Green Chair Press Blog

Pen Nibs

I’ve been working on a matchbox book with a calligraphy (or handwriting) theme, and think I’ll include a pen nib in the box. I bought a box of nibs marked “new old stock” from Ebay, hoping they would spur me on. They arrived on Saturday in, what I thought, was a nice old box, appropriately the size of matchbox.

My box of pen nibs

Then on Sunday I saw the most recent post on letterology, entitled “20th C Italian Pen Nib Packaging,” and my box now looks very plain indeed. Here’s a couple of the Italian boxes, and you can see many more here.

Schachtel Vulcano pen nib box from Letterology

Flipbook Assembly Day

Last Friday was a flipbook making day in my studio. First I print the books (8-up), cut them into stacks, staple each book with a piece of heavy black paper for the spine, and finally fold and secure the spine (with glue). The key is my stack cutter, which lets me cut the entire book in one hunk, so there’s no trimming required once the spine is attached. You can see all my flip books here.

Mind Map

I couldn’t find a bigger picture, but I was intrigued by this work by Bexx Caswell in the “Geographies: New England Book Work” show by the members of the Guild of Book Workers’ New England chapter. In the catalog she says

When I first moved to New York, I helped myself to learn the city by equating roads and neighborhoods to those I knew growing up in Philadelphia. I used a similar tactic when I moved to Boston a few years later. I soon found that as I became more familiar with the roadways of Boston, the once familiar landscapes of Philadelphia and New York became faded and distorted in my mind’s eye. Although each of the cities featured in this book have their own distinct geographies, they also share a certain sameness dictated by their location on the East Coast. Street names, landmarks, and visual landscapes all blend into one another.

To create this book, I dissected maps of Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, and then shuffled the pages so that they would be ordered randomly. I intentionally chose maps printed by the same mapmaker to encourage visual similarities. Each roadmap blends into the next, a chaotic jumble of roads, street names, and anonymous landmarks. This in not unlike the map which now exists in my mind’s eye.

See the entire catalog here.

Submerged

Maybe it’s because we have so little water (and humidity) here in New Mexico, but this book by Lisa Onstad, with it’s cool wet blues caught my eye recently. It’s called Submerged and also was a winner of an EcoEditions Award from 23 Sandy. The caption on the 23 Sandy site says, about the book:

In 1957 the Columbia river was dammed at Celilo Falls, inundating ten thousand years of native culture and a thriving river ecosystem. Submerged depicts this event with poignant text and hand-painted imagery by the artist. The physical structure of the book captures both the flow and stasis of Celilo Falls: the opening movement of the book mirrors cascading water and the static pages reference a dam wall.

Prompt Challenge: word-paint

The March word for my prompt challenge book group is word-paint: v. To describe or depict vividly in words; to make a word picture of.

Our meeting isn’t until the end of the month, but last weekend I did a show-and-tell of my books down in Albuquerque to Libros, the New Mexico Book Arts Guild. Barbara Byers came up after my talk and showed me the doodle she made as I talked—imagine my excitement when I saw it was a word-paint! She kindly scanned it and sent me a copy. Here it is:

Happy Birthday to the Modern Printing Press

On April 14, 1863, William Bullock was awarded a US patent for the modern printing press— the first rotary printing press to self-feed the paper, print on both sides, and count its own progress. His press revolutionized the newspaper business, as it meant that they no longer had to rely on an operator who manually feed individual sheets of paper into a press. (Sadly, according to wikipedia, “a few years after his invention, Bullock was accidentally killed by his own web rotary press.”)
Below is a picture of Bullock’s press. I didn’t know about Bullock until about a week ago, when I read a nice post about him on the Afterimage blog, which also has links to more info on Bullock.