Category: Letterpress

Tour de Lead Graffiti 2013

Tour de Lead Graffiti 2013Imagine letterpress printing getting a mention in Sports Illustrated! Here’s what writer Alexander Wolff wrote: “Each morning during the [2013] Tour de France, members of the [Newark, Del.] Lead Graffiti printmaking collective gathered to watch that day’s stage. They took note of every salient breakaway, pratfall and Phil Ligett bon mot, then spent the rest of the day producing a broadside that captured the action. The results are like the peloton, a riot of shapes and colors. The designers call what they do ‘endurance letterpress,’ for they repeat the routine 23 days in a row and, like the Tour itself, scrupulously post total elapsed time.”
Quite a feat—23 posters in 23 days! See all the posters here. And they’ve done this for 2011 and 2012 as well!

The Scottish Play

The San Francisco Center for the Book’s latest exhibition is “Superstition 13”:

Superstition 13 is a juried show which invites artists to investigate superstition and the esoteric….rtists are encouraged to submit book works which speak to the mysterious, the alchemical, the arcane – both written and unwritten.”

Tom Leech, the printer at the Palace Press at the Palace of the Governors here in Santa Fe, submitted “The Scottish Play,” a chapbook of Act IV, Scene 1 from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. This is the scene where the witches chant “Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble.” It’s handset type (all 36pt but of different faces). I bought a copy of the book, and here’s a few spreads. Be sure to read the very entertaining colophon pictured at the end of the post. Notice I got copy 13 (or maybe they are all copy 13!)

The Scottish Play, Tom Leech

The Scottish Play, Tom Leech

The Scottish Play, Tom Leech

The Scottish Play, Tom Leech, Colophon

luv 4evR

Matthew Chase-DanielLast month, Edie Tsong spoke at the monthly Santa Fe Book Arts Group meeting. She’s very interested in poetry, and she had a contest asking people to submit a love-letter written using text abbreviations. She then letterpress printed the result as a broadside. For those of us who don’t read the abbreviations well, here’s what it says:

Early this morning
before the sun
I rolled out of our bed to soak
olive slowly shifting to black
raven and owl chasing
each other in the meadow
white bird of night
black bird of day
endless conversation
swooping play
and dance
love M.

Read more about the poem and contest here.

Pica

Pica PoleWho knew that “pica” had a first meaning that isn’t about measurements. From wordsmith.org’s a.word.a.day
  1. A tendency or craving for eating substances other than normal food (such as clay, chalk, and dirt), common during childhood or pregnancy.
  2. In printing, a unit of type size, equal to about 1/6 of an inch.
  3. A type size for typewriters, having ten characters to the inch.
Thanks to my friend Cathy for the fun fact.

He just wanted to make beautiful books

Kim Merker in 1991 by Robert McCamant

There’s a lovely memorial to Kim Merker, a hand-press printer from Iowa City, in the NY Times this morning. He ran Windhover Press at the University of Iowa and founded the University’s Center for the Book. Here are a few of the books he printed from a nice exhibit about Windhover Press at Okanagan College Library.. (The photo above is by Kim Merker in 1991 by Robert McCamant)

Merker’s Flowers of August

Flowers of August

book by merker and windhover press

Robert the Devil.

Merker’s “Within the Walls,” by Hilda Doolittle.

“Within the Walls,” by Hilda Doolittle