Category: General

This past Saturday at the Books Arts Jam Fair I saw Elaine Benjamin of Blue Chair Press. We got to be friends several years ago when we both had tables at a book fair in Seattle. Elaine contacted me about sharing a hotel room because our press names were so similiar! I’m really glad she did, because as a bonus to saving money on my hotel room, we spent a relaxing day before the bustle and stress of the fair weekend exploring a bit of Seattle.
Elaine makes books but also uses words and type in her prints (like the dictionary page below) and in her Dada Dolls. She writes a story about each doll and attaches it to the back. I especially like the ones that incorporate wooden type.

This summer I sent coasters to the Sampler, a marketing & promotional tool for indie businesses. I had fun designing and making my contribution but wasn’t sure if it would generate any sales. To my pleasure, I sold a few broadsides. But even better is that the Sampler folks bought my coaster packs to be part of the debut of Sampler Select. It’s a package of home-themed items, including a shotglass, a wall tile, soap, and a special print by one of Etsy’s most popular sellers, theblackapple. You can find out all about it here.

Every July most of my projects come to a standstill as I spend all my spare time and then some watching the Tour de France. Here in California the real-time TV coverage starts about 3:30 AM, which is too early even for me. So I watch the final hour when I get up in the morning and then the 3 hour re-broadcast in the evening. This year I thought ahead a little bit and folded another set of my haiku and Winter books during the commericals. Now that the race is over, I guess it’s back to work for me!
Biking was the subject of some of my first bookbinding projects. After I first learned to make boxes, I practiced by making a few “Bicycle Emergency Kits” for friends. The boxes had handlebar tape for the hinge and handle, and inside I made dividers for each part of the kit — a spare tube, tire patches to fix flats, food rations and a little book of silly instructions for dealing with emergencies including a quarter for a phone call in a pocket in the back.

I’m a bit of a word junky. I love to discover new words or meanings for words I didn’t know or even new meanings for words I do know. A good source for new meanings is the Urban Dictionary. My husband Harold found this site when he was trying to prove to me that some word he made up was actually a word (I lost the argument). I used it recently to figure out what crunchiest means in “He was clocked doing 100 miles an hour in the crunchiest of cars” where the car in question was a Toyota Prius. Here’s the definition:

CRUNCHY. Adjective. Used to describe persons who have adjusted or altered their lifestyle for environmental reasons.

For the same reasons I also like to read poetry, especially where the familiar meanings of words are turned on their head. I have a collection of poems that I use to find titles for my broadsides. One line I recently used for a title is A Madness Well Restrained, from At the Mermaid Cafeteria by Christopher Morley (d. 1957). The poem refers to the art and passion that go into the making of a poem. But of course it extends to the making of anything one is passionate about, as in my case, wood type collages with numerals.

TRUTH is enough for prose:
Calmly it goes
To tell just what it knows.

For verse, skill will suffice–
Delicate, nice
Casting of verbal dice.

Poetry, men attain
By subtler pain
More flagrant in the brain–

An honesty unfeigned,
A heart unchained,
A madness well restrained.

In the Spring of 2006, one of my letterpress students told me about Etsy, an online marketplace for handmade goods. I wrote down the name but didn’t get around to looking at the site until August. I discovered it hardly cost anything to list my books. I already had pretty good photographs from trying to sell from my personal website, and making sales from my own website was proving difficult, so I took the plunge and opened an Etsy shop. The past year has been quite an education–improving my photography skills, figuring out how to safely mail my orders, doing accounting. This week I’m honored to have been selected as the featured seller! You can read my interview here.

As part of its fundraising efforts, the San Francisco Center for the Book has a group of local artists create unique large linocut prints that are inked and pressed by a two ton steamroller and then sold at an annual auction. On the day the linocuts are printed, there’s also a street fair with a book arts and printers’ sale as well as a chance to pull a print on the center’s letterpress printers. This year the big print day is Sat Sep 8 from 11-5 (at 16th & De Haro). You can find out more here. (The photo is of SFCB studio manager Katherine Case on the steamroller.)