Things I Find Beautiful

Inkless, the treadle platen C&P waits for its turn in the sun beams.


Instead of a very large gear, I like to think of this as a staircase. It also has no mercy, and has entangled many a printer's fingers or loose clothing. Most printers who damage themselves on the presses do so when attempting to fix or align parts of the press, instead of sustaining an injury while operating the press. At some point, I'll have to post the Marian and Jen rules of printing safety, developed one year ago about this time of year.


Mac built this out of leads and spaces when he was supposed to be listening to Kate say something of import. This tower remained standing for two days, which says something about the state of the shop at the time.


Natural light doesn't just make the printed images look beautiful. It lights up the lead here and makes those letters even more pronounced. It also picks up the colors of old ink layered and smeared into the type time after time, so much smearing that you'd think the type would just melt into a brownish grey color. Here you can see faded red and purple in the relief of each letter.


Umbrellas never seemed so fascinating. The cut below it is upside-down, but it's a landscape with bubble-gum bubble clouds. "Cut," by the way, a the term for the images. It might not be the official term, but that's what we use at the Print Shop. I think it derives from "woodcuts" - and we have some of those too, as well as linoleum cuts. These, however, are lead.

These cuts of birds frozen in various stages of flight are about an inch long at widest, and a centimeter high at smallest.