre venture into hand press printing." Most of the Laguna Verde projects were on the scale of single-signature pamphlets; the bibliography is one of only two books issued in boards. His editions never topped 50 copies, "because longer runs on a hand press get wearisome and tedious and I choose to print only for fun." To that sentiment, we echo the "Halleluja!" with which Ritchie ended his bibliography.

More detailed accounts of Ritchie's introduction to printing, and his subsequent career as one of California's most influential printers, can be found in The Ward Ritchie Press and Anderson Ritchie & Simon (1961) and in Fine Printing - The Los Angeles Tradition (1987). Next installment, if all goes as hoped, will be Everson's Psalter.

Uncommon Deities at Punkt

2011-09-01T14:05:00.000-07:00

The Punkt Festival kicks off tonight in Norway with the a performance (if that's the correct word) of David Sylvian's "Uncommon Deities" audiovisual installation, featuring artwork by Atsushi Fukui. A description of the installation can be found here. David has also curated an evening of music (Saturday) by a variety of artists, and will perform "Plight & Premonition" with John Tilbury, Philip Jeck, Eivind Aarset, Jan Bang and Erik Honoré. The Punkt festival program sounds extremely cool in its breadth & depth; we especially like the idea of the Alpha Room, wherein "the concerts on the main stage are remixed, and the audience may listen to the remixes immediately after each concert." In case you happen to be in Norway this weekend. Meanwhile, our last two copies of the Uncommon Deities broadside are available from Wessel & Lieberman Booksellers, in Seattle.

Handpress Library #4 - A Great Hoax

2011-08-20T11:00:00.000-07:00

The book that may, for HM, surpass all others as an exemplar of what can be achieved when the full potential of a handpress is exploited, is Leonard Baskin's Jewish Artists of the Early and Late Renaissance. We like it all the more for being completely fictional - "a small phantasy, inventing and imagining early Jewish artists and their work which happily answer a number of exceedingly difficult art historical problems" (The Work of Fifty Years, p. 111).

The book combines type set in a variety of shapes and printed on different handmade papers, the setting and printing both accomplished by Leonard's son Hosea, who at the time was a recent university graduate. It is a remarkable technical achievement (it also convinced him that he didn't want to spend his life repeating the effort, and he has since become a well-known dealer in early printed books). The artist described the design as "typographic play in the working of a form-binding cohesion between the etched portraits & their permutations & the shape-related geometry of the text" (p. 111).

The book combines letterpress text with intaglio portraits, one artist featured on each recto, accompanied by a brief biography. The intaglio plates are of various geometric shapes, typically more than one per artist, and combined with the text set in sympathetic shapes.

It appears that the intaglio printing was done after the letterpress, given the heavy plate impressions remaining. Setting the text to achieve both acceptable spacing and line breaks, while still creating the spaces in which the etchings will fall, must have taken ages (Baskin describes the compositional task as "hand and back cracking" in his notes to The Work of Fifty Years). No wonder Hosea didn't feel the need to repeat himself.

Jewish Artists was a sequel of sorts to Unknown Dutch Artists, printed in 1983 under Baskin's Eremite Press imprint, in an edition of 17 copies. (The letterpress for that book was accomplished by D.R. Wakefield, who has since issued beautiful books exhibiting a strong Baskin influence under his own Chevington Press imprint.) In his notes to Unknown Dutch Artists in The Work of Fifty Years, Baskin explains:

"This delicious jeu d'esprit was a proving ground, the means by which we attained mastery over the hand-press. Its delicate assault on sensibility is vested in the unexpectedness of the book's mise-en-page...Thus, "Unknown Dutch Artists," although beset with whimsy & trimmed with irony, was of consequent importance in determining the appearance & attitude of many later Gehenna Press books." (p. 98)

Printing with a handpress is a slow process. People who use a handpress as a pre-industrial oddity, or some belief in its moral purity, are not interesting. Conversely, people who use a handpress because its pace and limited output create opportunities to use materials and techniques that enable them to achieve result that just aren't feasible (or possible) using automated presses, are interesting. This is what Leonard Baskin, Hosea and the others involved with Jewish Artists succeeded in doing.

Jewish Artists probably will be the only title included in HM's handpress library in spirit only; it is an exceedingly rare Gehenna title, and when found, exceedingly expensive (a few more images & details about it and other GP items can be found here). But we have had the pleasure of being up close to the copy shown here several times, and have found much to be inspired by in its pages.

Gatherings

2011-08-17T09:25:00.000-07:00

Got away from the studio for a bit this month, though not from work - sadly, it came along, in a box, and demanded daily attention. Nonetheless, we found time to go foraging for things that would make interesting additions to the HM library. Like most addicts who've been at it for some time, we need increasingly obscure and extreme junk to fix, or it just isn't worth the bother. A few things turned up...

A copy of Roy Squires' diminutive first publication, the only copy we have ever seen or heard of being on offer. It's a series of poems in Spanish by Clark Ashton Smith.

A trial (& incomplete) setting of Cobden-Sanderson's "Credo," proofed on onion skin paper. Compositor and printer unknown (but surely American).

An invitation to the publication party for Arion Press' Moby-Dick (ours must have been lost in the post...). We're hoping to learn more about the production of this book one day, particularly how the paper was dampened and handled. (We've heard mention of machines used at places like the Riverside Press to dampen paper, but know no details.) During our work on Oddballs, Barry Moser mentioned in a note that the engravings and text were locked-up and printed at the same time. This bit of ephemera appeals because, presumably, it was printed the same way.

A little notice for the final Kelmscott publications, & requesting payment in advance "in order that the press may be closed without avoidable delay." How about that word spacing in the sixth line...

Coincidentally found on the same trip, a copy of Neil (Yellow Barn Press) Shaver's The Kelmscott Golden Legend, featuring an original leaf from that 1892 publication (with an engraved ornamental O on its verso). A lovely book, printed on handmade Batchelor & Son paper (dampened, needless to say) by a lovely & generous man.

A prospectus for the Allen Press' Printing with the Handpress (issue price, $68.50; see HM Handpress Library #2).

A 1930 prospectus & retrospectus from the Nonesuch Press. Most Nonesuch work has a commercial blandness, but this little piece exhibits some humanity.

A woodcut portrait by Leonard Baskin of Hendrick Goltzius (1558 – 1617), a Dutch printmaker and painter.

A folio-sized publication marking the purchase by the United States Government of Dr. Otto V. F. Vollbehr's collection of 3,000 incunables, including a Gutenberg Bible (shown below is the frontis, with the good doctor fondling his [soon to be the Library of Congress'] copy of the Bible). The text is the address by Frederick W. Ashley, Chief Assistant Librarian of the Library of Congress, to the Eleventh National Conference on Printing Education, marking the acquisition. For a few decades at the start of the last century, publishing this kind of thing was a matter of course among universities and institutions. "Designed and printed by George Henry Carter, B. Ph., L.L.B., Public Printer of the United States of America, at the Government Printing Office in the City of Washington to the number of four hundred and twenty copies bound in parchment, impressed on handmade paper with Cloister types in two columns of forty-two lines each and illuminated with handmade initial letters similar to the Gutenberg Bible in the Library of Congress of the United States of America MCMXXXII," reports the colophon.

Book Craft by Ruth H. Kemp, being Book Number Eight of the Library of the Seven Crafts of the Camp Fire Girls (Camp Fire Outfitting Co., NYC, 1935). Despite the name, the series actually stretched to 10 volumes. We also saw Block Printing & Stenciling (which included some paper decoration crafts, like marbling and paste) but the things were too expensive, so we stuck with just the "Book Craft" volume, which should help fill some of the many holes in our education.

Ivy League Books

2011-08-16T08:40:00.000-07:00

The Princeton University Library recently added one of the five miniature copies of The WunderCabinet to its collection. We like the way they post images and some notes about new acquisitions (although the 'Cabinet posting should be corrected: their copy is 1 of the 5 miniatures, not one of the 30 from the actual edition).

A Font of Reiner Script

2011-08-15T08:44:00.000-07:00

During our recent travels, we were presented with a still-in-the-wrapper font of 24-pt Reiner Script capitals. Irme Reiner was a Hungarian artist and typographer who designed a number of faces, many of them brush based. We're going to think up some little broadside showing the face.

Glenn Goluska, Vandercooker

2011-08-14T10:59:00.000-07:00

Been away for a bit. Came home to this bit of news:

He'd been ill for the past year, and this was not unexpected news. Glenn started his career in Toronto designing books at Coach House Press, and also printing typographically playful limited editions under his own imprint, Imprimerie Dromadaire. He moved to Montreal, where, among other things, he designed numerous books and posters for the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and book jackets for McGill-Queens Press. We never met Glenn in person, but he did call in Vancouver once and we had an enjoyable chat, swapping stories about mutual acquaintances. The Gaspereau Press blog recounts a trip to visit Glenn last spring with some good photos.

Sad news for Glenn's family and friends, but with time they can focus not on his passing but on all that is still with us. Like this little piece that he "translated, designed, composed and vandercooked" in 1983 titled The Topography of Typography by El Lissitzky, which we believe was issued as part of Bill Hoffer's TANKS series (three leaves printed on mulberry paper, in a printed yellow wrap).

Done Like Dinner

2011-07-26T17:22:00.000-07:00

At exactly 2:34 p.m. last Saturday we finished printing Oddballs. Above is one of the Heavenly Babes holding the last sheet (recto is the title page, verso is second half of the contents listing). Red was the last run. The day before we printed the black and pale gray (not really evident above, but maybe it is in the close-up below). Those two colors were done simultaneously, with the gray section being inked up separately and dropped into the form for each impression.

After a night, day and night of celebration and relaxation, we're into collating the sheets and tipping in the engravings, 41 in each copy (the 40 oddballs plus Jim's self-portrait frontis). With luck, copies will be ready for the Seattle book fair in early October, and the Vancouver wayzgoose later that month.

This Could Be Your Type

2011-07-26T08:12:00.000-07:00

Michael Russem, over at Kat Ran Press, is selling off a bunch of his type. Unfortunately we were a bit late to the game and so some of the choice stuff is gone (like all the Dante, which was used in our favorite of his books, 2004's Sleep, featuring etchings by John Gibson, one of which is shown above just so there would be some kind of image with this post), but there's still lots worth looking at, and apparently he has more that's still to be listed.

Do You Have It In a Smaller Size...?

2011-07-14T17:17:00.000-07:00

As previously mentioned somewhere in the past on this blog, last summer for fun & laughs we printed a few copies of a complete miniature version of The WunderCabinet. These shrunken heads came in at about 30% the size of the original, which means a page of about 3 x 4 inches, with text in 2-pt type (printed on dampened pieces of Reg Lissel's linen paper deemed too thin for the full-sized book). As is always the case with Barbara and Claudia, this little bit of off-hand hilarity snowballed out of all proportions, with everyone attempting to outdo the others, and has yielded this:

Which is to say, five miniature replicas of the deluxe issue of The WunderCabinet (plus 3 hors de commerce). It's the same full-leather binding with onlays, laid into a box covered in wood veneers, with accompanying oddments and disturbing bits.

These photos are the first completed copy: Claudia's been spending an unprofitably large amount of time with this little distraction, during which she reportedly has overcome much of her strong dislike for small books. Meanwhile, we'll continue pondering how to list this mini-WunderCabinet in the HM bibliography.

News From All Over

2011-07-12T09:42:00.000-07:00

A longer break between posts than we usually take, all because of Oddballs. The colophon was printed, the sheets sent to Red Deer for Jim to sign, and then returned to HM. We carried on with the last few pages of printing. The end is in sight. Meanwhile, a few things of interest that have come our way lately...

Wicked Bugs: The Louse that Conquered Napoleon's Army and Other Diabolical Insects was released in May and has received extensive media attention. This is a sequel to Wicked Plants, written by Amy Stewart and featuring reproductions of original etchings by HM fave Briony Morrow-Cribbs. The New York Times site features a slideshow of seven illustrations from the new book, and there's even a Youtube clip of Briony and Amy talking about the project. Happily, unlike Wicked Plants, the publisher seems to have resisted the urge to incorporate additional illustrations (dull in comparison to BMC's) by a second artist in the new book.

Speaking of Briony, it's subscription print time: for the past three years, she and her partner at Twin Vixen Press, Helen O'Donnell, have offered a set of two original etchings to subscribers at a very reasonable price (2010's are shown above and below). Details for this year's offer can be seen at the TVP site.

Still speaking of Briony, check out this miniature etching press her mother Buffy recently made with at Bill Ritchie's Emeralda Works in Seattle. While even larger tabletop etching presses have poor reputations for printing ability, Ritchie's miniatures apparently are the real deal.

The gang at Shakman Press have just published a "small specimen of typefaces designed by Emil Rudolf Weiß, bound by Sarah Creighton in dashing pastepapers. The typefaces used all come from the spectacular collection of the Druckladen of the Gutenberg Musuem in Mainz. Weiß's designs—Antiqua Kursiv, Antiqua Fett, Kapitale, Lapidar Halbfett and Kapitale Halbfett—are reproduced in two colors and printed on mould-made Zerkall paper." The edition is just 25 copies in English, 10 in German, printed letterpress on a Korrex cylinder press. All that and a Sarah Creighton binding for just $60, it seems a steal.

Stumbled across "a blog about fine press books" called The Whole Book Experience written by one J. Davis. Might be of interest to people whose tastes run toward the genre's more conventional traditions and subjects.

A significant new addition to the HM handpress library is expected to arrive later this week. Watch this space...

Printing Oddball Stories

2011-06-22T14:08:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot of whining on this blog in recent months about the work of printing Oddballs. Visitors - which HM's Webmaster reports now total in the several - have asked about the process of printing a sheet. So, in an effort to avoid the work we've been moaning about, we took some photos to illustrate the sequence of events. Each sheet is printed over a period of three days: on the afternoon of the first, we wet the paper. On the second day, we print the inner form, and on the third we back it up.

We're using an abbreviated form of Gabriel Rummonds' recommended method for damping paper (which is to stack the sheets between dampened pressing boards). We need 37 good copies of the book (the edition is 30 plus six hors commerce and one binder's dummy), so we're printing 48 sheets. This takes between five and six hours, which is exactly how much time we have for work while HRH is at school.

We wet a sheet by running it through a vat of clean water, shaking off the excess and then laying it down on a dry sheet to start the stack.

Then two dry sheets are smoothed across the wet sheet. The Guarro laid paper we're using doesn't cockle and react as violently to the water as many well-sized handmades would, so smoothing the dry sheets across the wet one is not difficult.

Once the stack is completed, it is put into a heavy garbage bag, put under light weight, and left for a few hours. Before going to bed, we restack the paper, simply starting at the top of the stack and moving each sheet over in turn to make a new stack. This reverses which sheet faces which, and helps disperse the surface water from the wet sheets. The stack is then wrapped again and pressed over night.

Below is one of the four platen bearers on the bed of the press (this one manufactured & sold by Steve Heaver of the Hill Press). The bulk of Oddballs consists of the one-page biographies, which appear on versos. We're printing all of these first, so that the bearers could be adjusted to even the platen's fall on the one-sided form. This is done using Rummonds' "zero packing" system, adjusting pieces of the packing material between the back of the tympan and beneath the bearers. When it comes time to print the frontmatter (spreads), we'll return the bearers to a more level setting.

In the morning of the second day we roll out the ink and leave it standing while getting the press ready. We use a piece of half-inch glass as an ink slab (on a non-slip mat) and a 60-dur roller from Takach Press.

The text to be printed is set in place and a position proof is taken, plus a few impressions on tissue for makeready. The pages we're printing are pretty consistent in length and shape, the only difference being the number of lines, so makeready is straightforward. The hinged Mylar window that covers the makeready can be seen (with some text offsetting) on the left side.

In addition to makeready, we make some adjustments to the roller bearers with tape, to ease the transition on to and off of the text block. (The bearers are locked up above and below the type, as the roller must pass perpendicular to the lines when inking.) As many as six pieces of tape may be required, arranged in a narrow band across the vertical area occupied by the first and last letters in the lines.

A few proofs are then pulled on newsprint to check impression and the roller's ink coverage. Then we tuck into the stack of dampened paper. After removing the stack from the plastic bag, it is covered in a thick layer of dampened cotton cloth. The stack is uncovered and a sheet removed only when the type has been inked and is ready for printing.

When properly dampened for printing, a sheet of paper should feel cool to the touch but not wet on its surface, and it should be completely relaxed (i.e. floppy).

Before being printed, the sheet must have holes pricked in exactly the correct position, to fit on the press' points. We use a thick piece of foam core covered in plastic (so that it doesn't react to the papers' dampness) as a base. A piece of Mylar the same size as the printing sheet, with holes pierced in the proper spots, is then laid over the printing sheet, and a needle is used to make the holes. This all happens in less time than it takes to describe, so that the paper doesn't start drying out.

A mould-made sheet like the Guarro will expand almost entirely across the grain and very little (if at all) vertically, so it would theoretically be possible to prick the holes before damping the sheets, but we believe this creates too much potential for error. A handmade expands equally in all directions, between 2 and 4%. We once tried to gauge this expansion with test sheets, so that we could prick the holes before damping. But even the slightest error will ruin the whole point of printing on points, which is to achieve the most precise registration possible. So we make the holes in the dampened paper before printing the first form.

The sheet is then laid on the points. Between it and the Mylar window covering the makeready is a slip sheet, which is most important when backing up: if not used, the printed side will offset to the packing, and then transfer to subsequent sheets. But to ensure impression is consistent throughout, and to not "burnish" the verso against the Mylar when pulling an impression, the slipsheet must be used even for the inner form.

The frisket is lowered.....

the bed rolled in, an impression pulled, and voila....

The image above shows the impressions from the two roller bearers along the frisket (smeared here from various cleanings). Strips of tape are laid along the frisket in these areas, to prevent the ink from soaking through. Pieces of tape covering the area where the frisket contacts one of the platen bearers (top left) can also be seen; this tape is simply to help the paper withstand the repeated impressions (it will wear there first).

The slipsheet showing some cockling caused by the dampened printing sheet. It is replaced for each impression.

On Day One, the printed sheets are placed in a second stack, under a damp, heavy cotton cloth. If deemed prudent, each is lightly misted as it is laid on the stack, to maintain the ideal dampness.

On Day Two, after the last run (outer form), each printed sheet is interleaved with a pressing board, to wick out the moisture. When printing is completed, this stack is pressed tightly overnight. It is then restacked with fresh pressing boards the next day and pressed again, ultimately yielding dry, flat sheets. (When printing on handmade paper, we remove the sheets from the boards before they are completely dry, and press them very hard overnight, then restack them to complete drying. This pressing while still slightly damp gives the paper a wonderful crispness, but the process doesn't seem to yield the same results with mouldmades.) For Oddballs, the printed sheets are tucked away under the bench, the entire stack left under medium weights. The book will consist of 24 printed sheets; in the image below you can see we have completed 15 of the 24.

When all the printing is completed, copies will be collated, and the engravings will be tipped to the rectos facing their biography. Here's Unn, awaiting her text...

Cow Pies

2011-06-19T12:20:00.000-07:00

Came home the other day to discover a note left by one of HM's esteemed friends:

Esteemed or not, we won't be eating any pies at her place.

Handpress Library 3 - H.D.C. Pepler

2011-06-17T17:14:00.000-07:00

In 1934 Hilary Douglas Clarke Pepler published The Hand Press, based on his two decades of experience running St. Dominic's Press and working in collaboration with people such as Eric Gill and Hilaire Belloc. American printers were still in the thrall of their English counterparts at that time, but Pepler's book wouldn't have caused any technical envy among the Yanks: the greatest comfort we at HM take from The Hand Press is its unapologetic demonstration of the challenges posed by printing with a handpress. After a tough day in the studio, when printing a block of text with the crispness and consistency that we know is possible proves illusive, dipping into Pepler's book reminds us that others have suffered the same trials (and even issued their less-than-good results!).

The University of Notre-Dame's Hesburgh Libraries site offers this summary of Pepler's printing and publishing ambitions:

"Hilary Pepler lived in the Hammersmith neighborhood of London in the vicinity of the Kelmscott Press and early in life was an enthusiastic follower of the Arts and Crafts Movement. When he founded the St. Dominic's Press in 1916, however, he rejected the vision of the Book Beautiful embraced by William Morris over two decades earlier. Pepler printed the books he believed needed to be printed without undue concern setting especially high aesthetic standards. With his frequent collaborators the calligrapher and type designed Edward Johnston and the type designer and illustrator Eric Gill, he created books that were attractive while retaining their simplicity. Pepler printed books and the periodical The Game, but also a great range of ephemera, including posters, broadsides, calendars, and even labels for beer bottles. The commercial focus of the press allowed it to be successful well into the 1930s when many other private presses were failing. By 1940 it had gradually become less active while Pepler directed his energy elsewhere, and it was purchased and renamed the Ditchling Press."

Rejected the vision of the book beautiful; that's about right. Not that The Hand Press is ugly, but it is a bit rough and ready. The text was set in what seems to be a particularly poor casting (the T and H sorts all seem much too heavy compared to the other letters, but the printing is inconsistent throughout the book, with little evidence of attempts at makeready, so it's hard to tell if this is the casting or work-ups; the image below sanitizes much of the vagaries on the page). It is printed on a laid paper that is too thick for the page size and bound with the chain lines running horizontally; despite what some people claim, even handmade paper, if laid, prefers folding with the chain lines.

The text offers only passing technical information, focusing instead more on the esthetic and spiritual aspects of printing by hand (which is another reason for our fondness for the book). The stages of producing a book - from type selection through materials, to binding - are all covered in the text, often with anecdotes. There are a few facsimiles of title pages and early printing samples. It is not, however, a technical discourse, but one of taste and philosophy, and therefore of interest to both practising printers and those with an interest in the craft.

The book was apparently issued with a number of variants. Most copies seem to have been issued in a heavy brown wrap with a title band (see an image here); functional and not lovely. HM's copy is one of an unknown (to us) number - but probably very small - issued in quarter leather with patterned paper sides. This copy came from the excellent shop of Michael R. Thompson in Los Angeles, who can always be relied upon to provide cool books about printing.

This post probably reads as if written while looking down from a higher point than Pepler occupied: it shouldn't and isn't. When reading The Hand Press (which starts with the sentence, "The difference between a Hand Press and a Power Press is one of control") we are listening to a colleague discuss in an affectionate tone the vagaries and labors of a process that might seem outdated, slow, and overly complicated when more modern options exist. But Pepler also writes about why no other process offers the same results or satisfaction, and like Lewis Allen's book, the fun is in seeing pages printed in exactly the manner discussed in the text.

Next installment: Harry Duncan's The Technology of Hand Printing. Another book that makes us feel better about our own shortcomings.

P.S. a second edition of Pepler's book was issued in 1952 by the Ditchling Press, also in an edition of 250 copies. Haven't seen a copy but online descriptions make it sound like a resetting, not a facsimile. No idea how it was printed, but we'd bet not with a handpress.

Period Space, Not Period Space Space

2011-06-13T11:31:00.000-07:00

A brief note....a third installment in our Handpress Library will follow soon, probably Pepler's The Hand Press...been deep in printing Oddballs. A few of the recent sheets have resisted our efforts for uniformity and consistency (Timothy Leary was one; big surprise he rebelled against conformity), which leaves us too drained at the end of a day to write blogs. Last night we were attempting to unwind with a library book, Iain Banks' The State of the Art, a collection of short stories we'd first read maybe 20 years ago. But a few paragraphs into the first story we were stopped short by what seemed like an unusual amount of space after a period. Almost like two spaces. Really?! Gobsmacked with disbelief, we quickly scanned across that spread, and then flipping through the book confirmed yes, there were two spaces after each period throughout the first half, just like the students at Miss Havisham's School for Young Typists were taught a century ago. The disappearance of the additional space in the book's second half suggests perhaps the spaces were in the original text files used for setting the book, and the designer was too lazy to remove them (which shows a lack of care). And if these spaces are there intentionally (which shows a lack of care and taste), why only in the first half?

This vestigial belief in double-spacing was the topic of a half-hour discussion on a national radio show in Canada last spring, and it alarmingly generated a huge amount of pro and con debate. (It being Canada, both sides were given equal deference and the question remained unresolved. If you can't even get a thing like this right....) It's bad enough that there are still people who are prepared to defend this as good practise, but to see it in a book is incredible.

It was a second edition of The State of the Art we were reading, issued in 2004 by Night Shade Books. We've seen other books they've put out, and none have shown much sensitivity for design. The unfortunate aspect of this situation is that the first edition, from Mark V. Ziesing, was an attractive book (and, contrary to Night Shade's claim, Ziesing's was the first publication of this collection not only in North America, but also the world). However, as a bookseller who specializes in modern fiction, Ziesing can take comfort in knowing that, if only for typographic relief, this latest edition of The State of the Art will make his original that much more desirable.

It's Good for Breakfast Too

2011-06-03T09:39:00.000-07:00

While HM toils away printing the text for Jim Westergard's exhaustive study of interesting characters from recent & long past, the artist has moved on to new projects, such as studying aspects of Irish culture in the glass shown here. Another is his ongoing series See What I'm Saying, exploring how "words and phrases can sometimes suggest images that are either variations of their meanings, or totally different." He's just posted a new addition to the gallery: "God willing and the creek don't rise." As with his studies of oddballs, Jim supplies a brief history lesson with humor & irreverence.

About Oddballs, we have reached the 50% completion point, which means 12 of the 24 folio sheets have been printed. The project is going to be a few months later than originally promised, because HM decided to start over after printing the first six sheets: a number of factors that combined to leave us feeling dissatisfied with things. The right decision. Progress on Oddballs v.2 has been much better.

Handpress Library 2 - Lewis Allen

2011-05-24T11:48:00.000-07:00

Lewis Allen's Printing With the Handpress may be the most widely known of 20th century books on the subject. He, along with his wife Dorothy, spent 50 years designing and printing books that took the fullest possible advantage of the techniques and freedoms offered by the handpress, such as printing multiple colors with a single impression and using wonderful handmade papers (which, of course, had to be printed damp to realize their fullest potential). By the mid-1960s Lewis Allen had become recognized as one of the few practising experts on handpress printing, and he spent many hours replying by mail to inquiries about technique, materials, etc. To avoid answering the same questions repeatedly, he and his wife decided to print a manual describing the equipment, materials and techniques used at the Allen Press to publish a book.

The book is illustrated with many drawings (line engravings) by Victor Seward, plus some decorations by Mallette Dean. It is narrower in scope and shallower in depth than Rummonds' book, but these features may make it a less daunting introduction to the craft. It covers all the same bases, but in less detail.

As a manual, Allen's book has never been used very much at HM. His method for dampening paper is more laborious and less reliable than Rummonds'; his mention of adding formaldehyde to the water has led subsequent generations to live in fear of carcinogens and mould (it's really not an issue); the humidors he describes for keeping paper damp are baroque. The book's real value lies in its production, using all of the techniques and materials described: you can examine each page to see the results of what Allen is describing. Which is why the subsequent facsimile editions are poor seconds. They contain the information only. This is the problem with all books about printing techniques that do not employ the actual technique(s) being discussed: you are left looking at a reproduction of the thing, which is never the same.

Nonetheless, the original edition of Allen's book (limited to 140 copies, the usual run for Allen Press titles) is not often encountered now, and never inexpensively, so most people have to make do with a copy of the facsimile. The drawings are excellent references, the book is beautifully designed and printed. Its concise description of the process for designing, setting and printing a book is an excellent primer for anyone wanting to develop a knowledgeable appreciation of fine printing. Despite our niggling disagreements over technique, HM holds the Allens' work in high regard - aspirational even - and will always credit them with opening our eyes to the potential of the handpress.

Uncommon Deities Portfolio Released

2011-05-20T13:46:00.000-07:00

The ten copies of David Sylvian's broadside "Uncommon Deities" which have been put into a special triptych portfolio case were received from Claudia Cohen's bindery this week. The case is covered in a black Japanese book cloth, with a printed label set on the front board and spine. For these portfolio copies (numbers 1 - 10 from the edition of 30), the broadside was trimmed in thirds. Closed, the portfolio measures approximately 6.5 by 12.5 inches; when opened, it measures approximately 19.5 by 12.5 inches. Just four of the ten portfolio copies are being offered for sale; the other six are for the publisher, author and artist.

Naughty Flowers

2011-05-13T10:00:00.000-07:00

David Clifford's been getting naughty over at Black Stone Press. After many years of thinking and planning, he's finally published a new edition of the "pièces condamnées" from Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal, featuring multi-color illustrations by Charlie Mayrs. Very, shall we say, sophisticated illustrations, appropriately stylized and explicit for poems that deal with decadence and eroticism. So sophisticated that we are showing just details from a few here, lest we need to add some "18+ content" warnings to this blog's header.

These six poems, which were considered to cross France's obscenity laws, were censored from the collections first (1857) and second 1861 editions of Les Fleurs du Mal. (Not until the 1940s could they legally be printed in that country; a history of the poems' publication can be found here.) David's interest in the poems was sparked in the 1960s, while living and working in France, where he would listen to an LP recording of the complete poems. The challenge - beyond finding time for a personal project amidst Black Stone's ongoing commercial work - was connecting with an artist who had the right style and sensibility for the project.

Charlie Mayrs was a student at the Vancouver Art School in the 1960s (one of Robert R. Reid's many students) with a passion for painting. But his subsequent career took him into advertising, and it was not till this past decade, after retiring, that he returned his full attention to art. He has created and published a number of artist's books, printed on commission at Black Stone Press, featuring his art as well as his own prose and poetry. Having gotten to know Charlie and his work during these projects, David invited him to create the sexytime illustrations - one for each poem - for Les Fleurs du Mal.

The edition is printed in an edition of 40 press-numbered copies (28 pp, 6.5 x 9.5 inches), signed by Charlie Mayrs. The text (in French only) was set in Arepo and printed (in a total of eight colors) on Rives BFK paper. It is sewn and bound into a printed, heavy case of handmade paper by David's daughter and partner at Black Stone, Yasmine Franchi. The price is $300, available directly from David (see link along right side of this page; no kids or prudes).

Handpress Library 1 - Gabriel Rummonds

2011-05-09T08:54:00.000-07:00

When looking at your own printing for eight hours every day, one can quickly lose perspective on issues like color, impression and consistency. While slogging through printing the text pages for Oddballs, we often turn to our small collection of handpress books for inspiration, confirmation, and solace. Eric Gill provided one of our favorite quotes about the challenges of inking and printing entirely by hand:

"The press and method of inking, and sometimes the paper, which the craftsman uses are such that the colour of his work, at its best, is balanced on the very razor edge of accuracy. On either side his tools force on him a very slight margin, so that he is a tight-rope walker whose deliberate balance gives a different delight from that of the mechanical gyroscope."
Eric Gill, An Essay on Typography (p. 103)

And so, we thought we might share a few images and notes about the books that constitute our core reference library for printing with a handpress. First is Gabriel Rummonds' Printing On the Iron Handpress (Oak Knoll Press, 1998) which should be required reading for anyone interested in letterpress printing, including collectors. We know of no more comprehensive single resource for information about all stages of printing, from press set-up through design, paper selection, inking, right through to binding. While the detailed technical directions are based on using a handpress, much of the book's content is applicable no matter what kind of letterpress is being used. The book is broken into 33 chapters, essentially breaking down the printing of a book to the sequential steps; and each chapter then provides detailed directions, in addition to historical contexts and comparisons, and Rummonds' own comments and asides based on his decades of experience. Any beginning printer should gladly pay the book's price just for the chapter on recognizing (and thus diagnosing) the many different kinds of printing flaws one will encounter, each one illustrated with a photograph.

For gearheads who really want to delve into the arcana of handpress printing, Rummonds followed this work up with the two-volume Nineteenth Century Printing Practices & the Iron Handpress (Oak Knoll Press, 2004), which essentially compares, contrasts and explores details included in the major printing manuals upon which printers had relied at that time. But for most people - anyone interested in any aspect of the book arts - Printing On the Iron Handpress should be a standard reference. And don't just buy it; read it. Or at least skim through, which will inevitably lead you to drill down in the areas of most pertinence and interest. Be warned, however, that this could lead to an overwhelming desire to begin collecting Gabriel's own works from the Plain Wrapper Press and Ex Ophidia.

Next installment: Lewis Allen's Printing With the Handpress (& a discussion of why facsimiles just don't cut it for this kind of thing)

Lawrence, Lowell, Letterpress...

2011-05-06T09:52:00.000-07:00

A great new comprehensive site dedicated to T.E. Lawrence and journalist Lowell Thomas can be found at Clio ("dedicated to developing innovative American history projects that are designed to engage students, inform educators and researchers, and appeal to a wide public audience"). The collection of images and photos is very cool.

Anyone interested in fine printing & publishing should take at least a passing interest in TEL, since he was responsible for what may be the most elaborate bit of self-publishing in the English language during the 20th century. His original edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom was a gargantuan undertaking, beyond just the writing (or reading...) of it. Some info about, & images of the book can be found at the E.J. Pratt Library site. A brief but insightful account of its production can also be found in the memoirs of Herbert Hodgson (Fleece Press, 1989), who printed it. He was initially presented with a treadle platen press to do the work, which he had to trick out with a motor to get through the project. Simon Lawrence's Fleece Press also published a brief account by Vyvyan Ryder of the plans he and TEL had discussed to start their own private press, modelled after Kelmscott (how dull that would have been). Although none of these fascinating bibliofacts were included in David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia," the movie's still worth seeing, preferably in a theater, or at least on the biggest screen in your neighborhood. For anyone wanting to really dig into TEL's writings (such as his original, 1922 version of Seven Pillars, which was even longer than the version he eventually published!), check out the Castle Hill Press.

Comments from the Peanut Gallery

2011-04-26T16:42:00.000-07:00

A report of the All-Day Wonder Cabinet event in New York City, filed by our people on the ground...

The WunderCabinet, represented by Barbara, Claudia and the book itself, made its New York debut on the 16th of April at the All-Day Springtime Wonder Cabinet. This event, curated by author/thinker Lawrence Weschler and presented by the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, was a veritable cabinet of curious scientists, artists, filmmakers and musicians. Highlights included Michael Benson and Carl Schoonover comparing telescopic views of the universe with microscopic views of the brain; "Lurch," Boris Hars-Tschachotin's captivating film set in the Berlin Natural History Museum; and Harvard neuroscientist Margaret Livingstone's assertive yet comprehensible explanation of vision and its quirks.

A copy of The WunderCabinet and all its objects, along with a miniature version and the author's notebook, was on display in the foyer. Barbara had the opportunity to turn the pages from time to time, giving those who hung out in the foyer a chance to see an ever-changing selection of topics. Barbara's talk included slides of the book and Claudia contributed pertinent comments from her sheltered spot in the audience.

Flea marketing the following day resulted in several purchases which may or may not end up in future books. On Monday, Claudia and Barbara visited Victoria Steele, Director of Collections Strategy at the New York Public Library, and were given a terrific tour of the library and saw NYPL's copies of The Temperamental Rose, After Image and The WunderCabinet.

Apprenticeship Canceled

2011-04-21T12:07:00.000-07:00

The Kramerica Memorial Apprenticeship, about which we mused in a recent post, has had to be abandoned; the corporation was not interested in (strongly objected to) being associated in any way with HM. Thanks & apologies to those people who contacted us about the opportunity.

Uncommon Exhibition

2011-04-20T09:20:00.000-07:00

This week the Tomio Koyama Gallery in Tokyo opened an exhibition of new works by Atsushi Fukui. Included in the show is David Sylvian's Uncommon Deities broadside, featuring original drawings by Fukui, and two related items: a poster featuring a number of the mushrooms he created for the project but which were not used; and copies of the book Basidia, printed and bound at HM. The entire edition of Basidia (10 copies) was given to Fukui in thanks for his participation in the project, and this will be the only opportunity to secure a copy. Details about these pieces and others by Fukui can be had by contacting the gallery.

First We Take Manhattan...

2011-04-15T13:12:00.000-07:00

Barbara Hodgson & Claudia Cohen have stormed New York City with The WunderCabinet. Yesterday The New Yorker's blog ran a short piece about the book, and Barbara was interviewed by WNYC. We await a debrief on how tomorrow's all-day Wonder Cabinet event goes....

Your Eyes Do Not Deceive

2011-04-11T09:44:00.000-07:00

The deluxe copies of The WunderCabinet (numbers 1 - 10) were shipped out from Claudia's studio last week. She and Barbara spent two full days assembling all the bits contained in the box's two levels (the bottom one consisting of two drawers), and writing up a detailed inventory of items for each copy (sewn into a wrap made from Karli Frigge's marbled paper, shown in image at the bottom of this post). Each of the deluxe boxes contains about 40 items. No two collections are the same, but some of the items that might be found include a limpet shell from the Aurora Islands; a cast of a finger of Catherine Vorontsov, Mme la Princess de Dashkov; a porcupine quill; reducing & enlarging lenses; a sea urchin skeleton; polished stone obelisks; ammonite pairs; a parchment armillary sphere; and artifacts and Roman coins from Syria. Each box also contains, in a separate pamphlet, a sunprint and a watercolor painting of a magnolia seed head. Barbara sent these photos of the book and box along.

Claudia had described her plans for the deluxe binding as full leather with a trompe l'oeil pattern, but that could be anything. As one young fan of her work commented upon seeing the deluxe WunderCabinet, just when you think she couldn't possibly outdo herself, she does.

While working on the boxes, the two collaborators also discussed various upcoming projects, the first of which will be the third volume in their color series, tentatively titled A Colourful Calling: The Palette at Work. In a format similar to The Temperamental Rose and After Image, A Colourful Calling will explore how color is used in a variety of occupations, from chemistry to house painting to hairdressing. Illustrating the examples with palettes for interior design, artists’ supplies, textile dyeing, philately and psychology, to name a few, Barbara and Claudia show that work has never been more colourful. We expect to be publishing A Colourful Calling at about this time next year. Meanwhile, for those in the area, don't forget that Barbara will be talking at the upcoming Wonder Cabinet event in New York City on April 16.

Help Me Somebody

2011-04-06T09:49:00.000-07:00

Before printing of Oddballs could start in earnest, we had to tear the paper down. Which is one reason we kept delaying things; it is such a boring job. We're printing on some of our coveted vintage Guarro mouldmade laid paper (the same stock used for HM=X). Each book requires 14 signatures of two sheets (i.e. eight pages) each; each sheet is almost a half full sheet of the Guarro. Almost but not quite; we need to remove two inches from the width. We used a cutter to halve the sheets (so the heads will be a trimmed edge), leaving the deckle on the bottom and one edge. We didn't like the look or feel of the other fore edge being trimmed, so those have to be torn. We'll print 45 copies to get 35 we like. That means 630 full sheets; once halved, that's 1,260 printing sheets. So that's 1,260 fore edges that need torn. And being a laid paper, we have to ensure we keep track of the rough & smooth sides. You can see why we procrastinated.

The photo above shows the stack to be torn, the offcuts, and the trimmed sheets. The offcuts will be further trimmed - mercifully using the cutter again - to a width of one inch, for use as shims in the binding. Since the engravings are being tipped into the book, the binding - the spine - must account for the additional thickness they add to the text block, and this is done by adding shims to the folds of the signatures. With the trial binding, Natasha Herman has determined that a one-inch strip of Guarro folded twice (to make four thicknesses) inserted between the outer and inner sheet, will be sufficient. (No, we're not printing on this horrible yellow Guarro, but it's the same weight as the white so we used it for the blank dummy.) This is a detail one should always look for when presented with a book that includes tipped-in items.

Progress was somewhat expedited by setting up a jig: a ruler fastened at one end to the cutting mat, and a mark exactly 17 inches to the left. By aligning each sheet to the mark and horizontal, the edge can simply be torn along the ruler's edge. Nonetheless, it is tedious work. So tedious that, after years of rejecting all inquiries along this line, we have begun entertaining the idea of a HM apprentice. This is exactly the kind of work intended for the young & keen. There's even room in the studio for a bedroll.

As the idea took hold, we thought of other tasks suitably interesting and valuable to the studio's ongoing success. Like harvesting the moss from our roof (the apprentice could sell it at the nearby weekend farmers' market). And so, investigations into the feasibility of what we're tentatively calling the Kramerica Memorial Apprenticeship are underway; stay tuned for application details.

Prospective Oddballs

2011-04-02T10:11:00.000-07:00

Copies of the prospectus for Jim Westergard's Oddball series have gone out. Jim sent us 27 copies of the Hunter S. Thompson portrait, which is featured as the sample spread in the notice, so 27 copies were printed, sewn into wraps, and numbered. Initial response to Jim's work has been - no surprise - enthusiastic. One correspondent in the U.K., however, thought the content wasn't right for a clientele with a too "Eurocentric" focus. We agree, and this is, of course, why we were attracted to the series in the first place - Jim's ability to inject humor and perversity into a medium that too often takes itself terribly seriously. As Barry Moser says in the introduction:

“Wood engraving is a dark medium...I don’t know how Westergard does it, but he has an uncanny ability to pull humor out of that dastardly valley of shadows. Despite the dark odds against him, he manages, again and again, to wrangle some of the funniest wood engravings I have ever seen.”

While printing of the various oddball biographies is underway, we continue to play with ideas for the title page. Below is a quick digital sketch of an idea we had, incorporating "thumbnails" of all 40 oddballs in the setting, but the size reduction is too great and they'd end up looking like thumbprints. Nonetheless, the concept we still like, and we're talking with Jim about other illustrative options...

How to Stack Books

2011-03-30T12:21:00.000-07:00

Maclean's Magazine has published a profile of Vancouver's MacLeod's Books, and owner Don Stewart (the photo above, from the article, is by Brian Howell). MacLeod's is Vancouver's most storied used and antiquarian shop, with a history that now spans five decades. Don is among HM's first generation of patrons, and continues to be a source of inspiration, advice, found-treasure stories, and, of course, books. In fact, one of the cool things about Don is that customers go through an esoteric probationary period - the duration and terms of which are never discussed, but generally have to do with one's level of knowledge, willingness to learn, and commitment to actually buying books. The successful candidates are elevated to a cadre that qualifies them for invitations to purchase certain items that will appeal to their particular interests. These items are never on display (or online), but appear from unknown repositories, often with the story of their provenance. (We know that somewhere he has a copy of our 1998 Griffo book, and a few other very early HM efforts. They will bubble up to the surface one day...) Should you fail to act when the opportunity is presented, you cannot be sure it will recur. Readers whose interest in piqued by the article's mention of a panoramic photograph of Terrace, B.C. please note that this is an error; it's Trail. And for an even better shot of the shop, here's Stan Douglas's famous (& fantastic) photograph, which really needs to be seen in its original 1.75 x 3 meter size for the full effect:

She's Rocio!

2011-03-25T15:58:00.000-07:00

The mystery to our new "Iguanas" print is solved, courtesy of one Preston Briggs: the signature was indeed misread, and the artist's first name is RocÌo. (But that C and I really run together like a U....) That makes our artist the Mexican actress and dancer RocÌo Sagaon. Preston kindly sent a link to a 2004 article in the North Texas e-News, which includes the following biographical notes about Rocio and her husband, George Vinaver:

"RocÌo Sagaon, interacting in the circuit of dance and the cultural milieu of Mexico since a young age, expressed her restlessness in all fields of the visual arts, and later together with her husband Georges Vinaver, entered the realm of ceramics. Her pieces invoke the Pre-Columbian and Oriental tradition. Sagaon works on diverse scales, from tiny pieces to large scale....The late George Vinaver deserves posthumous recognition due to his contributions to the relief genre of ceramics. Vinaver, wife Sagaon, and Gustavo Perez are all founders of the El Tomate workshop opened in 1984 on a large piece of land owned by Vinaver and wife. Early pieces produced at El Tomate for part of Seven Worlds [sic]."

We were able to find just one of her etchings online (available from Gilley's Gallery in Baton Rouge), "Tambien ellos Pasan." These images don't do the pieces justice; her color work is fantastic.

Who is Rouó Sagaon?

2011-03-25T14:30:00.000-07:00

Found this etching at a flea market last weekend. Edition of 50, titled "Iguanas," image measures approx. 15 x 20 inches, the colors printed from multiple plates. Stunning. In fact, it's so arresting that we asked the price just to see how much the peddler thought it was worth, expecting to hear some ridiculous price that would allow him to retire. But no! It could be had for the few small bills in our pockets! But since getting it home, all attempts to find any information about the artist - or even mention of him/her - have been fruitless.

The print is signed Rouó Sagoan. It doesn't show well below, but we're sure that third letter is a U.

At the lower right corner of the sheet is a blind stamp for the Sagaon-Vinaver Work-Shop:

Google turns up nothing for either the artist or the workshop. The print does not look terribly old - probably less than 20 years. In this day & age, how many people don't show up, at least tangentially, in a Google search? Any information about this artist would be appreciated; our e-mail is down at the bottom right of this page.

One-Day Wonder (Cabinet)

2011-03-22T16:57:00.000-07:00

After being shown the New York Public Library's newly arrived copy of The WunderCabinet last month, Lawrence Weschler contacted co-author Barbara Hodgson with an invitation to participate in a one-day symposium celebrating the multi-disciplinary character of the traditional cabinet of curiosities.

This is the third such symposium organized by Weschler, in his role as director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU. The purpose of the event is to "delve back into the roots of the modern Humanities in the sixteenth century’s Age of Marvels, when the sorts of disciplines that would eventually separate out into distinct Arts and the Sciences, as currently understood, still comingled promiscuously and sometimes well nigh deliriously." Barbara will give an illustrated talk about The WunderCabinet, touching on both its inspirations and details of the project itself.

More information about this event can be found here.

Distaff Side

2011-03-19T13:29:00.000-07:00

The Book Club of California recently sent out an invitation to the Oscar Lewis Awards presentation, an attractive piece of printing designed by Kathleen Burch. Not being familiar with Ms Burch, we looked her up & discovered the Ladies of Letterpress (which includes a brief CV for Kathleen, whose 30+ year career really should not be unknown to HM). The LoL is a site that seems to cover just about any printing-related topic its members care to raise and discuss. It also links to a site for a Ladies of Letterpress Conference, slated for August, with some interesting panel discussions and workshops. Not sure if it's open to printers from the paternal side.

The LoL reminded us of the book The Ladies Printing Bee, organized and issued by Jules Remedios-Faye in 1995 . A very cool collection of signatures contributed by 39 women printers. Good luck finding a copy now. But check out the happenings at the C. C. Stern Type Foundry (of which Jules has been a driving force), which is having an open house on Saturday 26 March.

(Today's heading refers to Bertha S. Goudy, First Lady of Printing. Remembrance of the Distaff Side of the Village Press [The Distaff Side, 1958]).

Fonds is a Weird Word

2011-03-18T10:26:00.000-07:00

The University of British Columbia recently posted an announcement of the HM archives, which were acquired, sorted, deloused, & catalogued last year. Graduate students, starts your theses.

Blowing Smoke

2011-03-13T14:13:00.000-07:00

At the risk of jinxing the project's possible, eventual completion, we report here starting work on Oddballs. Although we generally find excuses to not issue prospectuses, we decided it might be appropriate in this instance. Turns out that this can be an excellent way to warm up for the main event - who knew? Here's a shot of the makeready for the outer forme (the press dislikes such unbalanced spreads, and required much adjustment of the platen bearers to even things out).

However, we are following past practise in issuing fewer copies of the prospectus (27) than there will be of the book itself (30). Each copy is sewn into a printed wrap, and the inside spread shows one of the Oddball biographies and prints from the book. We chose Hunter Thompson, for no particular reason. An interesting aside about this print came to us via new friend Miles Wigfield: turns out the print was featured on the cover of the Society of Wood Engravers quarterly journal Multiples, and elicited a rebuke from a member who objected to an image of someone smoking being given such prominence. Happily, the wet blanket was pelted with butts (some still glowing) in the Letters section of the following issue. As someone noted, given that it's Hunter S., Jim could have portrayed much more venal antics.

The prospectus: printed on the same Guarro laid paper we're using for the edition. The page is 8.5 x 12. 5 inches, the type is Dante. The engraving was printed by Jim on Zerkall, and tipped on to the page, as is the plan for the book (binder Natasha Herman is currently working on a dummy, figuring out all the shimming required to balance out 40 tipped-in prints & yield a pleasingly rounded back). Copies will be going out to HM's regulars in the coming week.

T. E. Lawrence & Siegfried Sassoon

2011-03-11T19:58:00.000-08:00

Fellow handpress printer Miles Wigfield, in the U.K., recently published a T.E. Lawrence item featuring a wood engraving by Jim Westergard. Details of T. E. Lawrence and Siegfried Sassoon - A Friendship from the Reading Room Press's site:

"This was the text of the talk that Dennis Silk gave at the Imperial War Museum in 2007. The chance to put the names of two of my literary heroes together with his name on a title page was an opportunity that no self-respecting private press printer could allow to pass. The portrait illustration, engraved on boxwood by Jim Westergard, I suggested, might be the first published image of Sassoon and Lawrence together for even though Lawrence attended Sassoon's wedding no photograph of them both appears to exist. Bound by Chris Hicks, there were 120 copies. [A few remain: £30 + p&p.]"

Miles has two Albion presses and, based on the photos on his site, a pristine studio (note the cool drying rack hanging from the ceiling). The press is his avocation, and therefore proceeds at a pace that makes publishing pleasurable but never onerous. He is particularly interested in wood engravings, and like HM makes a habit of commissioning work by artists whose names may not (yet) be terribly well known among the book crowd.

That Dastardly Valley of Shadows

2011-03-09T09:15:00.000-08:00

Jim Westergard's blog includes a detailed description of his process for creating a wood engraving, including photos of the different stages. An interesting behind-the-scenes look from the creator of our upcoming Oddballs book.

“Wood engraving is a dark medium...I don’t know how Westergard does it, but he has an uncanny ability to pull humor out of that dastardly valley of shadows. Despite the dark odds against him, he manages, again and again, to wrangle some of the funniest wood engravings I have ever seen.”
from Barry Moser's Introduction to Oddballs

Printing Fuel

2011-03-08T09:52:00.000-08:00

Distractions continue.... spent the past week helping organize Robert Reid's papers and books spanning six decades. Luckily HM is a graduate of the Don Stewart school of hand-truck driving... Oddballs is truly in the press this week; the prospectus will be going out next... Great news from Harold Budd: his latest collaboration with Robin Guthrie has just been released; Bordeaux is available from Darla Records. And next week Harold is in the studio to record his first solo album in a decade. New fuel to keep the press going.

Copy Artist

2011-02-22T15:09:00.000-08:00

When we finished printing The WunderCabinet last July, we kept a complete copy made up from waste sheets, with the vague intent of sewing them up in some simple case one day, to at least have a bare-bones copy of the book kicking around the studio. Clearing up loose ends before descending into Oddballs, we decided to sew the sheets up, and offered to do the same for Barbara, if she had a waste copy made up from her own rejects among the colored sheets. So she dropped them off last weekend. Even though the sheets were rejects, her copy still looked much more lovely than our plain sheets. So, since it's a waste copy anyway, we decided to do our best at copying in our copy, the pages and parts she'd spent so many months watercoloring. This was no small undertaking for the dedicated monochromaticists at HM. Using what colored pencils were lying around, we got to work. And it became an experience with a book unlike any we've ever had. It's one thing to look at the pages of The WunderCabinet and think, That must have been a lot of work. But it's a much deeper and more sustained experience when one is attempting to copy the original, getting the hues and tones as close as possible. It made us wonder what it would be like to publish a book like The WunderCabinet, and issue it with an uncolored copy, for the readers to fill in. Knowing book collectors, no one would ever actually try it - more's the pity. Shown above and below are a couple of the pages, with Barbara's watercolors on the right, and HM's attempts on the left (the butterflies haven't been tipped on to our page yet).

By the way, institutions that we know of where copies can be seen include The New York Public Library, University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, and the University of Alberta. In all cases copies are held in special collections, and so appropriate arrangements must be made to see the books. There are, or will soon be more in the United States, and we'll communicate those if/when we hear.

The Ripple Effect

2011-02-21T09:21:00.000-08:00

HM would go to Codex if only to see Ken Shure and all the very cool books he always has on display (Chevington Press, I'm looking at you). This year's reunion was particularly satisfying because we learned that Ken and his partner Liv Rockefeller are launching their own imprint, Two Ponds Press. It's no surprise that after Ken's long association with the Gehenna Press, TPP bears a familial resemblance both esthetically and philosophically. But, as Lisa Baskin herself had pointed out to Ken, there is no value in simply being a copy cat, and that is not the intention.

Two Ponds Press will recruit the talents of different artists, typographers and craftspeople for each project, the curating of teams no doubt being part of the appeal for Ken and Liv. And given their long and deep connections in the book arts community, they will be coming up with some very cool combinations. Their debut publication, Anthony Hecht's collection of poems Interior Skies, will feature typography by Russell Maret, printing by Art Larson, wood engravings by Abigail Rorer and a binding by none other than Gray Parrot.

At Codex Ken was handing out a broadside prospectus (set in Baskin's much-loved Centaur) that includes a brief description of the press's aims:

"Our mission is to forge a collaboration with writers, artists, photographers, designers, printers and bookbinders. Our list of forthcoming projects includes poetry, children's literature, photography, culinary arts and history. Original material presented in both traditional and modern formats will be our hallmark. We are rooted in the tradition of modern fine printing, but it is also our intention to use the newest technologies available to us; metal type, letterpress, polymer plates, photogravure, intaglio and relief printing and more will be utilized in the making of our books, portfolios and broadsides."

That bit about being a contemporary press founded on traditional models, and using "newest technologies available" particularly appeals to HM. The TPP Web site is still being constructed, but Ken can be contacted at gehenna [at] midcoast.com. Interior Skies is scheduled for publication this summer, in an edition of 75 copies.

Lies!

2011-02-15T12:05:00.000-08:00

HM completely fabricated much of the previous post. The saddest part is, we didn't even know we were doing it, which is worse than being intentionally deceitful. Though lovely, having now seen it in person, Sarah Horowitz's etching featured in her recent Blake broadside was not created anastatically. We were bamboozled by her reference to "relief etching" in a description of the broadside, and jumped to a conclusion. Our falsehood was betrayed when we saw her, and the broadside, at the Codex book fair in Berkeley last week. We also saw her latest book, Archeologies of Loss (detail above), which is stunning. Sarah's botanical (arboreal, really) etchings are sublime, her books produced with the highest attention to detail. No lie.

Baskin Would Be Proud

2011-02-07T11:48:00.000-08:00

Sarah Horowitz's Weisedruck has just issued a broadside featuring a relief etching, an uncommon (and challenging) technique also known as anastatic printing. Relief etching was originally conceived by William Blake (whose poem "Sun-flower" is printed, by Keegan Meegan & Co, in Sarah's broadside). It was also written about by E. A. Poe in an article featured in the April 12, 1845 issue of Broadway Journal. The article has been frequently reprinted, perhaps most famously in a small edition from Leonard Baskin's Gehenna Press (1972, 60 copies), featuring a (pretty blurry; see below) two-color portrait of Poe printed ~~anastically~~ anastatically. Baskin would have been impressed with the beauty and skill in Sarah's print. The print, and Sarah's lovely books, can be found among the exhibitors at Codex this week.

The Cabinet Revealed

2011-02-03T11:23:00.000-08:00

Copies of The WunderCabinet were sent out to subscribers last week. All of the 20 regular issue copies have been completed. Claudia is now finishing up the bindings for the 10 deluxe copies. Offered here are some photos Barbara took while various wonders were being assembled and arranged in the regular copies; each is accompanied by a handwritten inventory, detailing the items included.

One of these copies will be on display at next week's Codex book fair in Berkeley, at the table of our friends Vamp & Tramp Booksellers. One of the miniature copies will also be on display. We'll post images of the deluxe copies when we have them.

Brass Monkey

2011-01-31T07:56:00.001-08:00

Happy birthday to you

You look like a monkey...

(Above is a detail from an impression taken from a piece of hammered brass, a decoration that once adorned a now-lost trunk or piece of furniture from the Far East. Printed - expertly - by Peter Braune at New Leaf Editions.)

Beasts Contained

2011-01-25T07:18:00.000-08:00

The two text pages for inclusion with Jim Westergard's suite of prints Beasts of New York were printed at the end of last week. They've been dried, pressed & trimmed to final size, so this week we go off to the local bindery to have ten slipcases made up. For the chemise we had just enough of some large, heavy taupe sheets with red highlights, made by Reg Lissel, lying around. The one thing we forgot to print (because we're not very bright) was the spine label for the slipcase, so that'll have to get done this week.

The image below shows the colophon sheet (still to be signed & numbered by Jim) and the drawing, titled "the King Beneath," that will accompany this suite. The sheets measure 6.5 x 8 inches. Jim printed the engravings on Zerkall, and did the drawings on a heavier and toothier Hahnemuhle. The text was set in 18-pt Perpetua (with 36-pt used for the title) and printed on Arches Wove paper.

All 11 prints in each suite are uniform in edition number; the suites account for numbers 16 through 25. Only eight of the ten suites are being offered for sale, priced at $750. Contact Jim directly (jimwest at telusplanet.net) if interested.

Cut But O.K.

2011-01-22T15:00:00.000-08:00

Having delayed it for as long as possible, we finally had to play slice & dice with 10 copies of the David Sylvian broadside, Uncommon Deities. These ten (numbers 1-10) are being put into a triptych portfolio case, made by Claudia Cohen. Which means that each copy had to be cut into three pieces. As they have already circumnavigated the globe, to be signed by David and Fukui, our hesitancy to cut them up is understandable. We are happy to report that all went well, and the ten copies are packed & ready for delivery to Claudia next week.

These photos are the paper design dummy made up Claudia, using one of the makeready proofs (hence all the scribbling & marks). Closed, the case will measure approximately 6.5 by 12.5 inches. It will be made from thin board covered in cloth (color TBD). The front board has a print of one of Fukui's mushrooms inset. The inner board has a sort-of colophon inset, explaining how & where these 10 copies fall within the total edition of 30. And inside, mounted on the three boards, is the broadside.

However much fun they may be to produce, broadsides can be problematic if one's walls are already fully populated. This portfolio format offers an alternative, allowing one to both store the broadside on a bookshelf, but also keep it easy to access (i.e. as compared to having it packed in a box under the bed). And can also be opened and easily displayed, as a triptych.

Two of the ten copies being cased up will go to David, and two to Fukui. The remainder are HM's, and a couple will be offered for sale. We'll post details here when we know them.

Beastly Distractions

2011-01-19T09:53:00.000-08:00

This week we've pulled out the drawers of lovely 18-pt Perpetua, cast by Dan Jones a dozen yeas ago, for a quick distraction with Jim Westergard.

Last year Jim created 11 engravings to illustrate a book by Jon Evans, titled Beasts of New York. The book, which will be published by The Porcupine's Quill this spring, is a parable about a Central Park squirrel coping with various evil events and forces, all in animal form. While the engravings will be reproduced offset in the book, Jim printed each of the blocks in an edition of 25 copies. Seeing them posted on his site last fall, HM suggested he consider issuing some portion of the edition as complete suites, an idea he liked well enough. (He did something similar with his series Wee Beasties, in the early 1990s.) So, before Oddballs takes over the press for a few months, this week we're printing a title page, descriptive colophon (setting copy & design shown above), and paper chemise for a total of 10 sets (numbers 16-25 from the edition) of Beasts of New York. Each set will also include an original drawing by Jim, a sketch for one of the beasts.

Each suite will be wrapped in the printed paper chemise, and put into a custom slipcase. They will be available for purchase directly through Jim's Web site (but HM will post purchasing details when they are finalized, in a week or two).

Mushroom Surprise

2011-01-13T09:19:00.000-08:00

It's been years since we did a secret book. The most recent was produced at the end of last year, but we couldn't tell anyone until it reached the person for whom it had been made, Atsushi Fukui. Today we received word from him that it (all of them, actually) arrived safely in Japan.

Last year, when David Sylvian asked Fukui to create some incidental drawings for possible inclusion in the "Uncommon Deities" broadside, Fukui sent nine mushrooms. Only two ended up being used in the broadside, and it seemed a waste for the other seven to be left unused. So, we struck upon the idea of printing all nine in a small book, which we titled Basidia, and giving the entire edition (just 10 copies) to Fukui, to do with whatever he will, in thanks for his contribution to the project.

The book (4 x 6.5 inches) was printed on sheets of Reg Lissel's HM Text paper. What text there is (just the title page and colophon) is set in Dante. But all we had was white, which needed toning down to suit the book's content, so we tea stained it. We'd initially thought we'd have to dry it down after staining, and then redamp for printing; but looking at the stack of stained sheets after they'd pressed for a bit, we decided to just push ahead with the printing, and all worked out beautifully.

The book was printed eight-up (work & turn) on full sheets, then trimmed for binding. It was sewn in three signatures (integral endsheets) and put into a case made from Reg Lissel's heavier, colored papers, and lined with thin card.

Eno & the Art of Surrender

2011-01-11T10:27:00.000-08:00

Went to Brian Eno's "Illustrated Talk" last night. In an old, supposedly renovated theater, but we suspect they bought the seats from junked Air Canada planes.

The first half of the talk was generally a discussion about how (Western) humans' perception of the world and the universe has changed (and also how language has not always kept up with these changing concepts and perceptions), and this tied into a discussion on organizational models for systems and groups, i.e. traditional top-down structures, with linear flows of interaction vs complex/"organic" structures described by people like Stafford Beer.

In the second half he discussed how some of these concepts inspired and affected his interest in art; how our language still insufficiently distinguishes between music as performed (i.e. live) and music as created in the studio (he used the example as theater and cinema as two related but distinct forms); and how he really came to music as a painter. He made the point that many art school students from the '60s onward ended up getting into music, and that this was because music - as created in a studio, using the various tools & technologies that were coming available - had become a form of painting. (This reminded me of his "Harold Budd is a great abstract painter trapped in the body of a musician" quote.)

He spoke at some length about his interest in light and the paintings/installations he's created. This would have been more engaging if he had some visuals as accompaniment. He ended by talking about the concept of surrender, as he's seen people surrender to his installations - to just being in the space. He talked about surrender as the opposite of control, and generally a word/concept we view in a negative sense, as a sign of weakness; but that really control and surrender are two ends of a continuum, and that being able to truly experience life requires being able to constantly find/adjust to the point on this continuum best suited to the situation.

In 1990 we had the opportunity to visit (several times) his exhibition The Quiet Room, in Montreal. Eno's 77 Million Paintings is (are?) currently on exhibition at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, until March. It's an uncommon opportunity to attend one of his exhibitions, especially in Canada, so if you're able to go, do; and go with the idea of just sitting down for a while and being there, and see what happens.

Closing Up The WunderCabinet

2011-01-09T10:37:00.000-08:00

We're getting close to The WunderCabinet's release, in just under a month now. Barbara and Claudia will be meeting in a few weeks to assemble all the various bits & pieces that go into each box (and Barbara will write out a detailed inventory of each box, for inclusion). The book will make its debut at the Codex Book Fair in Berkeley. HM has done the previous two fairs but we couldn't spare the time this year, so our friends at Vamp & Tramp Booksellers (who will be exhibiting) have kindly offered to display the book for us. It will be a rare opportunity to see the book in the wild, as the entire edition is subscribed, and our booksellers seem to already have customers lined up for their copies.

In addition to exhibiting one of the "regular" copies (i.e. 1/20), Vamp & Tramp will have on hand one of the miniature versions. Alas, this little copy will not be bound by Claudia but rather by HM. Nonetheless, it should be sufficient for people to flip through and get an idea of what the big book is like. The ten signatures were sewn on two vellum slips, the spine pasted, and then the book was put into a case made from a piece of Reg Lissel's abaca vellum paper (from batch that had been loaded with pigment to dye it black). Barbara is going to create a spine label. The frontis, which is an etching in the real book, is reproduced digitally here, but printed on Reg's paper; everything else in the book is legit (i.e. letterpress and hand embellishments, just like the real thing).

Colorful Talk Radio

2011-01-06T15:56:00.000-08:00

CBC Radio will be airing an interview with Barbara Hodgson on Sunday 9 January. North by Northwest (NxNW) host Sheryl MacKay and Barbara spoke about her collaborations with Claudia Cohen on a series of books about color (The Temperamental Rose and After Image so far; two more volumes are planned) being published by HM Editions. NxNW airs across British Columbia on Saturday and Sunday mornings, and can be found at 88.1 FM. Barbara's interview is scheduled to run between 8 and 9 a.m. PST. An unedited podcast version of the interview will be posted to the show's site following broadcast.

Thanx Santa

2010-12-29T15:09:00.000-08:00

Found under the tree on Xmas morning, A Specimen of Some Printing Types in Use at the Alcuin Press, Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, and a note on the Press and its aims. It opens with a page of glorious 72-pt Cloister, followed by a spread in 36-pt, and then a spread with the roman and italic in 18-pt. Poliphilus and Blado in two sizes, followed by Caslon in several sizes also appear. The text is a single essay that provides some history and commentary on the faces shown, along with statements of principle in the matters of printing, paper and binding.

The Alcuin Press was a commercial concern modeled after Chiswick and Nonesuch, attempting to bring the best possible craftsmanship and materials to its work. According to Court Barn - A Museum of Craft & Design in Chipping Campden,

"The Alcuin Press was started in 1928 by Herbert Finberg (1900-1974), a Roman Catholic friend of F. L. Griggs. It was housed in a malt-house behind Elm Tree House, High Street, Chipping Campden. Unlike Arts and Crafts printers who printed by hand for their own pleasure, Finberg used modern machinery and worked for commercial publishers. But he cared just as much about quality. The press was sold in 1935."

While books printed at the Alcuin Press are not uncommon, this printing sample appears to be. The book is squarish octavo in size, a single signature of 16 pages, printed on Batchelor's Kelmscott paper in an edition of 50 copies. Bound in quarter marbled paper over thin boards, with a linen back. The text makes reference to planned future specimen books exhibiting the press's collection of ornamental initials, borders, and type flowers "designed specially for use at this Press." No idea if these subsequent samplers appeared. But a lovely book to spend a quite Christmas afternoon enjoying.

Chris Stern's Foundational Type Foundry

2010-12-23T10:39:00.000-08:00

Printer Chris' Stern's legacy lives on! His former partner, Jules Faye, has sent out this notice with details for the planned opening of the C.C. Stern Type Foundry in Portland, OR. Chris and Jules published many interesting and innovative books during the 1990s and early '00s, before his untimely death. Great to see all this equipment, and Jules' expertise, still at work. Note than in addition to soliciting cash donations for the foundation's start-up and ongoing costs, there is a "wish list" of equipment they need.

A (New) Letter from Edward Johnston

2010-12-07T13:37:00.000-08:00

Received in the mail this week was a package full of surprises from The Aliquando Press. Will Rueter has issued a previously unpublished letter by calligrapher Edward Johnston, printed here in facsimile on a sheet of Barcham Green Medieval handmade paper.

Will discovered the letter years ago at a book fair, tucked inside A.R. Ashbee's copy of Writing & Illuminating & Lettering - score! The bulk of the 27-page book is taken up with an insightful essay about Johnston, providing some context for the letter. And, there's an original two-color wood engraving portrait by Will of E.J. The collection of papers combined in the book alone make it a joy to leaf through: Nepalese for the case, Hahnemuhle Archive for the text, the BG (printed damp), and some kind of a gampi for the engraving. Another lovely publication from TAP, issued in an edition of just 40 copies. And it's priced at just $95! But Will's never charged enough for his books.

Also in the package was a copy of Will's ninth books, Poe's story The Cask of Amontillado, published in 1965 (just a few months after HM was born....). We admit to having been gently pestering Will about the possible existence of a copy for some time now, and finally wore him down: a note tucked into the copy that arrived reported that it certainly is the last copy.

Perhaps Will had been reticent about sharing a copy of such an early work, as he was understandably still perfecting his presswork. But he shouldn't feel apologetic: one might niggle about the printing only if comparing it against what he later achieved, but the book itself shows the early blooms of taste and style that would come to characterize TAP's publications.

There were a few other recent additions to the HM library. Printing on vellum has long been an interest here, considered by many to be the pinnacle of challenges in handpress printing. Printing on Vellum is also the title of a small pamphlet reprinting an exchange of letters between Daniel Updike and C.H. St. John Hornby on the subject. The pamphlet is set in Centaur and printed damp on (unidentified) handmade paper, in an edition of 25 press-lettered copies. It is an immaculate little production, issued by the Wind & Harlot Press in 1976. An Internet search suggests that this was an early imprint of Bob Baris, but the e-mail link on his current Press on Scroll Road site is dead, so our inquiry remains unanswered.

HM has never been reticent about expressing our admiration for the work of Gabriel Rummonds, or our regard for the man himself. But is the little pamphlet above, displaying 10-, 12- and 14-point Spectrum (roman and italic) on a single french-folded sheet, issued in an edition of 70 copies to celebrate Abe Lerner's birthday in 1978, really worth almost $1,000?! That's what the other copy listed on Abe was priced at when we ordered the one shown above, priced much, much, way much less.

Small, Colorful Wunders

2010-11-29T10:45:00.000-08:00

Having perfected and streamlined her technique with the big copies, Barbara Hodgson practically tore through coloring & embellishing the eight miniature copies of The WunderCabinet. (Ten actually, with the two printer's proof copies she kindly undertook as well.) She sent along these photos of completed miniatures, displayed with their full-size progenitors. Still no definitive plan on what to do with them, except that a copy will accompany each of the authors' deluxe boxes, and the publisher's as well. That leaves five in play; watch this blog for details of how and when they will become available.

We asked her for a few comments about the book (in its two forms). She replied with the following:

"Who knows what drove me to tackle the creation of this 33%-of-full-size book, when most of my resources (motor control, eyesight, patience) had already been expended. Ultimately, it must have been the challenge, combined with an enduring fascination for miniscule handmade objects.

"The eight copies took about five days to embellish. The small version is an almost exact replica of the larger one and includes a pressed Dicksonia antarctica fern, a working volvelle and a magic lantern slide of natural history images.

"Claudia Cohen will be joining the madness and binding these copies once she has finished binding the full-size edition."

HM checked in with Claudia this week. The black leather has arrived from Harmatan for the deluxe copies, and the those boxes are well underway. We had expected to be debuting one of the regular (1/20) copies at Codex next February, but now Claudia's thinking that we may have a deluxe one (1/10) ready for display. Either way, the book will be at Vamp & Tramp's table when Codex opens on February 6.

Pressure Printing

2010-11-26T08:13:00.000-08:00

Purely by happy coincidence, last weekend we stumbled across a passing mention of Pressure Printing, Brad Keech's studio specializing in fine prints by contemporary artists. HM's interest was piqued because most of the artists he has worked with are recruited from the worlds of graphic arts and comix, i.e. Jim Woodring, Tony Millionaire, Gary Baseman and Kim Deitch.

A fellow handpress printer (he uses an Albion), Brad's Denver studio is also capable of intaglio printing. His background is in marketing and design (he currently handles most of the design work for artist Mark Ryden's Porterhouse imprint & online shop), and he brings these talents to Pressure Printing, working with the artists not just on the technical aspects of the print, but also designing and making custom frames or packaging (for lack of a tony-er word) for each project, such as Mark Mothersbaugh's "Grandma Cyclops" (above & below; "Grandpa Cyclops" shown at top, appeared a few years earlier).

Pressure Printing's site offers an excellent overview of the its publications since starting, in 2002. Brad averages a few prints per year, with editions ranging from a handful to 100. He seems to have attracted a loyal following, as most are O.P. No books per se, but several portfolio collections, at least one of which (the deluxe edition of Baseman's Unattainable Beauty) could be described as an artist's book.

The site also links to a blog that is full of additional details and asides about projects. It's worth poking around in: the June 2009 archive includes details of a project that seems characteristic of Brad's interest in the exactitudes of printmaking. The print, titled "Kindling," was created by artist James Jean for a fundraiser held at Pixar Studios, with director Hayao Miyazaki, to save the Totoro Forest. It's a diptych intaglio print, overprinted in relief (polymer) with a second color, issued in an edition of just 10 copies.

It's always energizing to encounter someone like Brad who is so clearly dedicated to the demands of traditional printmaking techniques, but using them to create contemporary work that pushes at the edges of form and content.

Small Wunders

2010-11-20T16:28:00.000-08:00

Printing The WunderCabinet took three months in the HM studio earlier this year; one day last week we printed off eight more complete copies. Chalk and cheese: these latest copies are shrunk down to what felt like 2-pt type, pages small enough we could print two entire signatures (8 up) on one sheet (vs the 2-up folios printed for the edition).

Why? is the obvious question. The answer has faded from recollection, but ties back to Barbara & Claudia's first collaborative book, The Temperamental Rose (2007). For that book, Barbara had made a miniature mock-up as a reference for the printer. When the project was wrapping up and we were collecting all the bits, we asked if HM could keep the little dummy. Surprised by our interest, Barbara instead proposed making three proper miniatures, one each for HM, Claudia and herself. Here's what she came back with:

The book, which measures 2 x 3 inches, is complete in every aspect, right down to the hand coloring, embellishments, pop-ups and even the glass vial of dry pigment. But all that work on pages that were, at the end of the day, just printed digitally. Thus, in the early days of The WunderCabinet, some wise-ass suggested doing this again, but this time with the text printed letterpress. Always being up for a challenge like this, Barbara had polymer plates of each page made, shrunk down to about 30% of the original size. When Reg Lissel completed the paper for the book, we culled some of the 100% linen sheets that were particularly thin. And there it all sat, as HM avoided the issue and did other things. But a promise is a promise, so last week we finally set things up in the press, damped the tissue-thin paper, and got down to the work.

The type on the plates was so small that positioning the eight pages to ensure correct margins & back-up was tedious and strained the eyes. We weren't sure just how the very small pages, with lines that were already very fine in the full-size version, would print; perhaps not at all, or perhaps as a muddy stain.

One of the advantages of printing on dampened paper is that significantly less ink is required to achieve crisp letterforms, and this is especially important when the letters are so small. To our pleasant surprise, the plates printed wonderfully. The biggest challenge was that the paper would begin to dry in the short time between pulling the first impression, re-inking the type, and turning the sheet to back it up, so careful haste was required.

Seven signatures of two sheets each took about eight hours to print off (five sheets printed for each signature). Most of that time was taken up with just getting the pages correctly positioned. Two days later the sheets were dry, pressed, and ready for trimming and collating. Barbara and Claudia have plans to bind up eight copies, the pages hand-colored and enhanced just as they are in the life-sized edition. We hope they do not lose their eyesight on such distractions.

Big Printing

2010-11-15T15:04:00.000-08:00

Over two days this past week we printed the broadside Uncommon Deities, with a text by David Sylvian and illustrations by Astushi Fukui. In a previous post about this project, we stated it was just our second attempt at a broadside. That's incorrect; it's our third. We'd forgotten about this lovely Alice broadside printed for Mariko Ando.

Uncommon Deities was, however, certainly the largest piece we've ever printed on the Washington. The sheet measures 22 x 15 inches; the text area is 16 x 9 inches. The set-up of the press had to be completely changed to accommodate the piece. The platen bearers had to be relocated to fall outside the area of the sheet, and the points had to be positioned on the far side of the tympan, where the top of the sheet would be (the top inch of each sheet, where the pin holes lie, will be trimmed off). None of our roller bearers were long enough for the form, so we had to cobble a straight run of 20 inches on either side of the forme from shorter pieces of 12-pt rule.

The text lies in two columns, each with one or two lines that extend well beyond the rest. This always makes even inking and impression a challenge, but five hours of makeready and using layers of tape to build up the roller bearers at the extremities of the forme evened things out. So, having started at 9:30 a.m., we were able to begin pulling usable impressions by 3 p.m. The edition is 30 copies, but with three runs per sheet and our general ineptitude, we printed 50 to allow for spoilage. We finished printing the black shortly after 8 p.m. on the first day. Nothing happens quickly at HM.

The text was set in 14-pt Dante and Dante Titling. The 200-g Arches paper was printed damp. Using quite a dry ink slab, the roller was charged twice for each impression (we ascribe to Harold McGrath's strategy of using as little ink as possible on the roller, and building it up on the letterforms with successive passes). The photo above shows part of the ink slab, the roller, and the two piles of paper during the last run: the sheets to be printed (covered by damp towel), and the printed sheets (stacked between blotters, the first step in drying them down).

The second day went more quickly, with just two lines of red in the second run, and two lines of small type (the copyright & limitation statements) printed in blind at the bottom. The photos above & below show a sheet in the press after the last run.

The sheets must now circle the globe to be signed first by David, and then Fukui. Will spent the weekend building a big box strong enough to protect them during their travels.

Beeing with Joe Average

2010-11-12T08:55:00.000-08:00

You know Xmas is coming when you receive Joe Average's e-mail announcing his annual sale. Visitors to Vancouver Intl. Airport may have seen some of Joe's prints, such as the bees (below), or be familiar with the postage stamp he created for the XI International Conference on AIDS 1996. Older hipsters might even have noted his large canvas that hung behind the coffee bar in the television show Friends for a while.

Joe's art is unique, vibrant and joyful. And these are proper prints, not reproductions: the stone lithographs were, we think, printed at the now defunct Prior Street Editions gallery in the 1990s, and they skillfully translate the colors and tones characteristic of his paintings to a new medium. HM has long wanted to recruit Joe for some kind of book-ish project that drew on his talent and facility for printmaking. Perhaps our new Artist Pamphlet series would be a suitable forum to start...

Joe doesn't seem to have been as active, at least in printmaking, in recent years as he was in the 1990s. One day these editions will run out, and everyone will talk about how they could have bought one of his prints - on sale! - but kept putting it off....

Two Cool

2010-11-05T10:25:00.000-07:00

Two new books that caught our attention recently...

The first is from Jason Dewinetz's Greenboathouse Press, Alphabetum Romanum, an instructional treatise on the correct rendering of Roman capital letters, writtten by Felice Feliciano in c.1460. The press' site includes a summary of the project, and Jason's journey through redrawing the letters and printing each in multiple colors.

Jason was in town for the Vancouver book fair a few weeks ago, and very kindly dropped off a copy of AR. It is by far the most substantial publication to date from his press, sewn by Jason and put into a stiff case of Reg Lissel's handmade paper. While Jason developed a reputation for his typography and design skills with his Greenboathouse Books imprint over the past decade, those books were all produced digitally; it is only in the past year or so (with the imprint renamed to Greenboathouse Press) that he has been working with letterpress, and his printing is admirably good and consistent for someone who has not yet logged that many hours at his press (much better than most of the HM books produced in our first few years).

Issued at C$300, this edition of Alphabetum Romanum is more affordable (& available) than the Officina Bodoni's 1960 version, and, being the first in a series of Renaissance alphabet books to come from GP, will no doubt become increasingly sought after as people attempt to assemble complete sets in the future. Copies are available directly from the press, with a discount offered for subscribers to the series.

The second new item is the latest from David Esslemont's Solmentes Press: Florilegium Solmentes, "a portfolio of 24 unique ‘digital’ flowers created from ‘nature prints’ of leaves, from scanned petals and from other parts of plants."

HM was first introduced to David and his work in the mid-1990s, when he came to Vancouver to talk about his work at the storied Gregynog Press, and give a workshop on the basics of bookmaking. He's an engaging and entertaining speaker under whose direction the press issued some stellar books. For reasons unknown to us, he & the press parted ways shortly after, and he has gone on to start his own imprint, Solmentes (and in our opinion, Gregynog has not since done work nearly so interesting or exacting as when David was there).

David is a rare commodity in the fine press world, in that he essentially is an artist who has developed a master's skills in the crafts of printing and binding (if you wonder at this, visit the Bookbinding pages at his Web site, solmentes.com).

(if you wonder at this, seek out any of the bindings he designed for deluxe copies of Gregynog books). While some may lack enthusiasm for digital printing, in David's hands the potential of the technology, and the unique possibilities it can offer, are undoubtedly fully explored to create prints that could not be made any other way. Which is, after all, what printmaking should always be about.

Florilegium Solmentes is available as a suite of prints accompanied by the book The Making of Florilegium Solmentes, priced at $4,500 (edition of 10 suites). The book alone, issued in an edition of 30 copies (10 to accompany the suites), is available for $300.

Our Second Attempt at a Broadside

2010-10-29T18:36:00.000-07:00

After too long a delay in production (HM's fault, no one else's), we are pleased to announce that HM will be publishing a broadside featuring a text titled "Uncommon Dieties" by David Sylvian, and an original drawing titled "The Botanist" by Atsushi Fukui (whose work has been featured on David's albums Blemish and Manafon, both released by his label samadhisound). This project was sparked thanks to Harold Budd, who mentioned HM's interest in publishing something to David. The text - sort of a free-verse rumination on the artist's work, influences, and influence - was originally written as an introduction for a catalogue to be published in conjunction with a show of Fukui's work, but that publication did not materialize. At David's request, Fukui created a large drawing (based on the original painting, also titled "The Botanist," shown below) around which the text will be arranged on the broadside, and several incidental drawings of mushrooms.

This will be just the second proper broadside ever attempted at HM (the first being the Tabula Smaragdina Hermetis [The Emerald Tablet of Herme] for Ouroboros Press some years ago). The sheet will measure 20 inches wide, 13 inches tall. The text is set in Dante and Dante Titling, and will be printed at HM in two colors on dampened Arches paper with the Washington press. The edition will be just 30 copies, signed by the author and artist. For all intents and purposes, this project will be hors de commerce: the edition will be shared equally among the author, artist and publisher. A few copies from HM's share will be offered to our regular customers.

Printing will be completed before the end of October, but then the sheets must circumnavigate the globe, to be signed by David and Fukui, so it will be some months before we have finished copies in hand. But we look forward to showing it off when the time comes. Meanwhile, check out some of the very cool new releases, like Sleepwalkers, from David's label.

A Birthday Bouquet for Bob Reid

2010-10-26T13:30:00.000-07:00

This is Robert R. Reid's birthday. How fitting that it coincides with the opening of a new show of watercolors by his one-time partner in printing, Takao Tanabe. We'll be enjoying a dinner, and then attending the opening tout en masse. Although the last thing Bob needs is another book in his apartment, HM found one that was too appropriate for marking the occasion (& sufficiently diminutive) to pass up: Printers' Flowers - Whimsicalities from the Windsor Press.

The book is a slim 16mo (18 pp.) published in an edition of 150 copies in 1933. It is quarter bound in cloth with a patterned paper printed in several colors. Part of the great fine press community that was so intensely active in San Francisco during the early 20th century, the Windsor Press was the imprint of two Australian brothers, James and Cecil Johnson. They seem to have started work around the mid-1920s. In 1929 they became one of the first "second generation" printers (the Grabhorns, John Nash and Taylor & Taylor being the first) tapped to print one of Book Club of California's limited editions (Witter Bynner’s The Persistence of Poetry). The Johnsons' imprint continued to appear on BCC books and ephemera up to 1943. Lawton Kennedy worked for the Johnsons, at least during 1929, when he is credited as pressman on Nocturne in St. Gauden's.

The little volume at hand was written by brother James, and set in Nicolas Cochin, although a number of other types makes appearances throughout. It essentially is a brief history of printer's flowers, and how their style and use have reflected typographic trends through the years. The writing is as florid as the title, and often interferes with whatever point the author is making. But the book is redeemed by its playfulness of design and color. A visual delight to mark the birthday of a man whose love for type and typography has spanned his entire nine decades. Happy birthday Bob!

Another Lowe at HM

2010-10-22T11:14:00.000-07:00

Professional musician, avocational binder and chronic bibliomaniac Keith Lowe was at HM the other day, sewing up the edition of Harold Budd's 4. It was through Keith that we were first introduced to Harold, back in 2008, and so it was appropriate (and always fun) to have him involved in this latest project.

As the first volume in what will be the occasional, ongoing Artist Pamphlet Series, 4 will serve as the format model for future collaborators: a single signature, two sheets (8 pages). Thus, sewing the edition of 50 copies (plus 10 A.P.) was not terribly onerous for Keith, which is good because his window of availability between tours was tight. He'd just come back from several weeks playing U.S. gigs (including a Jimmy Fallon show appearance) with Stone Gossard's band Brad, and he now leaves for a few weeks touring Holland with Jim Byrnes, Steve Dawson, and The Sojourners.

While working at the studio, Keith treated us to several tracks he recorded with Harold at a session in Seattle last January (release plans still TBD), and tracks from a session of Keith alone playing piano, recorded a few years ago. Fantastic stuff. Music for binders.

Francesco Griffo Rediscovered

2010-10-21T09:33:00.000-07:00

Scans of the entire contents of the Francesco Griffo - Fragments and Glimpses, published in 1999 by HM's precursor imprint, have been posted on Simon Fraser University's special collections site. We'd forgotten giving permission for this, & discovered its presence only when hunting around for samples of Tak Tanabe's printing (see the last post). We're also a little confused about the identity of the felon shown in the photo beside the HM heading, and what his relationship might be to us. Perhaps he is one of the people who helped move the Washington into the HM studio (an event that, oddly, antedates the Griffo project by about two years).

Griffo was one funky project, begun in the earliest days of our exploits with printing: set in 8-pt type (Bembo) and printed on a Kelsey 5 x 8 tabletop. And to make things really interesting, the paper (Lana Wove) was dampened (truthfully, it often was wet), which further funkified progress. But beautiful bindings by Natasha Herman and Helene Francoeur. Its many setting & printing flaws aside, this remains - as far as we know - the only book publication dedicated to the life and work of Aldus' typecutter.

A Takao Tanabe Treasury

2010-10-20T13:31:00.000-07:00

Best known now as a painter of muted and sublime Canadian West Coast vistas, Takao Tanabe paid the rent during the earliest days of his career as a job printer in Vancouver (having been introduced to the trade by Robert Reid). Under his own Periwinkle Press imprint he issued a handful of poetry chapbooks and broadsides, in addition to titles produced for other West Coast literary publishers. As illustrated in a new book featuring many samples of his printing from those days, he brought an artist's sensibility and creativity to his work, producing typography that ranged from austere to playful.

Printing ceased to be part of Tak's creative life about 45 years ago, but his reputation as a designer with type persists. Tak recently donated a large collection of his printing work and ephemera to Simon Fraser University. Drawing from this extensive collection, Robert Reid and the Alcuin Society have just completed Takao Tanabe: Sometime Printer reproducing a selection of examples from the SFU collection. From the book's prospectus:

"Tak not only printed books, which one expects from a “Private Press,” but was a master at Job Printing. His typographic imagination could run riot, producing an abundance of invitations, birth announcements, Christmas cards and ephemeral printing for Vancouver’s sophisticates, who had the sensibilities to recognize a master at work in the 1950s and '60s."

Sometime Printer is 156 pages of reproductions from books and job printing, all in full colour, with 19 tip-ins. It is similar in format and production to the Alcuins' previous publications, Duthie Bookmarks and Dorothy Burnett Bookbinder. The edition is 50 copies, priced at $185.00. Contact Jim Rainer (jrainer [at] shaw.ca) for further details, and inquire about the possibility of obtaining a copy signed by Tak. Or, get one before October 26, when a show of new watercolors by Tak opens at the West Vancouver Gallery, and ask him to sign your copy at the opening.

A New Book from Sarah Horowitz's Weisedruck

2010-10-19T17:21:00.000-07:00

ARCHEOLOGIES OF LOSS

An new artist book by Sarah Horowitz from her press, Weisedruck. With poems by Sarah Lantz and remembrance by Eleanor Wilner

Archeologies of Loss deals with collective memories, their loss and disintegration but also their rediscovery and unearthing through individual histories - those of Sarah Lantz and her poems. Lantz, who passed away suddenly in September 2007 just after the publication of her first book, Far Beyond Triage, explores themes of the passing of time, absence, deterioration and loss in her poems.

Seven poems by the late writer Sarah Lantz were reproduced from her book Far Beyond Triage with permission from Calyx Books and her family. Eleanor Wilner wrote the remembrance for this collaboration of words and images in memory of Sarah Lantz. Ten etchings were drawn, etched and printed by Sarah Horowitz on handmade Japanese gampi paper. The Centaur types were cast by Michael & Winifred Bixler and printed on Somerset satin wove paper by Art Larson of Horton Tank Graphics in Hadley, Massachusetts. Julia Weese-Young (a former apprentice of Claudia Cohen's) boxed and bound the book at her home in St. Louis, Missouri. Archeologies of Loss was designed and produced by Sarah Horowitz of Wiesedruck in Portland, Oregon. The edition is 25 copies (plus several proof copies for the collaborators). An additional set of individual etchings has been printed in an edition of 12.

More details can be found at the Weisedruck site. Sarah does beautiful work, and her books are always exemplars of the crafts involved.

A Printing of Poetry That's Odd

2010-10-18T13:31:00.000-07:00

An unusual item recently added to HM's collection of books about printing: Walter de la Mare's The Printing of Poetry, a paper read before the Double Crown Club, London 12 February 1927. Printed for the Club at the University Press, Cambridge by W. Lewis 1931. Issued in an edition of 90 numbered copies. It's a simple 16mo in size, 34 pages, cased in blue cloth adorned with just a leather spine label stamped in gold. The printing and paper are nothing special.

De la Mare (1873-1956) was an English poet and novelist who probably is best remembered today for his supernatural fiction. The first half of the text is given over to much false modesty and bloviating at the feet of his audience, before arriving at his central point:

"The very glimpse of verse, then, on the printed page extorts a definite response in the mind...If, however, we detest the very word poetry, the more a book looks like a book that contains it the more odious will that book appear to be. If we delight in poetry, the more abject will be our disappointment on finding that the verse within is merely rouge, patch and powder."

Here's a line we liked, the author quoting an (un-named) member of the club: "Poets are best bound hand and foot."

It's only in the last seven pages that he gets down to the topic at hand in real terms, and then only by offering a paragraph each to such topics as type, setting, layout etc. (He skips right over printing.) And here's an interesting little bit of disingenuity:

"It is something of a mystery who buys limited and expensive editions of books - since men of taste are seldom greedy of publicity; it is even more of a mystery who reads in them."

Disingenuous for two reasons: one suspects that many of the members of the Club he was addressing had at least a few limited or expensive editions on their shelves; but more to the point, those editions are exactly the manner in which one is most likely to encounter de la Mare today! Lots of limp vellum and gilt edges out there with his name stamped on the spine.

Despite its lack of real insight to the design concerns of printing poetry, and general oddness, a fun little addition to HM's library.

Vancouver Fares Well

2010-10-17T18:09:00.000-07:00

The first book fair held in Vancouver for about a quarter century seems to have been a success. A couple of exhibitors told HM that sales were slow, but when don't booksellers say that? (Although the summer of 2010 does seem to have marked a new low for booksellers across the board.) A collection of photos from the fair can be seen on the Alcuin Society's Flickr page. All of the exhibitors were Canadian (the sales tax issue making participation by foreign dealers too much hassle). Traffic was neither crushing nor sparse, but appeared constant on the Friday afternoon and Saturday. The show leaned heavily toward travel/exploration, modern firsts and true antiquarian items; there was essentially no contemporary fine press material on offer.

Charles van Sandwyk and his partner in Savuti Press, Waisiki Doughty were there (as part of Joyce William's booth) with a large selection of Charles' books and prints, including a copy of the out-of-print deluxe issue of Wind in the Willows, issued by the Folio Society in 2008.

Steve Lunsford had just a few items on offer, each one unique or essentially so, such as a signed, presentation large-paper copy of On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures by the father of the modern computer, Charles Babbage. It was accompanied by a hand-cranked computer of German manufacture c.1900, a thing of Art Deco beauty (and function, above).

John King had a copy of the Aldine 1518 edition of Opera Omnia Soluta Oratione Composita in a period binding by Courtland Benson (who was responsible for rebinding and restoring the collection of Aldines presented to Simon Fraser University in the 1990s). The book was printed in the Aldine italic, and concluded with a simple colophon over which each of the sorts in the font (i.e. including the ligatures) were simply displayed on a few lines.

A visiting bookseller had on hand a copy of Humphry Ditton's 1712 edition of A Treatise of Perspective Demonstrative and Practical, extensively illustrated. This was of interest because of HM's upcoming project with sculptor Geoffrey Smedley, which will draw from a long essay exploring aspects of portraying, or representing, perspective. The Treatise on offer had recently been rebound in a manner that may not have been entirely successful from a historical perspective, but was nonetheless a tempting book.

Additions to HM's library were limited to a single, inexpensive item: the 1964 edition of Wm Blake - Poet/Printer/Prophet, purchased for details included in the introductory essay about Blake's printing methods. Inexplicably, this otherwise well-produced book basically is perfect bound, with the text printed on folios that are not sewn, but simply glued up (and thus, popping loose). But it was cheap, and an interesting companion to one of the jewels in HM's collection, the Gehenna Press edition of Poe's essay Anastatic Printing.

Don't know what, if any plans the Alcuin mob has to repeat the fair, but hopefully this latest incarnation was sufficiently successful to justify a second. Perhaps they will alternate years with the Alcuin Wayzgoose. Be interesting to hear how the Toronto fair compares in a week's time. HM hopes to have one or two agents file reports.

Shinsuke Minegishi Exhibition

2010-10-14T18:41:00.000-07:00

A show of new works by past & future HM collaborator Shinsuke Minegishi has opened in Vancouver. The show is called "Transfer and Transformation," a title intended to be reflective of printmaking, the process, and of the artist. Transfer refers to printmaking; a mirror image is transferred from a matrix onto another surface. Transformation refers to the stages of printmaking but also to the artist who evolves and changes with every new project.

The show is being held at Art Beatus Gallery, which was founded in Hong Kong in 1992. With the addition of the Vancouver gallery in 1996, Art Beatus became the first gallery of its kind operating simultaneously on both sides of the Pacific. Art Beatus represents and promotes International modern and contemporary art with a unique focus on contemporary Chinese art. Shin's exhibition runs through December.

HM's next project with Shin (it's been five years!) is planned for the fall of 2011, when we will publish a retrospective collection of wood engravings spanning the first 15 years of his career, with a new essay by him about printmaking.

A Wunderful Weekend

2010-10-13T11:41:00.000-07:00

Last weekend we, accompanied by Barbara Hodgson, delivered the completed sheets for The WunderCabinet to her Seattle-based collaborator Claudia Cohen, for binding. Not entirely by coincidence, this was the weekend of the Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair. We took the opportunity to preview the book for a few bookseller friends who were in town for the fair. As was the case with Barbara & Claudia's previous collaborations, The Temperamental Rose and After Image, The WunderCabinet is almost impossible to explain or describe: it has to be seen to be believed.

The pages were printed at HM over a period of three months earlier this year (and before that, Reg Lissel spent a year making the 1,000 sheets of paper required for the project). Printing two-up, just black, we were able to work off about two sheets each week. Barbara then spent four months coloring, collaging, and assembling the various pages and associated items. While this was happening, Claudia began making the boxes that would hold the books, each copy accompanied by a unique assortment of curiosities - its own curiosity cabinet. The boxes use various wood veneers to create geometric patterns; the leather binding will likewise incorporate wood veneers and gilt tooling. The edition is just 30 copies, and the first ten will form a deluxe state, with a more elaborate binding (full leather with geometrical trompe l'oeil onlays) and a two-tiered box that includes a more extensive collection of objects.

Thanks to our friends at Vamp & Tramp, The WunderCabinet will be debuting at the Codex fair in Berkeley next February. All of our booksellers who have ordered a copy will receive it in for the ABA fair, which immediately follows Codex.

The opportunity to display the book (or at least, the finished sheets) last weekend let people fully appreciate how Barbara and Claudia have outdone themselves yet again. We are currently finalizing orders, and the edition is almost fully subscribed. Any interested collectors or institutions who have not already spoken to one of our regular booksellers about reserving a copy should do so soon.