Grimsby Wayzgoose 2013!

“Wayzgoose” is one of those old words of mysterious origin, but what is certain is that it was a time of celebration for printers, and printers are people who particularly enjoy celebrating! Today, the term is applied to  book artists to exhibit and sell their beautiful hand crafted work. And yes,  to celebrate as well.

The Wayzgoose in Grimsby, Ontario is a venerable book arts show, founded by the renown Bill Poole, and one we’ve exhibited at for the past five or six years. Once again, we’ll have a table there offering books and prints. Hope to see you!

 

A Greyweathers Apprentice

We are pleased to introduce Tasha Thorpe, our first “apprentice”

I’ve been printing periodically on the press for nearly nine years now, and it has been almost entirely a solitary effort. So, when Tasha Thorpe agreed to put in some time on the press, I had to look at my set-up in a new and different way. My space is kind of like the workshop equivalent of a well- used easy chair. It fits me perfectly. I know where everything is, without needing anything labelled – drawers, boxes, type trays. Also, there is the issue of a second person in the what is a very small space. I had no idea how it would work, but it has worked very well. Tasha’s busy tooling up her own art studio making some very cool steam-punk assemblages, but she seems to be enjoying the the very industrial/retro space that letterpress occupies. She is patient and possesses an enviable focus when it comes to dissing and setting type. Her coming to the studio on average once a week has lit a fire under me to begin steps  to accommodate more than just my solitary self. We’re actually getting some pretty decent through-put, which makes me very happy. And it’s made me think hard about how I do things and how things really work in the studio.

Keeping ems & ens straight… Newly defined wells for spacing material.

Shows outside and inside….

Printing the Creative Process

Every year, for the past six years I have printed a ‘signature’ (in this case two sides of an 8×11 sheet folded)  as my contribution to the Grimsby Wayzgoose anthology.

It was last year when I sat down with my notebook and pencil and began to brainstorm a sequel to 2010′s The Vampire & the Seventh Daughter fable, bringing back the feisty young herione, Septima, from the first fable. For this year’s anthology, I decided to interpret my notes with metal type, lined paper, scribbled notes and pencil sketches.

My notebooks are rather chaotic affairs at best, so a bizarre mix of type faces was called for. It took a few hours sort out the make-ready, all those different faces and different sizes.

A rabble of faces….

We set enough type for two sheets, or eight pages, along with some rough cut linos or engravings, but time constraints meant pulling out a lot of type, reducing the project down to one sheet, both sides and no block prints. I wanted to emulate the notebook further with the paper I used, and found large pads of graph paper at the office supply store. When I opened the packages, I learned that commercial paper today isn’t what I remember from 30 years ago. The graph paper was extremely thin, and I wondered if the ink  might even leach through. It printed well, however, and I even managed something close to a KISS impression.

Printing on graph paper about the thickness of onion skin.

From the start, I had wanted the piece to mix the traditional (letterpress) along with pencil sketches and handwritten scribbles. My notes are filled with sketches done while I think out problems, so I extracted some of these to use in the piece. This would require the digital laser printer, and help from Holly with some of the more technical aspects of layering images in Adobe Illustrator. Holly came up with the idea to have my ubiquitous pencil lying on the page, and to mess things up a bit with a coffee stain. Most of the handwriting is hers – you can read it!

Mechanical pencil shot, later cropped in Photoshop.

Septima, the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter

Inside spread, colour laser print on bond without the type. Holly’s handwriting. (Mine’s illegible!)

Outside spread: colour laser printing on bond

The combined result: letterpress & digital.

I was very pleased with the combined effect of letterpress and laser printing to create what is meant to appear as pages torn from of my journal. I was bothered by one thing: one of the digital layers did not have a pure transparent background, so it left a very faint tint on the page except were the white border an 1/8th inch around the perimeter of the sheet. While very subtle, I decided this was visible enough to make the whole thing look like it was spat out of a digital printer, which it was most certainly not! So the sheets were trimmed, making them somewhat smaller than the required 8.5×11, but still acceptable, I hope.

One side note: at least a half dozen times during the later stages of this project (folding, numbering etc), I found myself reaching over to swipe the pencil off the pile of printed sheets. That’s too funny!

I hope to launch the sequel to 2010′s The Vampire & the Seventh Daughter at this year’s Wayzgoose (April 27). Like the last one, it will be finely printed but accessibly priced, in an edition of 60 on Arches Text paper. The last one had lino cuts, but this time I want the illustrations to be wood engravings. We shall see.

Next job is to write the fable, cut the illustrations, print and bind, all by the end of April. I’ll announce it formally as soon as I decide on a title!

Exhibition – Contemporary Book Arts in Eastern Ontario

We are very honoured to be a part of an exhibition set to open at the Douglas Library at Queen’s University. I have studied under and with some of these participating artists, and many I consider my peers and friends, but they all inspire me. This exhibition was conceived by Margaret Lock of Locks Press (Kingston), and I have been helping out as a co-ordinator. Jeff Macklin, a letterpress printer from Peterborough, Ontario (Jackson Creek Press) designed the catalogue and the poster.

There will be an opening reception on March 7 between 5 pm & 6:30 pm. The details are below. If you are in the Kingston area, drop in and see this extraordinary collection of books.

Choosing a typeface

When choosing a typeface for any particular job, I like to roll them out in a display of some sort. Books offer plenty of opportunity for typographic exploration, but let’s face it, the idea with a book (generally) is not to bedazzle or snap attention, but communicate the words clearly. So I work with a very small number of trusted faces – Garamond, Italian Oldstyle, Centaur, Caslon, Palatino, and two or three other fairly conservative and traditional choices. Clients like it because they almost always want a book that “looks like a real book.” I shy away from faces that are boringly ubiquitous – yes, I’m talking about you, Times New Roman. Everyone is aware of Helvetica now, thanks to Helvetica: The Movie; it is a utilitarian face with rabid detractors and equally ferocious cheerleaders. So it goes, in our ever-diverging binary world. Myself, I can take it or leave it.

I’m designing a book now featuring a lace collection. The owner of the collection is Dutch, so I felt it was time to do justice to the work with a decent European san serif face. The book is dominated by powerful black and white photos, so any san serif could not be too dainty, light or delicate.

I quickly lay out some san serifs, this time in 8 pt, more or less randomly from our Mac’s vast font of fonts. This is what it looks like:

Which to use? Which to use?

Clicking on the image will give you a close-up of various san serif faces. I scanned this sheet immediately after selecting three faces to be ousted, but prior to sending them off the island, so to speak. Three more iterations of this page left me with Gill, the dark horse Charlotte, Lucida, Optima and and old standard, Univers. Seeing those five against each other, I quickly brought it down to Gill and Optima, the chose Gill Sans.

Really, all of the five finalists are contenders and would have done a fine job. Ultimately, type faces are about personal taste and I dare say, mood; today I like Gill Sans. And I hate agonizing over a type face – I try to make the decision as quickly as possible, from the resources I have at hand and with as little sound and fury as possible.

The Third & Elm Press

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Business and good fortune had us visiting Newport, Rhode Island a couple of weeks prior to Hurricane Sandy. The weather was extraordinarily beautiful and temperate, literally a calm before a storm. When I travel with Holly, I try not to schedule too much press activity, which can easily usurp a timetable. But destiny took a hand. While visiting a photography gallery called Blink, we learned that the owner’s mother ran a letterpress in the heart of Newport. On our last day there, Holly and I made sure to visit The Third and Elm Press, named (as you probably surmised) for the corner on which Ilse Burchert Nesbitt’s shop is located.

The home of the Third and Elm Press, located at Third and Elm in Newport, Rhode Island.

Ilse came to America from Germany in 1960, and set up the press with her husband, a calligrapher and book designer, in 1965. There are details and sample of her work on her website at www.thirdandelm.com. She is now 80 years old and not showing much sign of slowing down.

Isle has a very nicely organized studio. It is not large, but it holds an early 19th century “acorn” iron press, a good sized floor standing platin press, a cutter and several banks of type. While she has printed several books over the years, her primary focus these days is in making wood cut prints. In the long-established German tradition, she cuts her blocks using knives, as opposed to gouges and gravers.

A relief wood cut carved with knives on the plank.

The style of knives that Ilse uses for cutting her blocks.

Close-up of the plaque on the ‘acorn’ iron press.

A close-up of Ilse’s work-horse platin press, with a rainbow hue of inks on the underside of the inking disk.

I admired Ilse’s cutting desk, which folds down elegantly when not in use. Most print studios need space-saving solutions like this. (Mine certainly does!)

All the type drawers have beautiful calligraphy labels. Since I live with a calligrapher of some note, I have put Holly on notice that I would like this treatment for my type cabinets as well.

I make a habit of carrying samples of my books and prints with me where ever I go, so I was able to show them to Ilse and recieve a critique. She was refreshingly frank, or perhaps I should say refreshingly Teutonic. She thought my lines might “open up” and become more naturalistic if I abandoned gouges and gravers and adopted the knife as my principal tool, something I will certainly try when I turn my hand to cutting on the plank. She felt that my lines were too clean, that they followed each other too closely, that I needed to “loosen up.” All good advise, and in a sense, that’s the direction my linos had been going prior to my jump into wood engraving.

We spent a very enjoyable afternoon visiting with Ilse, hearing her thoughts on the ‘business’ and dropped some money in her gallery upstairs on a book and two prints. Most of all, it was simply inspiring to meet a fellow printer and print-maker who is steadily pursuing her passion and not letting anything, least of all aging, get in the way.

The Idle Fool / Is Whipp’d at School

When my friend and letterpress printing colleague Jason (of Three Bats’ Press) announced a couple years ago that he was seeking artists to illustrate an upcoming project, naturally I took interest. He had taken the text from an early New England primer designed to teach children their letters by infusing the little tykes with a healthy fear of God, or in other words, scaring the holy snot out of them. Artists could choose a letter and with the associated rhyme for the letter. For example: A = “In Adam’s Fall / We sinned all.” Or this for J: “Job feels the Rod / Yet blesses God.” Or Y: “Youth forward slips / Death soonest nips.”

Cheery, is it not! Jason was clear in saying that he wanted a “re-interpretation” of these poems, and by handing off to a bunch of recalcitrant artists, I’m thinking he’ll get his way.

I chose F: “The idle Fool / Is Whip’d at School” out of a sense of personal irony (as a student I was neither devout nor studious) and envisaged a period engraving showing the enraged schoolmaster, a la Dickens, taking his fury out on some hapless kid.  But as I thought more, the extreme violence and fear overtly suggested in the statement and insinuated in the other quotes, and the religious extremism implied in the the whole primer, I conjured the impersonal image of great big meat-hook hands clenching a heavy barbed-studded leather strap, with all the menace of impending violence that seems to go hand in hand with extremist ideals. I may go that route, or I may throw it back in the puritans’ faces and do something associated with that odd cast of kink enthusiasts who have an entirely different attitude toward the whole question of whipping. With all the popular fervour for Fifty Shades of Gray and similar works, called “accessible erotica” or less generously, “mommy-porn”, that might be the right choice.

A first attempt at turning the quote on its head, so to speak, played with the curve of a back to create a lower case ‘f’ from a whip and a belt for the cross-stroke. It had the uncomfortable look and feel of something out spiny out of Predator. Another quick effort incorporated a similar stylized letter ‘f’.  I’m really not entirely sure about pursuing this route.

Perhaps my discomfort comes from a certain reserved nature, but it also has to do with the violence implied for the woman in the picture. Making it a male back, or elongating the drawing to show the woman holding the whip would certainly change the dynamic.

No matter what, there will be a stylized letter “F” formed from the coils of a whip.

Jason tells me that he is expecting some very extreme submissions for some of these puritanical aphorisms, so perhaps I’m worrying needlessly.