Chocolate Initials

Chocolate LettermoldsIn December my husband & I had dinner with my friend Hayden, who had recently been to Europe, and his wife Tracey. He told us about the chocolate initials he’d brought back for himself and Tracey, explaining that in the Netherlands, Santa Claus (known there as Sinterklaas) celebrated his birthday by handing out chocolate initials. I thought this was the perfect sort of thing for my blog. But when I went to research it online, I found nothing. Tracey couldn’t find anything either. We debated whether Hayden was just pulling our legs to see what we’d be gullible enough to believe (a thing he tries to do regularly).
Then today I found this post (on the blog afterimage) that says

Rather than an orange at the toe of their stockings, St. Nicholas (known as Sinterklaas) brings good Dutch children their first initial, in chocolate form. Pastry and even sausage letters are also still available during Sinterklaas season.

The post points to another blog, called edible georgraphy, and this meandering but interesting post that starts out talking about miniature books and then segues into a discussion of edible letters. The photo above has the caption

Chocolate letter moulds. The letter I is unpopular with manufacturers as all chocolate letters have to weigh the same — those who do produce it often package two Is together. The letter M is the most popular — it is the first initial of moeder (mother) and mama. According to Droste, “Every year we keep track of how the different letters do. For example, two years ago we had too many Gs, so last year we adapted the production accordingly.”

Divagations on Printing and Poetry

Hermetic PressThe other day I followed a link to Philip Gallo’s blog and spent a wonderful hour reading the posts. Gallo is a letterpress printer and poet in Minneapolis. That’s his broadside to the left (see the post about it here — it’s about daffodils, printed on daffodil embellished paper, and with a subtle ff in the background). He doesn’t write often, and the posts vary widely, from writing poetry, to typesetting 40 years ago, to a poem called Imagine You Are A Craftsman to hand-setting mouse type. And a few of them are handy letterpress printing tricks:

Marking

Finger Pointing BookmarkI’ve been reading late into the night recently, which would be okay if I wasn’t having trouble keeping straight which line I’m on. I thought at first I didn’t have a strong enough light, but I’m pretty sure it’s time to admit that my eyes are the problem and I need to see an eye doctor about glasses (although my sister swears by her drug store reading glasses, so maybe I’ll try those first!) Or maybe I should try this pointing finger bookmark I saw first mentioned on swiss miss — unfortunately it comes from this website (25togo.com) which is mostly in Chinese, and I can’t quite figure out how to buy one!

Books as Sequence

Ida ApplebroogAt lunch today, as I idly paged through the Sunday paper, I recognized the images above. They brought back a flood of memories about the year long artists book class I took in 2001 at the San Francisco Center for the Book. As part of the course, we read excerpts from Johanna Drucker’s The Century Of Artists’ Books. These excerpts were supremely frustrating because there weren’t any pictures, just prose descriptions. After one class where we discussed books as a linear sequence, I somehow found all the pictures from a book by Ida Applebroog that was mentioned and made my own copy. Her drawings were primitive, and it gave me inspiration (or permission?) to use my own rather crude images in my own books.
The article about Applebroog is interesting. But even more so is this PBS documentary, part of the art:21 series. She starts off talking about making books at the beginning of her career, and also shows her techniques and working methods for her other artwork. (If you watch the documentary, there’s another artist featured first, so click on the 4th icon in the control bar at the bottom of the video, to start at “Chapter 4 of 16.”)

And the winner is…

10×10winner.jpgAnd the winner is Shelly with “growth of daughter, self, business, life.” It was very great to see all the comments about making books in the new year! Oh and what I’m looking forward to this year is pack, unpack, paint, arrange, settle in.