Green Chair Press Blog

All in One Place

flurrsprite has organized a Bookbinding Street Team on Etsy. (A Street Team is a group of Etsy sellers who band together to promote their shops.) She’s started a blog with links to members’ blogs. I especially appreciate having all those links in one place, and I’m really enjoying going through the blogs, especially the pictures and tutorials.
At My Handbound Books there’s a tutorial for making this origami fold book. Plus there are lots of great photos of her leather-bound books, as well as her adventures learning Medieval and Renaissance book structures.

Outside the Box

This is my latest broadside, Secret Sky. I wanted a large swash of color in the background, so I used an uncut linoleum block to print the light blue. It required a lot of makeready (shimming up the block in the back, as well as some under the tympan of my press. The block isn’t flat nor is it an even thickness. Next time I want a solid fill I’ll try another material!). The circle is a photopolymer plate and the rest is wood type.
Here’s the quote that inspired the title:

“This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet.”
–Rumi

Framed

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.

Triumph or Struggle

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

Whiffs of Gramarye

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!

Stencil printing

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.