 At the San Francisco Center for the Book’s holiday fair last month, my PodPost friend Carolee was selling these Ladies of the Letterpress patches for her friend Jessica White of Heroes & Criminals Press. I immediately snatched one up for my printer’s apron, to go along with my other merit badges. Jessica lives in Iowa and you can read about her press and bookmaking on her blog.
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In a recent post about colors and names, I mentioned that I mix colors using the Pantone (nameless) color system. Well, turns out I was wrong about the nameless part — Pantone does name their colors. And even gives them attributes. An article last month in the New York Times reports that annually Pantone annoints a “color of the year,” and for 2008 it’s a purple-blue hue they call “Blue Iris.” The Pantone press release says “Blue Iris combines the stable and calming aspects of blue with the mystical and spiritual qualities of purple, and satisfies the need for reassurance in a complex world, while adding a hint of mystery and excitement”.
To the right are their color choices since 2000, although I’m surprised by the lack of green, as my green wood type prints are always my most popular.
I’ve collected a lot of little paper scraps over the years, all thrown in a shoe box. I’m finally getting around to organizing them, by color in glassine envelopes I have lying around. I was also in the mood to make a book, and thought it would be fun to construct one with an accordion-fold spine with tipped-on envelopes (I wanted an accordion, rather than a fixed, spine so the book can grow as I add stuff to the envelopes.) There are directions for making this sort of book here. These directions use card stock for the spine, but that probably won’t hold up very well, so I used Tyvek instead.
Tyvek is a water resistant and nearly indestructible material/paper. White Federal Express envelopes are made with Tyvek. New home construction is often wrapped with it. It’s light-weight, doesn’t tear, but is easy to cut with scissors or an xacto knife. And, best of all, it doesn’t have a grain and folds really crisply in either direction. It’s great for spines in bookbinding. I get mine at Kelly Paper, but if you just want to experiment, you can buy a envelope made of Tyvek at an office supply store and cut it up.
The biggest drawback is that it’s a glaringly white color. Printing on it is difficult, but it can be painted with a sponge and water-based acrylic paint. Dampen the sponge, put a bit of paint on the Tyvek and use the sponge to rub out the paint into a very very thin layer. It’ll dry almost instantly. The paper gets a sort of marbled effect.
Here’s some pictures of my envelope book. Click on them to see a bigger image. Unfortuantely this book won’t hold very much of my paper scrap collection. But it’s perfect for having some scraps to play with at home, away from my studio.
Douglas Morgan, a Collector of Typefaces, Dies at 75
That’s the intriguing title of the obituary in the New York Times last Monday (written by Steven Heller).
“Mr. Morgan began acquiring antique wood types in the 1950s… These woodblock letters and fonts were commonly used in the mid- to late-19th century for advertisements, posters and handbills. Darker and larger than more delicate metal typefaces, they are familiar today as the bold lettering on vintage western wanted posters. Yet many classic wood type variations were intricately ornamental, used to grab the attention of passers-by in an increasingly cluttered advertising environment.
I collect wood type myself, so Mr. Morgan is a kindred spirit. A bit of Google searching reveals that the “Hall of Printing and Graphic Arts” at the Smithsonian was put into storage in late 2003. Very sad. But in my search for more info on the Morgan collection I happily stumbled upon Lloyd Schermer’s wood type sculptures (that’s an example above).
As a kid, courtesy of my large box of Crayola crayons, colors were synonymous with words: apricot, almond, goldenrod… (of course wikipedia has a chart with historical information on every Crayola color ever!). As an adult and a letterpress printer the word-names aren’t useful anymore. I mix colors using a Pantone mixing guide, which has no names, only percentages of other colors with no names (well, really code numbers for names!). So when my friend Cathy sent me a link to a color thesaurus, I was immediately transported back to kindergarten, sitting at the kitchen table with paper and my box of Crayolas (and that smell of waxy crayons). Here’s the entry for “goldenrod”:
I discovered COLOURlovers when I was working out the design and palette for my calendar earlier this summer. They give “people who use color … a place to check out a world of color, compare color palettes, … and read color related articles and interviews.” My friend Kate says she’s been using them lately to open her color thinking and she pointed me to a wonderful article about the colors in the original printing of The Wizard of Oz.
Click on the picture to the left to view beautiful high resolution scans of a first edition of the book, preserved in the Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division.
And to the right is one of the palettes you can create on COLOURlovers, this one taken from the colors in that first edition of The Wizard of Oz.