Broadside Project – Page 9 – Green Chair Press Blog

Broken Wood Type and Lead Rules

Dennis Ichiyama is a former Designer-in-Residence at the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum and currently Professor of Art and Design at Purdue University. Of his experiments with pieces of broken wood type and lead rules, he says “I’m just picking letters and colors and playing with them.” To create his prints, he starts with 25 sheets of paper and then layers colors on top. “When I get tired, when I don’t know what else to do, I stop,” he says. “And by the time I’m done, I usually end up with about 15 that I think are good.” That’s one of Ichiyama’s prints to the left. You can see lots more here. (First seen on Colour Lovers Blog)

And The Winnner Is…

Thank You! Wow! Did I ever hit the jackpot! So many great poems were submitted to my giveaway celebrating National Poetry Month. Lots of poets and verse I hadn’t read — good thing I didn’t make the criteria “my favorite” and instead selected a name out of a hat! As one entrant emailed me “selecting a favorite poem is akin to naming one’s favorite child! It simply can’t be done.”

And the winner of my broadside is Lauren, at one {crafty} writer, who submitted Mark Strand’s Coming to This.

Thanks again to everyone! Here’s a poem I would have submitted, one I never tire of:

Numbers
Mary Cornish

I like the generosity of numbers.
The way, for example,
they are willing to count
anything or anyone:
two pickles, one door to the room,
eight dancers dressed as swans.

I like the domesticity of addition —
add two cups of milk and stir —
the sense of plenty: six plums
on the ground, three more
falling from the tree.

And multiplication’s school
of fish times fish,
whose silver bodies breed
beneath the shadow
of a boat.

Even subtraction is never loss,
just addition somewhere else:
five sparrows take away two,
the two in someone else’s
garden now.

There’s an amplitude to long division,
as it opens Chinese take-out
box by paper box,
inside every folded cookie
a new fortune.

And I never fail to be surprised
by the gift of an odd remainder,
footloose at the end:
forty-seven divided by eleven equals four,
with three remaining.

Three boys beyond their mothers’ call,
two Italians off to the sea,
one sock that isn’t anywhere you look.

A Giveaway for National Poetry Month

To celebrate National Poetry Month, I’m giving away one of my one-of-a-kind Pattern Forms broadsides. That’s a detail picture of the broadside to the left. It’s a cut paper collage with a letterpress printed original haiku beneath it. The collage is 3-1/2″ x 3-1/2″, on 6″ x 9″ paper, and sits in a hand-debossed (recessed) panel. The type is handset in Baskerville; the paper is Somerset. You can see the entire broadside here.
To win, post your favorite poem in a comment below or email it to me by April 29th. The winner will be announced on May 1st. Be sure to leave an email address where I can reach you. The winner will be selected at random from the submitted poems.

Working Closely on the Press

For 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.

Mind Your Ps & Qs

No one seems to know exactly where the idiom “mind your Ps and Qs” originated, but I’d like to believe that it came from advice to typesetters. In letterpress printing, words are composed metal type letter by metal type letter, left-to-right, with each letter inserted upside down. For beginning typesetters, backward-facing letters are confusing, especially the mirrored lower-case letter pairs p and q, and b and d. And thus the advice to be alert and watch the details (“mind the ps and qs”).
In addition to the typesetting theory, there are many competing explanations — my favorite: an admonishment from a French dancing master to perform the dance figures pieds and queues correctly. Others include a variation on the typesetter advice, but to small children learning to write the alphabet, not to mix up p and q.
This article gives some more possible origins and then clears up the mystery: “Investigations by the Oxford English Dictionary in 2007 when revising the entry turned up early examples of the use of Ps and Qs to mean learning the alphabet. The first is in a poem by Charles Churchill, published in 1763: ‘On all occasions next the chair / He stands for service of the Mayor, / And to instruct him how to use / His A’s and B’s, and P’s and Q’s.’ The conclusion must be that this is the true origin.”
In my current project to feature my large wood type in my printing, my newest broadside uses only Ps and Qs. That’s it above.

Broadside Project: Big Letters

I happily spent last weekend in my studio, printing: here are my latest letterpress broadsides. I thought it would be fun to feature several of my very large wood type letters.