Letterpress – Page 16 – Green Chair Press Blog

Armina Ghazaryan’s Wood Type Prints

I keep a small pool of photos on Flickr and I found the photo to the left when looking through some of the groups I belong to. It’s a print by Armina Ghazaryan, a graphic designer living in Gent, Belgium. She made the print from wood type at MIAT, the Museum of Industrial Archaeology and Textile in Gent. (They call themselves “a unique museum that focuses mainly on the fundamental technological changes in our society during the last 250 years.”) But even better are her blog posts about a workshop she took at MIAT last summer. The pictures are great — of the wonderful typographic work of the participants, of old presses, of locked up type. And be sure to scroll down for a look at the photos of a chasse full of lego blocks, all locked up and ready to print.

Book Collecting: Another Letterpress Chapbook

Earlier this month, I wrote about my fledgling artist’s book collection. This post is about my latest addition: a letterpress chapbook, printed by SF-based printer Megan Adie, with a story called “The Pool Cleaner’s Rite of Spring in Phoenix, Arizona” by Scott Buros.
I bought it originally to add to several other letterpress printed chapbooks I acquired this year, because Megan did the printing at the San Francisco Center for the Book and because she printed blue behind the text of all the pages. What I was pleased to discover, as I read Buros’ bittersweet story of loss and swimming pools, is that the shade of blue varies with the mood and content of the text.
Click on the photo below to see a larger picture and read some of the story. The chapbook is for sale through Megan’s Etsy shop.
In the upcoming months, I’ll be writing more about my collection. Turns out I’ve written about a few things already, click here to see the posts.

The Pool Cleaner’s Rite of Spring in Phoenix, Arizona

Pied Type Weight

In a print shop, when metal gets jumbled, it’s been “pied.” Usually that happens when a form (type that’s been assembled for printing) comes apart and the pieces of metal fall over into a mess. It’s a pain to clean up and set right again, as Benjamin Franklin describes:

“But so determin’d I was to continue doing a sheet a day of the folio, that one night, when, having impos’d my forms, I thought my day’s work over, one of them by accident was broken, and two pages reduced to pi, I immediately distributed and compos’d it over again before I went to bed.”

Recently I discovered these little 2-1/2″ wide weights made from discarded metal type. They look like pies and are made by Carolee Campbell (Ninja Press). Type bodies can be seen emerging from the surface and to add to their perfection they are type high (.918 inches or the height of a piece of metal type). Gerald Lange is selling them. I bought one as a gift for a bookbinding friend who loves all things type.

Letterpress Printing from Plates

In the beginning letterpress classes at San Francisco Center for the Book, we teach typesetting the old fashioned way — with metal type, letter by letter. It’s a good introduction to press work, but in practice, almost anyone doing letterpress these days typesets on the computer and then gets a plate made. Some advantages are that you can use any font on your computer, incorporate illustrations, and proof-reading happens before you ink up the press. Erica at Three Red Hens has a nice set of blog posts about the process of creating and printing one of her illustrations from plates (that’s a detail of one of her cards on the right).

Homage to the Stamp

These beautiful letterpress printed stamps where designed by Gavin Potenza and printed by DWRI letterpress. They use some of the designs from his poster A Field Guide to the Stamps of the World. Potenza says “the stamps were each inspired by various elements surrounding the culture of the countries, including the Swiss-born color theorist Johannes Itten, old French Tarot cards, the Brazilian boardwalk Copacabana, German designer Otl Aicher, Mayan patterns, the Swiss Alps, sweater patterns, and op artist Victor Vasarely.”

Simple Pleasures

simple pleasures
gathered up—
this moment, this laughter

I’ve finished printing my 2009 calendar. For me, much of what makes life great is the series of simple encounters and observations I have every day — from the smell of freshly dug dirt when I’m working in my garden to watching a formation of pelicans flying over the bay near my house to catching a glimpse of a saffron colored sky at sunset. So this year my desktop calendar has 12 unbound letterpressed cards, one for each month of 2009, celebrating those moments with a haiku poem about life’s simple pleasures.
Here’s a thumbnail of all the months (click on it to see a lot more detail). The calendar is for sale on my webite ($20 + shipping).