Calendar – Page 7 – Green Chair Press Blog

Calendars on Display

For the fourth year, the members of the Pacific Center for the Book Arts sponsor a showing of calendars during the month of December in the San Francisco Center for the Books’ gallery. The show is a celebration of the seasons, the mysteries of time, and plans for the future. My calendar will be on display, along with about 24 other entries.

The opening reception, on Friday November 30, is a fund-raiser for the PCBA and calendars will be on sale. The exhibition is on view until January 11. If you’re in the SF Bay Area, please plan to stop by to take a look (get directions here).

Calendars Galore

For the past several years, I’ve designed a calendar for an annual year-end show of calendars at the San Francisco Center for the Book, sponsored by the Pacific Center for the Book Arts. Over time my designs have gotten more involved, and my calendar this year was a big production for me. I’m excited to see what the other members have created for the show. But in the meantime, Holly at Decor8 has posted a really nice guide of handmade calendars. Click on the picture to see them all (the picture shows a perpetual calendar from CP Swap Meat.)
You can see all my posts about calendar making here.

And To-morrow

I’m printing my 2008 calendar design on my hand-feed, manually operated (using a foot treadle) letterpress printer. The calendar has 14 pages, 2 colors each. This ends up to be a lot of feeding and a tremendous amount of treadling. It’s not a particularly mindless task, as I have to pay attention so that my hands don’t get caught as the platen opens and closes, that the paper is straight, and most importantly that the ink is consistent across pages. Once I get a rhythm going, though, it turns out to be a pleasant way to spend an afternoon, especially with a bit of music on the radio or through my ipod.
While printing I’ve been thinking about calendars I’ve particularly liked. The one pictured in this post is by Lisa Rappoport of Littoral Press from 2005. It’s really more of a mediation on time, I guess, and it perfectly matches that repetitious feel that I have spending my afternoons treadling. (Kate Godfrey took the picture.)

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
—Macbeth (V, v, 19)

Obsessive Nature of Time

This week I started printing my 2008 calendar design. I’ve already printed my Christmas cards and some winter coasters. My obsessive pre-planning has the effect of making me feel as though I’ve skipped much of summer and fall and catapulted myself into winter!
Of course I’m not the only one who’s obsessive! Last year, Nikki Thompson of Deconstructed Artichoke Press made a bookwork for the PCBA Calendar Show called “A Contemplation of the Obsessive Nature of Time.” It’s 12 flipbooks, one for each month, based on prose writings by Julio Cortazar: “Preamble to the Instructions on How to Wind a Watch” and “Instructions on How to Wind a Watch.” She decided that the repetitive nature of a flipbook structure was the best for communicating obsessiveness and said, “originally I was thinking about using minutes or seconds in a year as the constraint for the number of flipbooks and the number of pages per flipbook, but practically speaking it was too obsessive, so I chose the twelve flipbooks, ranging from 28 to 31 pages.” I immediately bought a copy, not only because of the subject but it’s a wonderful way to think about the year rather than as structured set of days and weeks and months.
The images above are from the December flipbook. And below, my copy of her books spread out on my shelf. At the end of this month, Nikki is teaching a class in calendar making, “Handmade Calendars: From Concept to Completion,” at the San Francisco Center for the Book. Be sure to check it out!

Marking Time

For the past several years, the Pacific Center for the Book Arts has sponsored a year-end show of calendars created by members. The theme the first year was “marking time.” That first year I started to design a calendar but got stuck trying to figure out what “marking time” meant for me. I dislike the rigidity of calendars, but I’m a notorious list maker — just as rigid as keeping a datebook I guess. So the second year I incorporated my list-making habit into my calendar entry with a diary for readers. It’s a slim little book that lets you record and rate the books you read. Maybe not traditional, but it does mark time.
By last year I had stopped worrying about the marking time business and was ready to do something that looked more like what most people think of as a calendar. I wanted to incorporate letterpress into my design, but I didn’t get started until November. So I designed and letterpress printed a flat 5″x7″ card with a quote on the top and the months on the lower half. This card motivated this blog — my adventures designing broadsides.
This year I’ve started earlier with the idea of a calendar that sat on a desk or table, in a propped open jewel case, with one page per month. And it would include some haiku that I’ve been writing. But first I had to get very distracted by some other interesting calendar designs, none of them in English. The Publikum Calendar, published by a Serbian design company, is glorious (there’s more about it here). And this sprial calendar appeals to my notion that time is continuous rather than discrete day-to-day chunks.

H N Werkman

It seems early, but I’ve been thinking about the design for my 2008 calendar. Every year the Pacific Center for the Book has an exhibition of member’s calendars in December and January. While looking through my notebooks recently, I found an entry about a lecture I attended by Alastair Johnston about his collection of artists’ books. He talked about a Dutch designer and printmaker H. N. Werkman (d. 1945). He’s known for his innovative printing techniques and avant-garde typography. He printed with all sorts of materials on his press, including wood furniture. I googled Werkman and found out he did lots of calendars as well as printing using stencilling and stamping. Although it’s in Dutch, the Groninger Museum website has lots of pictures of Werkman’s calendars as well as other examples of his work. There’s a good book about Werkman available from Amazon.