In addition to the Bookmaking With Kids and Susan’s Kupinski’s Making Books with Children, there’s a new web resource for making books with kids. Arts, Books and Creativity is a year-long arts curriculum developed by the National Museum of Women in the Arts. The curriculum section of the site has PDF worksheets with book structure instructions and there’s also an interactive section with videos about making books and tying content to structure.
life forms patterns
haphazard and beautiful—
catch them as they fly by
This week I finished printing my 2008 calendar — a year of patterns and poetry. It’s a desktop calendar with 12 unbound letterpressed cards that display the month, a pattern and a haiku poem written for that month. It comes in a plastic case that doubles as the display frame.
It’s been the perfect project to end my “year of the broadside“, as each month is a mini-broadside with a poem and illustration. It was especially fun selecting the 2 colors for each month (and especially challenging to hand mix all those colors so they matched my swatches!)
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 ($18 + shipping).
When I have a question about my press or how it’s not printing as I would like, I look on Briar Press’s bulletin board or through the PP Letterpress archive. But sometimes I’d really rather look through a book, especially at my studio where there isn’t an internet connection.
Too bad there aren’t many modern letterpress books, and even the old ones don’t have much information on fixing smaller tabletop presses, like C&P Pilots, and nothing on using photopolymer plates. Boxcar has digitized a Kelsey manual with information on oiling, press set up, makeready and printing on envelopes. A friend gave me Letterpress: New applications for traditional skills by David Jury — the title sounded promising but it’s just a coffee table book with lots of pictures and nothing really practical about printing. Paul Moxon has written an appreciation of John Ryder’s 1955 book Printing for Pleasure (available from NA Graphics).
Here’s what’s on the shelf at my studio:
This summer I sent coasters to the Sampler, a marketing & promotional tool for indie businesses. I had fun designing and making my contribution but wasn’t sure if it would generate any sales. To my pleasure, I sold a few broadsides. But even better is that the Sampler folks bought my coaster packs to be part of the debut of Sampler Select. It’s a package of home-themed items, including a shotglass, a wall tile, soap, and a special print by one of Etsy’s most popular sellers, theblackapple. You can find out all about it here.
I’m printing my 2008 calendar design on my hand-feed, manually operated (using a foot treadle) letterpress printer. The calendar has 14 pages, 2 colors each. This ends up to be a lot of feeding and a tremendous amount of treadling. It’s not a particularly mindless task, as I have to pay attention so that my hands don’t get caught as the platen opens and closes, that the paper is straight, and most importantly that the ink is consistent across pages. Once I get a rhythm going, though, it turns out to be a pleasant way to spend an afternoon, especially with a bit of music on the radio or through my ipod.
While printing I’ve been thinking about calendars I’ve particularly liked. The one pictured in this post is by Lisa Rappoport of Littoral Press from 2005. It’s really more of a mediation on time, I guess, and it perfectly matches that repetitious feel that I have spending my afternoons treadling. (Kate Godfrey took the picture.)
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
“Synesthesia” means one sensory experience described in terms of another sensory experience, such as hearing colors or seeing notes. When I was a kid and learning arithmetic, I would get confused and think “5+2=green” or “5+4=purple”. But just as we memorize multiplication tables, I memorized 5+2=7. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I knew there was a name for my confusion (there’s even a sub-genre called “grapheme” for perceiving numbers or letters as inherently colored). I still occassionally get confused though, and as I was printing my latest wood type collage, I noticed that I was thinking of number pairs in terms of colors. So “synesthesia” seemed like a good title for this one.