I’m a sucker for both tightly registered letterpress and quilt patterns, and I recently found 2 prints that have both! Krank Press has quilt cards printed in 5 colors and there are four patterns: pendant, hexagonal, “bento box” and spool. You can buy them separately or see a set of them all here.

The second one is an 11″x17″ broadside and 6 colors (!) by Cynthia Patrick in her Etsy shop here.

My husband got me watching the TV show In Plain Sight with him by convincing me I wanted to see a show set in our new home — New Mexico. On an episode we watched recently, the 2 lead characters played rock-paper-scissors to determine who would have to do something neither wanted to do. I immediately thought that might be a good tool for me — moving and getting our new house in order has been full of chores no one wants to do (who’s going to call the city recycling again because they missed our pickup? Or worse, who’s going to call the manufacturer yet again because the appliance we bought has broken for the Nth time — I finally got them to take it back as a lemon…) I got my husband to agree to the rock-paper-scissors decider game, but then I saw the poster below (here) explaining how to win rock-paper-scissors every time — which I read immediately, and now can’t in all honesty play it with him. (Who knew there were tournaments and world championships!)
And while this post isn’t about book arts, it is about a well designed broadside…

After I wrote about my calendar experiments, Nancy wrote me a comment about her suminigashi broadsides — that’s one to the left, with a Basho haiku. You can see more of Nancy’s marbling and broadsides here on Flickr or read her blog (where she talks about lots more than marbling!) here.

Check out the gallery of 90 or so prints celebrating the first one hundred years of Vandercook proof presses. This was a limited edition exchange of letterpress prints, organized by Paul Moxon.

To celebrate America’s Independence Day, my friend Richard sent me a link to the Library of Congress’ online image repository, Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera. The intro to the site says

The Printed Ephemera collection at the Library of Congress is a rich repository of Americana. In total, the collection comprises 28,000 primary-source items dating from the seventeenth century to the present and encompasses key events and eras in American history. An American Time Capsule, the online presentation of the Printed Ephemera collection, comprises 17,000 of the 28,000 physical items. . . While the broadside format represents the bulk of the collection, there are a significant number of leaflets and some pamphlets. Rich in variety, the collection includes proclamations, advertisements, blank forms, programs, election tickets, catalogs, clippings, timetables, and menus.

I found the best way to start looking at the collection is by genre. The breadth of subject matter is really wide — from poetry to advertisements to reward posters like the one to the left.

Doug Wilson makes letterpress posters from his collection of wood type. This one is an “Ampersand ID Chart” based on the familiar Snellen eye chart. And here’s another one:

{First seen here}