One of the last metal type foundaries in the US is here in San Francisco — M&H Type — now part of the Arion Press. If you’re in the Bay Area you can tour the press and type foundary. Or, without leaving your chair, you can watch these videos… The first one is an overview of Arion and especially the printing and binding of their Lecturn Bible. In the second one, you get a glimpse of traditional lead typecasting and Monotype composition, as well as letterpress printing.
What a wonderful thing the web is! The Abbey Library of St. Gall (in St. Gallen, Switzerland) has been in continuous existence for over 1,200 years and houses a vast number of old manuscripts. But until recently the only way to see the books was to go to Switzerland. That is until they got a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to digitize, index and describe their holdings of 355 manuscripts produced before 1000 A.D. And they have generously put their gorgeous high resolution images on their website for anyone to study. No plane ticket required!
While there’s lots of info on the library website, here’s a nice overview article about the project from The New York Times.
Last November I stumbled upon Elizabeth Perry’s blog of daily drawings. They struck me immediately as visual haiku — capturing a small moment in Elizabeth’s day. At the same time, my husband and i had just brought home our 2 new kittens, who left a bit of themselves everywhere — a button abandoned after a round of kitty soccer, a wet paw print on the sliding glass door into the backyard, a little head poking out of the curtains of the front window… I thought these might be easy enough for me to draw and be a good practice to complement my haiku writing. So off and on since December I’ve been slowly filling a notebook with line drawings.
Reading Elizabeth’s blog has helped keep me drawing — reminding me to look around at the little things that make up my day (and are easy enough to draw that someone might recognize the object if they peeked in my book!) That’s one of Elizabeth’s drawings above — probably my favorite so far. It’s from December 23rd and called feet up; she says about it “Wrapping done? No…I’ll get to it, though, really. No, really. After I’m done listening to this song.” Recently she completed her 1500th drawing and has a nice post about that anniversary and her drawings.
| Last December, Kelly Moran organized a letterpress print exchange between sellers on Etsy. Over 40 people signed up and the prints are due by March 15. I started mine last week — I haven’t made a wood type collage since last summer, so it was fun to plan out the colors and go through my wood type drawer choosing the blocks to use. While I was at it, I decided to do 2 designs, one 8×10 the other 5×7, in several different colorways. Below are 2 of the resulting prints — the one on the far left is for the print swap. The photo to the right shows the set-up for the print run for the first color of the print below right (it looks awfully yellow but is actually green!). Next up is figuring out the titles (that’s probably the best part of the entire process!), numbering and signing them, and finally shipping the swap prints to Kelly.
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Susan Scott designs and prints her own fabric then turns it into bookcloth that she sells in her Yardwork Etsy shop. (She also sells books covered with her fabric.) In her Etsy profile, she explains her printing process and says this about making bookcloth:
To begin with, the time-honored glue of choice, wheat paste, must be mixed with water and cooked either in a microwave or on the stove. The printed, dyed and washed fabric is then stretched out onto a pane of glass. A thin layer of acid-free wheat paste is brushed over the damp fabric and a very thin sheet of Japanese Mulberry paper, which is cut larger than the fabric, is carefully placed over it. The paper becomes very wet from the wheat paste and can be rolled onto the fabric with a rubber brayer. I allow the fabric and paper to dry on the window frame for around 24 hours. When completely dry, the paper edges are cut away to reveal the fabric edge. The paper and fabric is then easily pulled away from the glass as one combined piece of bookcloth.
 Wow! So many lovely and poetic comments about winter! Thanks to eveyone who entered — Amy Hanks is the winner of my book Winter along with an instruction sheet for making the crown and blizzard binding.
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