I’m doing a series of broadsides to experiment with my press, type treatments, and various printing methods. I have a gallery of all my finished prints and broadsides on my website.
I’m always interested to see how people have framed my letterpress broadsides. This photo of “A Madness Well Restrained” is from Holli Conger, the Type Junkie (she also has a store on Etsy where she sells great typography-themed photography). You can see more examples of framed broadsides here.
 This past week I finished printing my pochoir and letterpress broadside. The quote is “What’s important in life is not the triumph but the struggle.” The background grid is hand stenciled with a color palette of greens and blues and the text is printed letterpress in blue/white.This is an edition of 14.
|
|
This is what it looked like before I letterpress printed the words on top of the stenciled grid. There are 49 rectangles (a grid of 7×7) and each color is repeated 2 or 3 times. |
|
Here’s the jig I ended up using to do the pochoir. The base is 1/4″ thick wood and I used 2 clevis pins to do the pin registration of the stencil and paper. The photo shows a page that has 5 colors already applied, with the 6th color stencil on top, ready for paint. You can find out more about pochoir and making the jig for stenciling here
|
|
Earlier this week I came home from my studio with an armful of just-finished broadsides (that’s it to the right). It needed a title, but that had to wait until I read my email. In my inbox was a blog comment from Juliet Doyle, who had read my letterpress adventures and said “I played around a lot with my dad’s old Adana as a kid, so the smell of ink is ingrained in my nostrils somewhere…” I could still smell the california wash I’d used to clean my press, so her comment made me smile.
But back to the task at hand: a title for my broadside. I pulled up my saved list of quotes and poems to use for titles, and there was the poem “Smells” by Christopher Morley, with the wonderful lines “And printer’s ink on leaden type” and “These are the whiffs of gramarye”. ‘Gramarye’ means magic and certainly describes how I feel about the results of printing on my press. So I had my title: Whiffs of Gramarye.
WHY is it that the poet tells
So little of the sense of smell?
These are the odors I love well:The smell of coffee freshly ground;
Or rich plum pudding, holly crowned;
Or onions fried and deeply browned.The fragrance of a fumy pipe;
The smell of apples, newly ripe;
And printer’s ink on leaden type.Woods by moonlight in September
Breathe most sweet, and I remember
Many a smoky camp-fire ember.Camphor, turpentine, and tea,
The balsam of a Christmas tree,
These are whiffs of gramarye. . .
A ship smells best of all to me!
 |
As part of my project to design and print broadsides this year, I’ve been experimenting with different printing techniques. Right now I’m finishing off a broadside that mixes pochoir (applying color using a stencil and brush) and letterpress. Pochoir has been around since the Renaissance both in Europe and in Japan. The Japanese used the technique to color kimono fabric. Pochoir was really popular in books on interior design and fashion in the early 20th century (like the picture to the left from the Cooper-Hewitt exhibition Vibrant Visions). There’s another online exhibition from the University of Cincinnati called Art of Pochoir with more examples. |
|
One of the most famous artists’ books is Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jeanne de France, with a poem by Blaise Cendrars and pochoir illustration by Sonia Delaunay from 1913.More recently, some graffiti and street artists who use stencils refer to their art as pochoir. There’s a group of photos on flickr tagged pochoir.For my broadside project and my first attempt at stenciling, I decided that the Delaunay or graffiti artist approach (loose registration, neatness might not count) would be a better idea than the tight registration of the fashion plates. I’ll have some pictures of the finished broadside up later this week.
|
|
My latest broadsides. Numbers Warmly Pure and Sweetly Strong on the left and A Madness Well Restrained on the right. Both titles taken from poems (by William Collins and Christopher Morley, respectively).
On March 5th 2007, a car bomb exploded on Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad, the historic center of Baghdad bookselling, a winding street filled with bookstores and outdoor book stalls. To protest the bombing, the Mutanabbi Street Coalition, a group started by San Francisco poet and bookseller Beau Beausoleil, is organizing two readings and has invited letterpress printers to produce broadsides. You can find out how to volunteer or submit a broadside here. There is a reading at the San Francisco Center for the Book on Sept 28. The broadsides will be displayed at the book center from Oct 19 – Nov 12.