Category: General

This great picture accompanied Michael Kimmelmann’s article on “DIY Culture” in the Sunday New York Times. It’s a “book forest” in Berlin, where passerbys can take or leave a book.
Turns out the “forest” isn’t only about reading. On the project website (“The first public bookcase in Berlin”), they say

It was developed and realised by BAUFACHFRAU Berlin e.V. as an interdisciplinary, project orientated cooperation of apprentices of forestry, carpentry, cabinetmaking, media design, printing and bookselling.
The project adopts the idea of putting up a bookcase in a public space, in which people could release their used books to be picked up by others. This way of free dissemination, called “bookcrossing”, is by now a worldwide movement organised in a central database (www.bookcrossing.com). Registration of books enables following their travels through the world and communication about the books.

In preparation for moving my 1000 pound letterpress to New Mexico, my husband found 4 rubber wheels that held 400 pounds each at the local steel scrap yard. We mounted them to the feet of the press so that it could be rolled out of the shop. I thought the moving truck would have a lift gate, but it showed up without one. We have a power winch, and at first my husband suggested we might be able to use that. But there was no reason for me to fret, the 4 movers took the problem in hand and just pushed the press up the ramp into the van. The whole operation took about a minute! It’s now carefully covered and strapped into the truck and on its way to Las Vegas to pick up some else’s load and then on to Santa Fe this weekend.

Moving from California to New Mexico has been quite an adventure in patience! We knew from the beginning we would have to put our stuff in storage in California, go to New Mexico and get the house & studio ready, then come back to fetch everything. We thought the “get the house & studio ready” part would take a couple of weeks. How wrong we were! After many delays caused by bad weather and having to do a lot more work than anticipated on the studio to actually get it in shape for all my stuff, we finally set a move date — today! We’re back in California to oversee the loading, then we race back to New Mexico to meet the van. The van driver called yesterday to check that we were ready — and a stroke of luck: it turns out he used to earn his living as a printer and wanted to know all about my press, did I print from metal type, and what sort of things did I print!
While in California, we went to the local Ikea (none in New Mexico) to check out a sink for our bathroom. On the way out, I peeked into the framing/poster section, and there was my Ikea print! That’s a picture of my husband, arranging the print for my photo (how did we live without camera phones??) Hopefully later this week I’ll have more photos of the press being loaded, and, best of all, unloaded into its new home!

According to the OED, palaeotypographist means “An expert in early printing or typography.” This post on the Bygone Bureau unearths some more typographic gems from the OED, such as bake: “when Letters stick together in distributing… This is called the Letter is Baked.” See the entire post here. (Originally found here.)

Rob Walker, on his blog Murketing, has a series of posts called Books: the Idea, a “continuing series of images, and occasionally quoted words, dealing with the idea of books.” This book planter comes from an Italian company, Gartenkultur.

In California, at least where I lived, the temperature and weather today was, with high probability, the same as yesterday. Not so here in New Mexico. We seem to have all 4 seasons in one week: Sunday, the high was about 45. Monday up to the low 60s. Today, the prediction is 70, Wednesday 61 again, Thursday 52 with a chance of snow showers in the evening… It is quite beautiful here, especially the sky. The picture for this post is a spread from Phil Zimmermann’s new book Sanctus Sonorensis. Like me, Phil is new to the southwest — he’s lived in upstate New York for many years and moved to Arizona in 2008. On his blog he says

I had the idea for the book, and did some little sketches for it, during my sabbatical in 2003-2004. I was in a year-long residency at the Border Art Residency in La Union, New Mexico. I was taking a lot of photos of the incredible skies in New Mexico and Arizona while there, and they made their way into a lot of the work that I made during my year there.

You can read more about the book here and see more spreads of that beautiful sky here. There’s also lots more on Phil’s blog.