December 2007 – Green Chair Press Blog

Tools: Tyvek

I’ve collected a lot of little paper scraps over the years, all thrown in a shoe box. I’m finally getting around to organizing them, by color in glassine envelopes I have lying around. I was also in the mood to make a book, and thought it would be fun to construct one with an accordion-fold spine with tipped-on envelopes (I wanted an accordion, rather than a fixed, spine so the book can grow as I add stuff to the envelopes.) There are directions for making this sort of book here. These directions use card stock for the spine, but that probably won’t hold up very well, so I used Tyvek instead.
Tyvek is a water resistant and nearly indestructible material/paper. White Federal Express envelopes are made with Tyvek. New home construction is often wrapped with it. It’s light-weight, doesn’t tear, but is easy to cut with scissors or an xacto knife. And, best of all, it doesn’t have a grain and folds really crisply in either direction. It’s great for spines in bookbinding. I get mine at Kelly Paper, but if you just want to experiment, you can buy a envelope made of Tyvek at an office supply store and cut it up.
The biggest drawback is that it’s a glaringly white color. Printing on it is difficult, but it can be painted with a sponge and water-based acrylic paint. Dampen the sponge, put a bit of paint on the Tyvek and use the sponge to rub out the paint into a very very thin layer. It’ll dry almost instantly. The paper gets a sort of marbled effect.

Painting tyvek

Here’s some pictures of my envelope book. Click on them to see a bigger image. Unfortuantely this book won’t hold very much of my paper scrap collection. But it’s perfect for having some scraps to play with at home, away from my studio.

Collector of Typefaces

Douglas Morgan, a Collector of Typefaces, Dies at 75

That’s the intriguing title of the obituary in the New York Times last Monday (written by Steven Heller).

“Mr. Morgan began acquiring antique wood types in the 1950s… These woodblock letters and fonts were commonly used in the mid- to late-19th century for advertisements, posters and handbills. Darker and larger than more delicate metal typefaces, they are familiar today as the bold lettering on vintage western wanted posters. Yet many classic wood type variations were intricately ornamental, used to grab the attention of passers-by in an increasingly cluttered advertising environment.
But simply being a connoisseur of the wood type letterforms was not challenging enough for Mr. Morgan. In the late 1950s his company sold the type to designers, inspiring the rise of an ornately Victorian retro style in the graphic arts.
Among the designers that acquired the letterforms was Push Pin Studio in New York, which at the time was rejecting the cold uniformity of Modernist designs in favor of more eclectic revivalist styles. A studio member, John Alcorn, interpreted the Victorian decorative pastiche in his “Wood and Foundry Type” catalogs, which are now collectors’ items.
The Morgan collection, including type and printers ornaments, is housed today at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, in the Hall of Printing and Graphic Arts.”

I collect wood type myself, so Mr. Morgan is a kindred spirit. A bit of Google searching reveals that the “Hall of Printing and Graphic Arts” at the Smithsonian was put into storage in late 2003. Very sad. But in my search for more info on the Morgan collection I happily stumbled upon Lloyd Schermer’s wood type sculptures (that’s an example above).

Color Thesaurus

Crayolas As a kid, courtesy of my large box of Crayola crayons, colors were synonymous with words: apricot, almond, goldenrod… (of course wikipedia has a chart with historical information on every Crayola color ever!). As an adult and a letterpress printer the word-names aren’t useful anymore. I mix colors using a Pantone mixing guide, which has no names, only percentages of other colors with no names (well, really code numbers for names!). So when my friend Cathy sent me a link to a color thesaurus, I was immediately transported back to kindergarten, sitting at the kitchen table with paper and my box of Crayolas (and that smell of waxy crayons). Here’s the entry for “goldenrod”:

Rainbow in Oz

I discovered COLOURlovers when I was working out the design and palette for my calendar earlier this summer. They give “people who use color … a place to check out a world of color, compare color palettes, … and read color related articles and interviews.” My friend Kate says she’s been using them lately to open her color thinking and she pointed me to a wonderful article about the colors in the original printing of The Wizard of Oz.
Click on the picture to the left to view beautiful high resolution scans of a first edition of the book, preserved in the Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division.
And to the right is one of the palettes you can create on COLOURlovers, this one taken from the colors in that first edition of The Wizard of Oz.

For the love of &

One of my favorite symbols is the ampersand (&) because typographers have such a good time with it. In my beginning letterpress class earlier this month one of the students typeset and printed her return address on the back of some envelopes using Bernhard Fashion. I’ve tacked one of the envelopes up in my studio and that beautiful ampersand has been making me smile ever since.

sample of Bernhard Fashion

Speak in the Language of Rainbows

Abecedary (Nabokov’s Theory of a Colored Alphabet applied to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle) (detail) by Spencer Finch. Uses Nabokov’s system of a colored alphabet to transliterate 9,251 characters from Heisenberg’s text. [Click on the image to see the entire painting.]

I’m gotten several emails about my blog post on my wood type collage Synesthesia, why I chose that title, and my own confusion between numbers and colors. The most recent email recommended I look at Spencer Finch’s painting Abecedary, now at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, with the intriguing subtitle “Nabokov’s Theory of a Colored Alphabet applied to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.”
That subtitle took me off on a happy hour of Google searching for Nabokov’s theory. It turns out Nabokov (who is famous for writing, among other things, Lolita) had synesthesia and wrote about it in his autobiography Speak, Memory (that’s the theory quoted below). Then I found the book Alphabet in Color which, according to one reviewer “showcases what Nabokov heard with respect to colors would manifest visually to the rest of us with charming, vibrant, synesthetic colored letters.” As seems to be usual in cases of obscure books, it’s not available at my library or a local bookstore, but one of the pages is shown below. You can read Brian Boyd’s interesting intro to the book here. (The title of this post is taken from a line in Nabokov’s book Ada or Ardor — the end of the Nabokov quote below explains how to speak in the language of rainbows.)

“I present a fine case of colored hearing. Perhaps “hearing” is not quite accurate, since the color sensation seems to be produced by the very act of my orally forming a given letter while I imagine its outline. The long a of the English alphabet (and it is this alphabet I have in mind farther on unless otherwise stated) has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French a evokes polished ebony. This black group also includes hard g (vulcanized rubber) and r (a sooty rag being ripped). Oatmeal n, noodle-limp l, and the ivory-backed hard mirror of o take care of the whites. I am puzzled by my French on which I see as the brimming tension-surface of alcohol in a small glass. Passing on to the blue group, there is steely x, thundercloud z, and huckleberry k. Since a subtle interaction exists between sound and shape, I see q as browner than k, while s is not the light blue of c, but a curious mixture of azure and mother-of-pearl. Adjacent tints do not merge, and diphthongs do not have special colors of their own, unless represented by a single character in some other language (thus the fluffy-gray, three-stemmed Russian letter that stands for sh, a letter as old as the rushes of the Nile, influences its English representation).
I hasten to complete my list before I am interrupted. In the green group, there are alder-leaf f, the unripe apple of p, and pistachio t. Dull green, combined somehow with violet, is the best I can do for w. The yellows comprise various e‘s and i‘s, creamy d, bright-golden y, and u, whose alphabetical value I can express only by “brassy with an olive sheen”. In the brown group, there are the rich rubbery tone of the soft g, paler j, and the drab shoelace of h. Finally, among the reds, b has the tone called burnt sienna by painters, m is a fold of pink flannel, and today I have at last perfectly matched v with “Rose Quartz” in Maerz and Puol’s Dictionary of Color. The word for rainbow, a primary, but decidedly muddy, rainbow, is in my private language the hardly pronounceable: kzspygv. ”