Green Chair Press Blog

Letterpress Menus

Patricia Curtan began hand printing menus for the restaurant Chez Panisse during its early years, using letterpress and linoleum-block prints. She’s collected forty years of these menus in a book called Menus for Chez Panisse. For each menu, she shares a bit about the printing process, and for some of them shows the linoleum blocks she made. For instance, for the one on the right, she says the wings are hand colored. It’s a lovely paean to hand printing. Curtan wrote a blog post with more pictures and a bit of the history of the menus here.

Ligatures

Several weeks ago, I wrote about using ligatures in my book One More Blanket on the Bed. In response to that post, Louise Phillips sent me her lovely little accordion book, below. Do check out her website where she’s got photos of her artist’s books as well as a section on clouds with a print called Alphabet x 5 (language of clouds).

Kristin Gudbrandsdottir’s Folded Book

Another book I admired at the Pyramid Atlantic book fair earlier this month was this folded book by Kristin Gudbrandsdottir of punctum press. It’s called “onomatopaeia” and she says “the book’s name comes from the sound that it makes when it is pulled open.”
You can see more images of the book here and more of Kristin’s work here.

Book Table Display

I haven’t had a table at a book fair in quite some time, and at the BABA book jam in October, I noticed my display hardware looked pretty sad. I need something that comes apart and folds flat, so I can get it in a suitcase. I also wanted one made of wood. I found these stands that are perfect for my new miniature books and meet all my criteria.

Searching For Morris Fuller Benton

One of the books I most admired at the Pyramid Atlantic book fair earlier this month was a book from Sherwin Beach Press — Searching For Morris Fuller Benton. Benton is a type designer, best known for Franklin Gothic.

Benton is the most prolific type designer of the hot metal era, but unlike Frederic Goudy, Bruce Rogers, or William Dwiggins–whose ideas about type design are well documented–Benton wrote nothing about his own work, nor was it the subject of analysis by others. Juliet Shen has made a meticulous study of his work, including a new enumeration of designs appropriately attributed to him.

Map Broadside Folded

As I set up my table at the Pyramid Atlantic book fair last weekend, several people told me they had tried out the Turkish Map Fold instructions here on my blog. One woman showed me the book she’d made with the fold, using a letterpress & screen-printed map of artist book makers in the DC Metro Area. It’s for sale on the Pyramid Atlantic website.