Month: April 2010

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!