Covering Up

Gearing up to start a new project. The Washington is still settling into its new home & seems a little stiff - the bed doesn't slide the way it used to. Hopefully that's just a matter of getting things moving again.

One of the aspects of handpress maintenance that I try to keep to a minimum is recovering the tympan, and to a lesser extent, the frisket. Both need to be covered with a sheet of thin, strong paper that is taut as a drum skin and flat as a board. Sometimes a new sheet dries funny & you have to start all over.

(Please note that the following basically is the method described in Gabriel Rummonds' excellent Printing on the Iron Handpress. Any discrepancies are my fault. His book should always be your first & best resource for information about printing.)

The tympan is the sheet on which a sheet to be printed rests. The frisket folds over the tympan and has windows cut into it, just big enough to allow the text area to print onto the sheet, while covering the non-printing margins and holding the sheet in place. The frisket & tympan also are the parts most likely to be missing if/when from a handpress.

You start with removing the old sheet. Right now, the tympan on the press is still good. The frisket, however, was old and many times patched, so it had to go. Both tympan and frisket basically are just metal rectangles (or wood & metal in the case of the tympan). The sheet is adhered with white glue, so replacing one begins with scraping away all the paper & glue around both sides of the frame. It's messy.

I have tried using wheat paste instead of glue, since it would be much easier to remove. But it doesn't dry fast enough to hold the paper in place while securing it all round the frame.

Linson paper is the best material for covering friskets. It's basically a commercial binding paper. There's one place in Canada, a few thousand miles from HM HQ, that wholesales it, but you must buy it in lifetime supplies and I don't want to store rolls of paper. So, I have been using good printmaking papers to cover friskets & tympans: Arches wove has worked well. I have a large stack of 115 g Somerset Book for the new project, so I tried that. It worked well.

Once the frame is as clean as possible, you cut a piece of paper that is 1 inch bigger all round. The surface you'll work on affects how things turn out: it must be solid but also somewhat absorbent (you'll see why). I cover the counter in a sheet of mill board.

I use a spray bottle to dampen one side of the sheet, & then leave it for a few minutes to expand and relax. Then I slip it and spray the other side. Depending on the paper I repeat this sequence - you need to judge how much moisture the sheet needs. You want it to fully relax, and hold that condition for enough time to secure the edges (5 minutes?).

Once the sheet is completely relaxed, brush a fairly wet glue around the edges in a perimeter to cover the bottom of the frisket and top (i.e. when the outer edge of the paper is folded back & over). Work fast. Make sure you have scrap paper beneath to catch any stray glue so it doesn't mess up the other side of the sheet.

Place the frisket on it so that the border edges are all (roughly) equal. Using very sharp scissors, make perpendicular cuts into the paper, up to the frisket's edge. These should be made every 3-4 inches.(In these photos you'll see I cut the strips first; I've done this enough on this frisket to know where things need to be.)

Now start folding these section over the frisket. Start in the middle of one side. Then do the opposite side, gently pulling the sheet as taut as possible (this is why you don't want any surface tension between the damp sheet & the surface it's lying on).

Then do the other two sides. With these four center pieces in place, work from the center of one side to either corner. Then do the opposite on the far side. Then the other two ends. Then repeat, working to the remaining corners. Keep pulling the paper (gently) as taut as possible. Fitting the paper around the hinges takes a bit of tailoring with scissors; you'll figure it out.

Once all the edges are secured, I cover then with a clear plastic packing tape that's wide enough to fold and cover both sides of the frame.

Hopefully the sheet looks pretty flat as this point. If you see a few wrinkles (if they appear it's usually near a corner), cross you fingers and hope they'll disappear when the sheet dries. In this case, mine did.

I leave the covered frisket standing vertical, resting on its hinges, to dry. Takes a couple of hours. Should sound like a bass drum when fully dry.

Things that can go wrong:

• The paper tears when drying. Probably isn't strong enough to use; try something different.
• The frame warps! That would take some seriously strong paper that expands a tremendous amount. Try something different. 
• There are wrinkles/cockles. With a tympan this will ruin your printing; try again. With a frisket, depending how bad & where they are, you might be able to still use it. Probably save yourself grief to do it over. 

In all cases, doing it over means going back to step one: scraping all the paper & glue off. You can see why one avoids the process altogether whenever possible.

The worst part about covering a frisket is that, as soon as it's back on the press, you have to cut holes in it! 

Kickstart Your Paper Collection

For all you decorated paper enthusiasts, item #1 from bookseller Barry McKay's latest catalogue:

ANTIQUE PASTE PAPERS FROM THE RHINELAND PALATINATE

"This collection of 161 examples of Franco-German paper decoration was salvaged by a German bookbinder in the 1990s from a collection of slender volumes of birth, marriage and death certificates from the Rhineland Palatinate in present- day Germany. The compilation of such volumes was introduced by French authorities after their occupation of the region in 1790. The French headquarters was the garrison town of Landau in der Pfalz, which is still the main town of the area. The region was an arrondissement of France between 1792 and 1813; thereafter it passed variously to Austria, Bavaria, and Prussia during the nineteenth century.

"The papers in this collection were salvaged by a German bookbinder in the 1990s. The papers are from covers of registers that were made to order in Kaiserlautern between the 1790s and the third quarter of the 19th century. The paper used for decoration during the region’s French occupation was manufactured in France. Thereafter the paper was manufactured at two mills by Roedter, and Gossler, in the village of Frankeneck near Neustadt and der Weinstrasse.

"Until about 1800 the boards consisted on of two pieces of thick paper laminated together, generally a coloured wrapping (usually blue) was used with a white lining paper. Thereafter a low-grade laminate cardboard was used. Some of the binding covers consist of a single sheet of coloured paste paper while others are formed of two pieces pasted together to form a whole.

"In the earlier period the volumes appear to have had manuscript labels pasted down on the front cover, perhaps with a distinctive shape for each year. ‘shadows’ of these labels are clearly visible on a number of the examples. From the early-mid 1820s, printed labels with the title and date set within ornamental borders were used in place of the earlier manuscript ones.

"The patterns found on these papers fall into four, very broadly classified, types: a sprinkled pattern, a simple dabbed- brush pattern, a paste & pull pattern, and a paste & pull pattern further ornamented with a circular patter thereon. The latter pattern is one that, based on our own experience, is achieved by dabbing a dry binders’ brush vertically down onto the coloured paste while it is still wet.

"Blue (of several shades) is the predominant colour used although there are also examples using black, green, red, purple, and sepia pigments."

The link to Barry's site (barrymckayrarebooks.org) doesn't seem to be working; if interested write to him (mail [at] barrymckay1.plus.com). The collection is yours for £3,950. Better hurry before Claudia finds out about it...
 

A Secret Stack

Day late & a dollar short; here's what I got. Having trouble with the news feed for Decorating Paper, so those Q&As are on hold. Maybe one more to come, we'll see. I've spent the past week working on a secret project. Just finished the binding today. Can't say much about it for now. It's a surprise for the authors, who will be receiving the entire edition of 10 copies to distribute however they see fit. If they don't hate it, I'll come clean with some details in a few weeks. If they do hate it, maybe your local Dumpster diver will find a copy.

AND ANOTHER THING

Just found out that a Web site for the Limited Editions Club has appeared. I've been wondering what was up with LEC. Sidney Schiff's death in 2010 probably put was the cause for an interruption in its activities. The new site shows titles still available, all from Schiff's tenure. By the time he bought the LEC, it had gone through some pretty grim years in the '60s and '70s, producing a lot of indifferent and banal titles. Schiff's plan was to focus on the other end of the market, reducing edition sizes and recruiting established contemporary artists to create original works for the texts. He really turned things around, and made the LEC into a very different (& in my opinion, much more interesting) kind of publisher.

(An aside for readers who followed the Agrippa post & project from earlier this year: the Paz/Motherwell project that Agrippa publisher Kevin Begos spoke about can be seen on the LEC site.)

Not much information on the site beyond the titles in print. Nothing about new projects. The bookseller Carol Grossman has been working on a history of the LEC for some time, to be published by Oak Knoll. Publication seems to keep getting pushed back. An article she wrote for Biblio in 1999 can be found here. This is another good summary of the LEC's history.

Decorating Paper Interview 4a: Patria

Someone who shall remain nameless isn't being very helpful when it comes to doing her writing assignments, so this installment of the Decorating Paper interviews features just Barbara (who probably has never missed a deadline in her life) telling the story about one of the more uncommon papers included in the compendium...

BH: Decorating Paper includes an especially lovely set of papers from Patria, a French manufacturer.

We didn't know much about these papers, but we knew from the labelling that they were sold in 1920, and we knew the names of the pattern designers. However, we could not track down information about the process used to make them and suspected that they were block printed. Then, through a chance discovery of an article called “New French Colored Papers,” by V. Fauchier-Magnan, in a magazine called La France, An American Magazine (volume 2, 1920) we found out that they were made by stencilling, a process known as “pochoir.” This detail was found too late to include in the book, but we were at least able to place the papers in the correct section.

Patria, a Paris studio, created bookbinding papers to make up for the shortfall caused by World War I, when the papers normally purchased from Germany were no longer available due to importation bans.

Patria was the operation of Emile Greningaire, who came from a long line of Parisian “colorists.” The designs were created by numerous well-known pattern designers of the day and were executed in delicate stencilling by war victims. In numerous instances, patterns were produced by two processes: stencilling and block printing. With the aid of sample books, we are able to attribute the different patterns to their designers.

Next week we'll have part 4b, about contemporary decorated papers being made on 18th-century papers...

[Intermission: Print It Black]

The next Q&A (#4) with Claudia and Barbara about Decorating Paper will go up next week. Need to get a few more pix & details. Meanwhile, FYI, the edition is fully subscribed. Copies may still be available from the booksellers listed at right, but don't dawdle; I think most have already been placed.

Spending a few days doing an Intro to Intaglio Printing intensive at New Leaf Editions. Have plans to start combining intaglio and letterpress here in the studio, i.e. both on the same sheet. Finally got a proper bed for the little etching press HM acquired last fall & have started to play with it. First stage in a longer experiment; the purpose of all-black sheets will be revealed at a later date.

Tonight Vancouver Alcuin Society will be presenting the Robert R Reid Award for printing to Jan & Crispin Elsted of Barbarian Press. Huzza!

Decorating Paper Interview #3: How?

A shaky photo taken by an ally who gained access to Claudia's bindery, showing the first batch of completed Decorating Paper sets. This week the final piece will be set in place: the samples in each copy will be calligraphically numbered in sequence, and a separate reference sheet providing details about each sample will be included. Claudia needed to get the bindings and sequencing finalized out before we could set and print these sheets.

This week's Q&A asks a few technical and logistical questions about creating a reference that spans two volumes and over 500 unique paper samples...

How many methods/techniques are illustrated/included in the book; how many paper samples are there in total; and how many of those samples were created by you for the book vs being sourced from others?

Barbara Hodgson: Decorating Paper covers eight of what we’ve identified as major paper-decorating methods. Within each category, we discuss various techniques. This is how we’ve organized the book, dividing the subjects into the two volumes, the first for papers made by hand, the second for papers made by some kind of printing technique.

Volume One:

• Random-Patterned Papers: Sprinkled, False-Marbled, Crinkled
• Pulp-Patterned Papers: Watermark & Water-Pattern, Pulp Innovations
• Paste Papers: Paste-Paper Techniques, Paste-Paper Style
• Marbled Papers: Suminagashi, Turkish & European Marbled Papers

Volume Two:

• Stencilled & Resist Papers: Katazome; Screen Printing; Silhouette Paper; Brushed, Sponged & Wiped; Spattered, Sprayed & Airbrushed; Batik; Shibori; Itagime
• Lithographed & Glazed Papers: Lithography & Chromolithography, Offset Lithography, Glazed & Metallic
• Embossed Papers: Dutch Gilt, Blind & Metallic Embossed, Leather Imitation
• Relief Printed Papers: Woodcut; Karakami, Chiyogami & Zuancho; Domino & Calico; Remondini & Rizzi; Flock; Wallpaper; Rotary Block & Letterpress; Linocut & Stamps

In many instances, the techniques are subdivided. For example, under water-pattern techniques, within the category of pulp-patterned papers, we discuss mizutamashi (water-drop paper), suiryushi or ryusui (flowing water), rakusuishi or resugami (stencilled spray water, “lace” paper), hikikakegami, and danshi (“Sandalwood” paper).

 
What’s the most uncommon, strange, and/or hard-to-source sample in the book?
Claudia Cohen: The easiest to find are the marbled papers, because they’re the most common. The hardest to find were the 18th century ones. The resist paste papers (mentioned in Q&A #1) also are very hard to come by. It was a technique used for such a brief period of time, and you certainly can’t buy it commercially now.

I inquired with a lot of book dealers in Europe, but very few had any papers to sell. I bought some papers from auctions in Holland. There’s an auction house there that has two auctions a year, and I got some really nice early papers in an odd lot. You never know what you’ll get with those. There seem to be a lot of serious paper collectors in Holland, so it’s a good place to go looking.

One of the nicest samples in the book is the block-printed dominoté, a yellow sheet with small dots (see above). Those were made no later than 1820. I bought four sheets of the same pattern in two different auctions, which was a real coincidence. To find four whole sheets of old paper is very rare. Then one the hardest thing’s about doing this book is cutting up a sheet of 18th century paper, to make the samples!

Another sheet in the book that was hard to find is the Rizzi (below). Those came from a trade with another collector. I was lucky enough to stumble across multiple sheets. I was told by a bookseller who had them that the reason Rizzi papers have become so uncommon is that Tanya Schmoller hoovered up all the samples she could find for her book about them (Remondini and Rizzi: A Chapter in Italian Decorated Paper History, Bird & Bull 1990). I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s a good book. It’s the reference book on Remondini papers. 

BH: One particular technique eluded us: silhouette paper. This is one of the earliest types of decorated paper, originally created in Persia and Turkey, and popular in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. They were often used to decorate albums. It’s a simple but fiddly technique, felt or leather is cut into patterns, soaked in dye, and then pressed between papers. The colour transfers to both papers. I made dozens of small transfers, using leather, wool, felt, and chamois cloth for the patterns; dyes or paints for the colouring; and a variety of papers. None resulted in anything that I thought worthy of the book.

Papers that we made ourselves include ebru [Turkish marbling - the round samples shown on this page were all made by Barbara], shibori (Japanese tie-dye paper), kakishibu-coated crinkled paper, paste papers, and marbled papers. 

Were any of the techniques discussed hard to research (i.e. a lack of information) or difficult to find examples of? How many of the techniques are essentially obsolete, or even forgotten, now?

BH: Several techniques are now a rare specialty, for example, batik paper (samples below). This is made with a wax-resist technique, similar to the way batik cloth is made. Our information for how it was made commercially came from August Weichelt's Buntpapier-Fabrikation (1927). Translating Weichelt’s German text was made extra specially difficult for this reader of rudimentary German, as many of the technical terms are obsolete and not found in any dictionaries, print or on-line. I made a glossary of such terms that I could find, cross-referencing and slowly filling in the missing words (a process made somewhat simpler by the delight Germans take in making compound words). I eventually managed to piece together the rough technique. If someone ever translates Weichelt’s book into English, they will be doing the world of paper a big favour.

But the saga of batik paper doesn’t end with Weichelt. It was also made by artisans, including Emil Kretz (Swiss) and Ingeborg Börjesson (Danish born). But, where we classified the commercial technique as wax-resist stencilling, we classified the artisanal type as paste-paper, because of the actual application of colouring. Although we are able to follow the general methods that Kretz and Börjesson used for making their papers, each no doubt carried to their graves that “something special” that makes their papers uniquely theirs.

Tell me a bit about how you decided to physically present the samples in the book. What are some of the challenges or issues you had to deal with?

BH: We chose to present the papers as either small specimens, grouped together to make up a whole sample sheet, or as larger, full-page samples. Specimen sheets are a time-honoured tradition among paper makers and are still used today. Because both Claudia and I value specimen sheets as much for their aesthetic qualities as for the information they display, we decided to make our specimen sheets as visually pleasing as possible. We explored the varieties produced by the decorating paper factories of the past, especially those of Aschaffenburg. Ours is designed along the same lines, but we made ours more flexible, to accommodate a variety of different sizes of specimens.

Sometimes small samples appear with the text. Most are clustered at the end of each chapter, ensuring that the flow of the text was not interrupted.

CC: The main challenge with a book like this, with so many tipped-in samples of all different shapes and sizes, is you can end up with a pie-shaped book if you don’t compensate for all the thickness you’re adding with the samples. The Decorating Paper volumes are sewn on a medium-weight Japanese paper concertina. There’s a zig-zag between each signature, sometimes two, so that the spine ends up the same thickness as the text block with all the samples inserted. You have to sew a couple of copies to get it just right.

Another technical issue was how to protect and contain the loose portions of the tipped in samples, and the gatefold spreads. Because remember we wanted people to be able to inspect the back of the samples as well as the front, you had to be able to fold or turn the samples to see the verso. So I had to include tabs throughout the book to hold the larger samples in place - there are scores in each volume - so they don’t flap around.

Another trick I used - which people may think is purely decorative but it had a function too - was adding samples cut in circles throughout the book, often near the fore edges, to help build up the thickness at the outer margin to match the middle of the text block, where most of the bulk of samples lay. It was a structural issue, tempered by aestehtics. I love cutting decorated paper in circles. It’s like a spotlight. It intensifies the pattern.

Next week's post looks at some intriguing contemporary decorated papers being created in the U.K.

Decorating Paper Interview #2: What?

The second of five Q&A posts with the co-creators of Decorating Paper, a new compendium of traditional techniques for embellishing paper with color and patterns, featuring over 500 original samples of the methods discussed. The breadth of the topic - with techniques dating back centuries - and the number of samples included dictated that it be broken into two volumes. The first covers hand/manual techniques (i.e. marbled, paste & pulp), while the second covers mechanical methods (i.e. stencilled and various kinds of printing).

Last week's post focused on why this topic drew the creators' attention; this week we look at what the book is, in terms of form and presentation...

I imagine/presume that when approaching a book like this, there is the potential danger for it to come across as (just) a sample book, which Decorating Paper absolutely isn’t. If that was a concern, how did you approach it?

Barbara Hodgson: Although it was a real concern that Decorating Paper not look like just a sample book, we have replicated, in part, the “sample book” look by including printed specimen pages on which sample swatches are applied. Both of us are admirers of the sample books produced by the great decorated paper factories, such as those in the German city of Aschaffenburg. To be able to create our own versions of those pages was a delight.

The samples, however, are only a part of Decorating Paper. The text is comprehensive and gives a great deal of information about techniques, history, and patterns and styles.

Claudia Cohen: There’s a presumption in that question that there’s something wrong with sample books. Barbara and I both collect sample books of every ilk. I think they’re vital contributions to the study of color, paper, patterns. But sample books generally don’t have much information about the methods or materials, or it’s only very cursory. Decorating Paper gives real technical content - the written content and the samples bear equal weight. It goes back to my explaining that it’s a study collection. It’s an introduction to all the techniques, with samples to examine as you’re reading.

Also, the book gathers together a group of paper samples that you’d never find together anywhere else, especially since we’ve gone off the beaten path of what’s generally considered decorated paper. Even sources like Buntpapier.org really only focus on traditional surface decorating methods, but we’ve included things like pulp papers. We intentionally included a very broad range of techniques.

At any point during the planning stage, did you consider issuing this not as a bound book, but with the samples loose in folders or some similar format? Why did you choose the book format?

CC: We never considered a format other than a book. There’s not much value in separating the text from the samples. Plus, an integral part of this book - and a big part of the fun for me - was assembling groupings of papers page by page. Some spreads have 36 different samples! The challenge of this book was to make every spread a surprise and different, to get a flow so that every page is unique.

Basically every page is a collage created from decorated papers. 

BH: We did have discussions about separating the paper samples from the text. Personally, I wanted them together, to juxtapose examples with description. This way the reader finds it easier to move back and forth between text and example.

In addition to discussing techniques for decorating paper, the book also explains why/how the papers were needed or employed. What are a few examples of techniques created for specific commercial purposes?

BH: A number of papers were made for specific purposes. Many papers, including woodblock printed, marbled and paste decorated, were made for use in book binding, specifically, endpapers or coverings. One of my personal favourites, though, is the Japanese stencil dyeing, or katazome. In this technique, a stencil cut into persimmon-dyed paper is used for transferring patterns onto cloth. Stencils [an example is shown directly above; paper sample shown below] made for this technique are so intricate and beautiful that they become decorated papers in their own right.

Next week's post will offer glimpses at some of the creators' favorite papers and techniques from the project.

Decorating Paper is being published this summer in an edition of 30 uniformly-bound sets. Copies may be available through HM's regular booksellers, listed at right; please direct inquiries to them.

AND ANOTHER THING

HM has been maneuvered into starting a Facebook page. It probably will be just a temporary thing, but while it's around we'll post things to it as & when, probably more frequently (& much more tersely) than this blog. Please be my friend....