The Wonderful Mrs. McGarrigle

This is the first of two entries that will talk up two destinations in the village of Merrickville. About a month before the Studio Tour, Mrs. McGarrigle’s Fine Mustard…. Find Food offered their window to Holly and myself, your humble scribe, to display selections of our wares during the tour. Holly did her usual magic with the display and I gather the staff and owner of McGarrigle’s were pleased. We were thrilled and honoured to be there.

The owner began making her award-winning mustards in her kitchen (just across the street from us) then after a series of moves to rented premises, she purchased a storefront building in the centre of town, giving Mrs. McGarrigle’s a permanent home. The store has become a draw for tourists to Merrickville, offering the McGarrigle’s brand of mustard, imported sweets from Europe, exotic sauces, olives from Italy, a cheese bar, even fresh bread every day! All that, and quality merchandise for the kitchen and home. You really have to visit to get the experience.

Thanks again to Janet and her tremendous staff at McGarrigle’s Mustard & Fine Foods!

25th Tour a Wrap!

Holly and I had a great tour this year. I can’t say we were entirely ready — we would have liked to have done more of our own publicity and a mail-out, but the tour fell in the middle of production madness, so the two weekends felt kind of like a holiday.

Shown is the demo set-up that I had on the little Kelsey platen. Of course, I’ve flipped in Photoshop so that it reads right.

Congratulations to the Merrickville Artists Guild!

Merrickville Studio Tour

Studio Tour, final weekend, October 3 & 4, 10 am – 6 pm.

For two weekends in the fall, many of the artists who have made Merrickville their home open their studios to the public. It was a mad scramble for Holly and I to convert our studio from cottage industry to art gallery, but it came together, just in time.

The tour went well. Saturday was sunny and temperate, and we were busy all day long. Sales good. Sunday was rainy and slower, and people seemed to be as tired as I felt. Maybe I was projecting.

In the week between the tours, we convert back to our little crafts factory, but leaving the bones in place. The transforming studio…

Holly and Laura working away in our own miniature ‘cathedral to art’, with Holly’s work on the walls.

Ah, the press shown left making its living as a 2400 lb table. I took this photograph a couple of hours ago, and the boxes (14 in all) are already gone on their way to the halls of commerce.

Linocutting tools on display, and a compositor’s stick (used for gathering type from the trays) at bottom centre.

Wood engraving tools and examples from the work-in-progress — 19th century wood engravings.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the room in the studio to display a tray of type and demonstrate typesetting, but people get the idea from samples of set type that I have out.

Next weekend, I’ll take shots of the studio in full tour mode.

CBBAG Swap

I said in the last post that the Merrickville Artist Guild invitation would not be my swan-song for this year, and I meant it. Three days before the fall studio tour and in the midst of production on a massive order, I inked up the press to print a lino cut and a poem that Holly wrote many years ago. It was for a collaborative project with the Ottawa branch of the Canadian Book Binders and Book Artists Guild (or CBBAG, affectionately pronounced ‘cabbage’). Last year, we were given the specs (5.5″ wide x 11″ tall) and the theme (doors and/or windows), so naturally we left work on our contributions until the very last minute. I salute those contributors who had their assignments done weeks, in some cases months, in advance.

As Holly and I worked and planned our respective projects, they just naturally seemed to merge together, like so much we do in our work and life. Here are some shots of the results:

Ah, yes. Another nude. This cut was one I had thought about doing last year. I imagined it on the inside, but circumstances changed all that.

The text is Holly’s prose-poem ‘Pillars of Stone’, written back in 1997. Here it is:

PILLARS OF STONE
by Holly Dean. Copyright 1997

Vaulted heights reaching ever upward,
arching through space and time,
echoing thoughts and emotions.
Pillars of stone firmly grounded in belief,
ancient monument of human aspiration,
embodying spirit and soul,
architectural feat – larger than life,
inspiring awe-struck wonder.
An ancient presence calls across the ages,
speaking of unlimited possibilities,
how to transcend all boundaries,
teaching what is already known.
The inner essence of being begins to vibrate,
shaken to the core,
grasping the elusive,
sensing millenniums within milli-seconds.
Feeling weightless against the massive stone,
almost giddy with a sense of profound knowing,
dwarfed in stature,
yet experiencing vastness in freedom of spirit.
Chiseled stone worn smooth with time,
greened with moss to soften further still,
elements of nature slowly being reclaimed,
to exist as a cathedral of air and light.

Holly’s contribution is more painterly of course, but we sized the lino so that if I cut out the window, things would line up nicely, and they did….

I’m not exactly sure what inspired this young lady to doff her duds and stand unabashedly in front of a gothic window overlooking the cathedral close. It would certainly give the monks something to think about. I guess this tension between sacred and profane arose with Holly working on her ’sacred’ piece, and me on… well, you will pardon me for declining from describing this nude as profane, although some may say so.

Initially, I wanted to use one of the following quotes:

“So I wait for you like a lonely house, till you will see me again and live in me. Till then my windows ache.” That fabulous tidbit from a great and, to some, profane poet, Pablo Neruda, from 100 Love Sonnets.

“Faith goes up the stairs that love has built and looks out the windows which hope has opened.” From the sacred Charles H. Spurgeon, late 19th century British preacher and orator.

In the end, I took my lead from Neruda and let my heart choose Holly’s text. When it turned out that the two signatures would fit together, it made perfect sense. Nothing fancy in the setting — I just wanted to do it without typos, since I was working under a tight deadline. So far, no complaints although I guess that is tempted the fates, isn’t it?

No Time

Time. I wish I had more of it. Earlier in the year, our business was quiet and we filled our time and rode out the recession developing new products. I put aside press projects since I didn’t even have the cash to buy paper. Now, when I most need to work on artistic pursuits, the floodgates have opened and our Big Client needs to stock their shelves for Christmas. And thank heavens for that, because this year was looking pretty grim, financially. So no book off the press this year, as we work like devils to dig ourselves out of the hole. The studio tour and other events will have to be content with last year’s product since almost all of my time will be dedicated to following the money. So Greyweathers Press ends its fifth year with a whimper rather than a bang.

Not to say it has been completely idle. The engraving portfolio project has been good to work on here and there, both because it can only be done one block at a time, and it is, to say the least, a challenge to print. Frustration the apt word, perhaps.

In August, I printed the largest of the wood engravings, measuring about 6″ x 9″, mostly of a tree with two resting deer beneath it mighty boughs. There are two round vignettes in the top corners: a fence stile at left, and wagon wheels at right. The result was not what I would consider ideal — I’m still losing clarity in the centre of the engraving in spite of extensive make ready. But it is the best I can achieve. This time, I opted to restrain the ink and preserve the detail and tone of the engraving, as opposed to striving for heavier black impression throughout. Here it is:

The engraving work is lovely on this unsigned block. It took a day and a half to produce 100 prints.

More recently, I set type on a commercial piece for the Merrickville Artists’ Tour. The tour will celebrate its 25th anniversary this year with a party and I volunteered to print the invites. It’s by invitation only, so I’ve removed the details, but you get the gist.

I don’t mean to sound unenthusiastic about commercial letterpress, but I can’t help it. There are printers out there doing fabulous work for invitations, business cards, portfolio covers, annual reports etc. However, I love books and those are what I want to print. While I’m printing these little jobs, even the wood engravings, all I want to do is get busy on another book.

This invitation will not be the finale for 2009. No matter what, I will be doing a demonstration of some sort on the press for the two weekends of the Studio Tour (September 26-27 & October 3-4), so I’ll plan something fun for that. I’m thinking a type sampler….

Then down to planning an ambitious project for 2010. The leader right now is an illustrated book of selected Shakespeare soliloquies.

Printing 19th century wood engravings

Work has begun on printing the collection of 19th century wood engraving blocks loaned to me about a year and a half back. I’ve already taken proofs of the blocks, and will illustrate results in this blog as they come up.

I started out with the first block I proofed, a large engraving of a mouse or, more likely, a rat — an unlikely subject, but brilliantly executed, the engraver has defined every hair!

Unlike the initial proof, I spent over two hours on make-ready for this print. Make-ready is the preparation work designed to create a clean and even print. In letterpress plates, forms, block cuts and illustrations should be, in a perfect world, all even, all 0.918 inch thick. Alas, the world is not perfect, so if falls to the printer to make it so, if he or she cares about the quality of his/her work.

Early proofs identify areas of the print that are light. These areas are highlighted and very thin tissue is cut in the shape, and applied to a master sheet which will eventually underlay the sheet proceeding through the press, hopefully correcting the unevenness of impression. Make sense? Probably not.  Here’s my workspace for the make-ready on Ratty:

And here’s the end result, after about half a dozen applications of tissue on the underlay:

I know, it doesn’t look like much, but in the end, Ratty printed beautifully thanks to this corrective measure.

I can’t always be so smug. Today I printed the large ‘Willow’ block. The 150 years that have passed since this block was first cut have not been kind. It’s a composite of six small blocks, and each of the six parts printed differently, and the sections have shrunk ever so slightly leaving gaps that no skill of my own could repair.

Here’s an early proof to show you what I mean:

The make-ready on this block took close to four hours, and I printed the run, although I’m less than thrilled with the results. I increased impression to compensate for some areas that required just massive build-up, but that ended up causing loss of fine detail in areas around the edge of the block after adding more ink to the press to better define the interior. It’s like trying to capture quicksilver!

Here’s the Willow make-ready:

And the final print:

I may buy paper again and take another stab at this one. The make-ready is done, it’s just trying to balance the ink and the impression to maximize the details, and let me say, this block has details, baby. I spent an hour on proofs, lost in the lines, trying to find out why there were so much white in the middle, even though I had lines printing solid. I now realize that it was all the device of a highly skilled artist, now dead for over a hundred years, who cleared white space from the block to create the illusion of the sun-dappled willow fronds hanging from the tree. Okay… impressed! I don’t know what the wood engraver thought of his work, or if he gave it any thought at all, but it is fine work which deserves to be printed properly. So I’ll leave it fallow a bit and revisit it again next week.

Of all the 16 blocks in the collection, ‘The Willows’ is in the worst condition; I don’t expect make-ready on the rest to be so difficult.

He says, tempting the fates….

My monthly update & justifying justification

While blundering around in the files looking for images to post, I came across a shot of the little Kelsey press before Craig Black restored it. Here it is:

Just a little on the rusty side, but not so bad as to become scrap. I’m delighted with the results taken off of it so far.

Time for a short lecture. In contemporary word processing, justification is noted in tool pallets as tiny icons like this:

Just click and all your text flips left, right, centered or full justification, creating a neat block of text. Setting justified text in monotype is interesting for a number of different reasons. Those six of you who have been following my bi-monthly updates will likely know that setting little bits of lead with a reversed letter on top is a laborious game. The easiest forms to set are called ‘jagged right’ or left justified text, or right justified if that’s one’s desire. You can use a uniform letterspacing in this instance, then filling in the end of the line with spacing material (i.e. pieces of lead that are shorter than the type, so they don’t print).

Centering text is a little more complicated, but still very simple. The compositor simply uses the same width of spacing material at each side progressively, until the line is tight and the text is centred in the composing stick.

To create full justification, or straight on both sides of the text block, is a bit more of a chore. First, have a look at the tools of the trade when it comes to compositing:

At left, there the plastic tackle bin full of metal word spacing material for 12 point type. These spacers are of varying thicknesses, ranging from quite thin to quite fat, and they are proportional to the size of type, so a quad (perfectly square spacer) for 12 point is a different size than a quad at 24 point, but they are relatively the same proportionally, in relation to all other spacers. Don’t worry about it; there won’t be a test.

At the back is a little case I use to store what I call ‘thins’ or spacing material that is, you guessed it, really thin. These range from thin lead spacers on the right to very thin brasses (second drawer from left) to super thin coppers (left drawer). On the galley tray is a whack of glorious type set and fully justified. In the left foreground is the composing stick, the tool used when working over the type tray to set all these words and paragraphs, also used to create typographical errors. So without getting too technical, setting cold type involves lots of bits and bobs.

When I go to set a fully justified text, I first set the line with equal word spacing, but I don’t finish off the line by filling the end in with spacing material, as I would for left justification. Instead, I flip up all the word spacers, as shown below:

You’ll note that I have a quad at the beginning and end. It’s a habit I learned from Margaret Lock, and having the quad there, I’ve learned, makes life a lot easier when the form is standing on its own on the pressbed. Also, when a letter, like a capital ‘W’, or quotation marks have to extend beyond the justification line, the quad gives you some wiggle room. But I digress….

The space at the end of the line between where the text ends and the quad is the space that I must spread absolutely evenly throughout the nine spaces available between words. Apparently, there are printers who can measure that gap, and calculate (in their heads, probably) the exact size or combination of sizes of spacing material needed to fill out the line. Envious though I may be, I am not one of those printers. Instead, I frig around with various combinations until its close, then load them in. Nine times out of ten I’m bang on. The other times I have to try again.

No matter how you do it, it takes a bit longer, but even without the ability to calculate the proportional size of the universe in my head, I found that after I had done 30 or 40 lines, I began to develop an instinct about the spacers and what would fit, and my odds improved. What would happen to me if I shifted to another size, I don’t know. Maybe the instinct would shift over as well.

The dangers of sloppy justification are evident in lead as in digital composition. Who of us hasn’t seen columns in the newspaper with two words and an uncomfortable canyon of white space  separating them? And then there are rivers, those lines of white space that run down the length of a page like, well… like rivers. Our minds search for patterns in the text. Ideally those patterns are letters and words, but who hasn’t been distracted enough when the subject matter is perhaps a wee bit dull to follow the white water down through the gray? Rivers can happen with any text if the word spacing is too generous, and/or the leading (line spacing) insufficient.

End of lecture.

Kelsey up and running

It would be almost two years ago that a very kind veteran antiques dealer of my acquaintance gifted me with a small, luggable platen press (chase size 5×8 in). When I received it, it was just a tad rusty, needed new rollers and a couple of replacement parts. About a year back I sent it to Craig at Don Black Linecasting, Ontario’s letterpress mecca in Scarborough. He cleaned it up, replaced some bits, gave it a paint job and some new rollers, and voila! Good as new.

It has taken me almost as long to put it to use, but today I did just that. First I have to thank Gina from the Ottawa Press Gang for giving me a set of sheet guides — these are little pins that slide into the tympan paper on the platen (? I’m still a bit weak on platen press terminology. Is the platen the part that folds up to the type, or the part where the chase rests? On the Vandy, I call it the drum). Anyway, here’s a close up:

The press shown here is after clean-up, which was a breeze when compared to cleaning the big press. I’m glad to have this little platen because it makes doing labels, promotion cards and press demostrations very simple. For example, some may recognize this recurring title. I did a book or booklet treatment of this story last year, but used the type already set to print a second edition of 50 on a long sheet sans illustrations for my Ottawa Press Gang collaboration contribution. This little red label is a nod to the blood red endpages in the book version. It seems crazy to ink up the Vandy 219 to do such a tiny job. The whole process, including cutting stock and proofing material, took just over an hour, then maybe fifteen minutes to clean up.

So now my Press Gang contribution is nearly finished, just folding and gluing down 50 of these bloody labels.

To tie up another loose end, I’ll be doing up a special card or something for John Holyer, the dealer who gave me the press. Soon.

Kilburn & company

Work progresses on what I have been calling the ‘Kilburn Portfolio’. More proofs of the blocks have yielded more signatures, proving that the collection of blocks really is a mixed bag of work by different hands. The engravers that I have identified, or at least assigned attribution, seem to be from Boston or New England. It may be after the portfolio is pubished, others will be able to identify the makers. Of course, I’ll be marketing the work amongst New England institutions and libraries.

But back to production. I’ve cut Fabriano Accadema paper for the prints and am ready to produce the dummy, including a pamphlet which will contain a short essay on how the collecton came to light and what (little) is known about the blocks to date.

There’s a monogram that very likely belongs to Abel Bowen, Kilburn’s master, and another block is signed Matthews, a Boston wood engraving who spent a brief period of time in Montreal, the only Canadian connection so far.

This week I will begin to produce the plates. Some of the blocks are very straightforward — quite remarkable when one considers that they are well over 100 years old. Others did not age so well, and printing these warped blocks will be a challenge. It will require an enormous amount of ‘make-ready’ or custom setting the press to print one specific block. It is very. very fussy work and in the end, it achieves evenness of impression, but it cannot replace cracks and lines caused by composite blocks separating. This can really be heart-breaking work sometimes, but the benefits far outweigh the heart-breaks, in the end.

I received my second cheque from another institution for books on Thursday. Gotta love that!

Monthly update

My, how the time does fly! In the intervening month since my last blog, I have done a number of printing related tasks. I completed my submission to the Grimsby Wayzgoose anthology. The Grimsby Wayzgoose is the venerable book arts show held in Grimsby, Ontario every year in April. ‘Waysgoose’ is an old word to describe a printer’s party, but it has evolved into a show. Participants are invited to submit a signature (one or two 8.5 x 11 sheets folded in half to create a 4 or 8 page signature) which are compiled and collated into bound anthologies.

Back in December, Hugh Barclary of Thee Hellbox Press asked me to work with him on a collaborative Wayzgoose contribution with another printer, on the theme ‘alternatives to war’. I had to bow out of this for a number of reasons, but decided to carry on with the theme. For a while I was going to do the old hippy chant, ‘Make Love, Not War.’ I had even set up the type for the ‘Not War’ portion:

with ‘Make Love’ done in calligraphy by Holly. I considered doing a vaguely erotic block print to go with it, or perhaps hands clasped in the ecstatic moment or something, but just couldn’t come up with anything that wasn’t, well, silly. The quote was part of the problem. So back to the drawing board, and ended up with a William Gladstone quote that had a similar sentiment, but with a little more…. what? Dignity, perhaps. Geez! I’m getting uptight.

“We look forward to the time when the Power of Love will replace the Love of Power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace.”

An interested statement from a man who periodically ran an empire in the later 19th century, but there you have it. Apparently he was a Dove, and Disraeli was the Hawk. I am a bit cynical about blanket statements and slogans and buzz phrases regarding peace, love and all that. I don’t subscribe to the simplicity implied in Gladstone’s statement, or the hippy chant. If there is a solution to war, I know it’s not going to be a simple fix. All of these things are frigging complex, and as I get older, they seem to get more complex, which makes these simplistic solutions so enticing. I still haven’t ruled out doing a run of a much longer quote on this subject from none other than that master of stirring eloquence, Martin Luther King. Sometimes, in the face of human savagery and brutality, the sentimental refuge of idealism is preferrable to apologetic pragmatism. Sometimes not.

Well, enough waffling. Holly designed the piece, featuring a digitally produced ‘Power of Love’ centerpiece, and two small linocuts based on portion of this text. I used a large board and printed them together — successfully — thus saving a third print run.

Final result:

I used Fox River cotton rag paper, but it is a bit too lightweight. Fortunately, the translucency works for the piece, adding a kind of geometric weight to the inside of the signature. The type is handset in lead in the house font, Italian Oldstyle.