Category: Printing

I’m always on the look out for printing methods to use in my books and broadsides and with my letterpress printer.

Make Your Own Wood Type

Scott Polzen’s handcut wood type based on Carol Twombly’s Chaparral Bold
Scott Polzen’s handcut wood type based on Carol Twombly’s Chaparral Bold

On the wall of my office, I have several large pieces of faux wood type that I made by tracing letters in my favorite font-face onto some foam core, cutting out the letters, mounting them to frames I made and then painting the whole assemblage. Occassionally I think idly about trying to make some type of out of real wood.
So it was fun to find out about Scott Polzen, who has made wood type from scratch. So far he’s made 3-1/2 complete sets, each using a progressively more sophisticated method for carving the letters. He constructed the first set by carving 1/4″ high letters and then mounting them to blocks of wood. In the last set, he used a pantograph, an instrument that allows one to scale and copy diagrams, or in this case, letters, and was able to create a single type-high block for each letter.
You can see the various typefaces Scott has made on his website, as well as an explanation of how he made each set. He also has a video on YouTube showing him cut out one of the letters.

Reconstructing the Gutenburg Press

Stephen FryAs part of The Medieval Season series from the BBC, in the installment “The Machine That Made Us,” Stephen Fry travels to France and Germany on the trail of Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press. The printing press was the world’s first mass-production machine, and Fry shows how it was at the forefront of a cultural revolution that transformed the west. Along the way Fry learns to make paper, cast type, and, best of all, reconstructs a working replica of Gutenburg’s first press. (There are no extant pictures or plans for that first press, so there’s a bit of historical detective work to figure out how the press might have been configured.) It’s a wonderful documentary, and you can watch it on Youtube as 6 10-minute videos.

Letterpress Buckles

I’m a sucker for almost anything printed letterpress, especially if it isn’t the usual card or wedding invitation. Pictured to the right, to quote the seller, d.Sharp, is a “functional belt of letterpress printed paper and quality ribbon to decorate gifts. Forget impossible knots or fussy bows, simply slide over box and cinch, cut excess ribbon as desired. Reusable!” dsharp letterpress buckles

Working Closely on the Press

Stauffacher & Letbetter: Vico DuodecimoFor many years, Jack Stauffacher, a well-known letterpress printer and book-designer at Greenwood Press in San Francisco, has been making broadsides and prints using his small collection of assorted pieces of large wood type. Several prints he did with Dennis Letbetter for an edition in 2006 have recently been on display at San Francisco Center for the Book. In the text for the exhibit there’s a quote by Stauffacher that sums up perfectly how I feel about creating my own wood type collage prints.

“Taking these shapes, these letters, they are somehow no longer letters in the formal sense, they become more of a shape, an abstraction, and I have used them [within the page size] allotted to the portfolios in a variety of arrangements, different colors, different connections with the text and the photographs. When you work this closely on the press, you don’t have it all figured out, you do the whole thing mostly right there in the process.”

More on Stauffacher and his wood type work are here. You can see all the prints in the Vico Duodecimo portfolio, one of which is pictured above, here.

The Workmanship of Risk

craft_origami.jpgFor an upcoming issue of Ampersand (a quarterly journal I edit), I’ve asked half a dozen book artists to comment on the role of craft in their work. This article grew out of the exhibit New West Coast Design at the San Francisco Center for the Book that emphasised the technical expertise required in creating artists’ books.
This past weekend, as I set about to write an introduction to the article, I thought about what craft means for me. First I hit the dictionary: Craft: an art, trade, or occupation requiring special skill, especially manual skill. It’s a very old word — the dictionary dates its origin to before 900 AD. Today the emphasis seems to be on the manual skill part of the definition, arising from the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th century, a style that was a reaction to the “soulless” machine-made production of the Industrial Revolution. For book artists, the wide range of skills involved in making a book can be daunting: a handmade book might include paper making, typography, a range of illustration and printmaking techniques, calligraphy, not to mention those of bookbinding itself.
In my ramble through my bookshelf and on the internet, I found 2 quotes about craftsmanship that I especially like. The first is from the curators’ statement for the exhibit at SFCB. It’s by Leonard Koren, from 13 Books (notes on the design, construction & marketing of my last . . . ) Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley, California, 2001

“I want to present . . . as perfect an object as I can. What it could have been, or should have been, is irrelevant. As the creator, I have the ultimate responsibility to make sure my books are produced according to my conception. . . . The problem with bad craftsmanship is that it needlessly distracts from the purity of your communication; it draws away energy and attention; it raises more questions in the reader’s mind that shouldn’t be there.”

The other, by way of my friend Cathy, is from David Pye’s book The Nature and Art of Workmanship, Cambridge University Press, 1968

“If I must ascribe a meaning to the word craftsmanship, I shall say as a first approximation that it means simply workmanship using any kind of technique or apparatus, in which the quality of the result is not predetermined, but depends on the judgement, dexterity and care which the maker exercises as he works. The essential idea is that the quality of the result is continually at risk during the process of making; and so I shall call this kind of workmanship ‘The workmanship of risk’: an uncouth phrase, but at least descriptive.”