The Composing Stick

A Recent Obsession

2008-06-06T01:03:00.014-04:00

[Note: This essay was originally written as an article for The Collegian, a campus publication. However, for various reasons the issue in which this article was supposed to appear was never published, so I am taking the liberty of publishing it here, with minor edits. I want to post this while it is still fresh, before returning to material I'd neglected.]

"And so you make your place in the world by making part of it –
by contributing some new part to the set.... The world is not yet done.”
~Art and Fear, Bayles and Orland, p. 69.

I did not write a Senior Thesis. I took the English department's Comprehensive Examinations instead. Sometimes, that bothers me. Sometimes, I wish I was walking away from Washington College with something a little more tangible than a degree. Oh, for a thesis to rest quietly in Miller Library's electronic database or to hand with grave dignity to my mother and father, to be able to say "Here. Now, leave me alone."

I chose not to write a thesis in part so I could devote my time to my poetry, to write and shape a portfolio, but last semester I was still a bit hesitant about presenting a notebook full of poetry to my parents. They're quite supportive, but it still didn't have the same weight (in my mind at the time) as fifty pages of critical analysis of someone else's poetry.

My solution came in mid-Fall '07, when I was sitting on a table in the Literary House's Print Shop with Marian Robbins and Lindsay Lusby, both seniors as well and both enthusiastically involved in the Advanced Letterpress and Book Arts Workshop. We were brainstorming projects that might go beyond our usual, though fun, jobs for the Literary House.

Bookmarks and broadsides lay about us in stacks, and blank, hand bound journals filled the shelves behind us. Wouldn't it be great, I thought, if I could combine the printing and the binding to create not just a fine poster but a book, one with text inside. What if I printed my own poetry? A fine letterpress edition would beat out a book slapped through Lulu.com.

But might be awkward to print a book of my own poems. Chapbooks have a long, respectable history, but as a poet who is still a fledgling, I thought it might be a bit vain. What would distinguish my effort from a "vanity press" but the old-fashioned technology?

I said all this to Marian and Lindsay, in fewer words. And they each said, "Me too!" - to both the desire and the concern.

"So let's print one book of poems from all three of us, together," I suggested, and we did.

"To all viewers but yourself, what matters is the product:
the finished artwork. To you, and you alone, what matters is the process.”
~Art and Fear, Bayles and Orland, p. 5.

It wasn't that simple – and if it had been, we wouldn't have had so much fun. Yet the quote above says the process only matters to me (and my comrades in rubber-based ink), so I'll try to simplify.

The first, most important step was editing our poems and compiling them into a cohesive manuscript. This involved long nights on the floor of Lindsay's living room, poems spread before us in an ever-shifting black and white mosaic. We emerged with a fifteen-poem manuscript, with five sections of three poems each.

None of us realized it at the time, but the decisions we had to make in ordering and grouping our poems foreshadowed the decisions we would have to make in compiling our final portfolios in the spring.

The Print Shop has a spectacular 30" monitor for a PowerMac equipped with Adobe InDesign, and we took full advantage of it for the design stage. We had to imagine the finished book, what size and shape we wanted, how we wanted it to feel when held in the reader's hand – then translate that to the page.

Next, we applied to the Cater Society of Junior Fellows for funding, because we realized that unless we bought polymer plates of our manuscript, we would not have the time or energy to complete our project.

Usually, when printing a postcard, I would hand set the lead type, letter by letter. Instead, we emailed our digital manuscript to Boxcar Press in MA, and all of our poems returned whole and Braille-like on thin plastic sheets that we applied to a base for the press. This allowed me to draw the title page art, though for the rest, we used "cuts," images the press already had hidden in the basement.

We spent two weeks printing, cultivating sore arms and ink-streaked skin. We squeezed out forty-ish hours between classes and homework. Between the three of us, we cranked the press' handle about 6000 times.

Now, after selecting paper colors and textures, we are binding. This includes collating, folding, sewing, gluing, cutting, and more gluing. This stage will continue until 18 May, 2008*. I know what I will be doing over senior week, and I would not trade it for anything else.

"No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone."
~"Tradition and the Individual Talent," T. S. Eliot

To Eliot, we stand among the dead, amidst relationships that change as we set forth our own art. While as poets, Marian, Lindsay, and I are of course aware of the English canon and our conversations with it, for this endeavor we were also as printers aware of the weight of history, of Gutenberg, of John Ruskin, and William Morris and the Kelmscott Press.

I like also to think we must find meaning and strength as artists in others, in community. Neither Marian, Lindsay, nor I would have undertaken this task alone. Yet because we did, we stretched ourselves through every stage in the birth of a book.

I can graduate happily, because I managed to find an adventure that required I draw from my poetry and art classes, not to mention the Letterpress Workshop. This perhaps is my thesis: an intensive, interdisciplinary effort to shake my fist in the face of the internet, and more importantly, to make the lonely art of poetry that of a community.

In May, I walk away from WaC with something tangible: a book. My share of our 200 copies, that is.

*Process is as yet still ongoing, even beyond 18 May 2008. Projected completion date has been revised.

Thanks!

2008-05-23T12:32:00.007-04:00

Thanks to everyone for all the recent interest. Please feel free to read a few of the earlier posts for more context.

In the first post, I introduce myself, my interests, and purpose. The next two, "What Is a Composing Stick, Anyway" and "Setting the Scene," might also be helpful.

Also, an update: I graduated on Sunday from Washington College, and so unfortunately I longer work in the Print Shop. However, I had a lot of great projects this past semester, I took a lot of pictures, and once I get everything sorted, I intend to restart this blog. If you are interested, please check back in a week or two for more on a resumed update schedule. Thank you!

Cosy in the Snow

2007-12-05T23:55:00.000-05:00

I always walk to the Print Shop. My reasons are simple: I don't have a car, and my dorm is only seven minutes away, by my stride. Also, walking wakes me up. This morning, I stepped out an hour early, at 11:00 a.m., right into a constant flow of snowflakes. Today, I didn't walk to work, I skipped and twirled and stomped.

The snow calmed the landscape and softened the edges of even the ugliest buildings on campus. When I reached the Literary House, the snow was already bearing down on the black roof, muting the pitch of it to the same greys and whites that already belonged to the trees.

Inside the Print Shop, even the Vandercook 4's chipped blue-grey paint felt brighter, starker. Sunlight generally steps directly down through the tall windows in wide beams, but today it was diffused by the thick, low clouds. It was as though the roof and front of the shop had been lifted off, as if they were part of a doll house, exposing the shop to the visual beauty of the elements.

As a result of so much light, the shop felt larger to me, as though I had tasted a few drops of the potion in Alice's "Drink Me" bottle. When I printed 100 sheets for Beanball, each sheet felt less substantial than the sheets I had handled the day before. Also, I noticed that the light, thin as it was, was strong enough that I could hold a sheet of paper up toward the window and see through it as well as if I had pressed it to a light box.

Jim asked me to search among some endpaper samples to find a good color and texture that would work with the colors he has in mind for the cover and the crisp white of the book's pages. Endpapers are the blank sheets that start and end a book; they mark a visual progression from the cover to the title page, and from the final page to the cover. Perhaps because the light was so cold, my eye caught a burgundy sheet with dark flecks. It's dark enough to anchor the bright pages and it's as rich as blood, which could fit well with the story's noir tone.

"Sometimes it's best to go with your instinct," Jim said, and apparently our instincts agreed. He asked me to figure out the amount of paper to buy. I had to determine how many 7" by 10" sheets we could cut from a 20.5" by 33" sheet, which is 8, and divide that number into 200, the number of 7" by 10" sheets we would need. I am embarrassed to note that this was perhaps the most complicated math I have had to attempt in at least the past semester, and it went smoothly until I realized that 200 divided by 8 is just 25, not 24.64.

But I kept my cool, and Jim ordered the paper. He managed to secure the last fifteen 41" by 33" sheets of that particular kind of burgundy paper available on the East Coast, so we'll have plenty of extra in case we mis-cut any. The 20.5" by 33" sheets were completely out.

Mike called from his day job with an assignment regarding the final Advanced Workshop project, which is the development of a postcard that can be used as a punchy demonstration piece. I searched out a font to suit a Samuel Johnson quote. Maybe it was the brain-clearing influence of the crisp light, but I found the choice particularly easy.

I crouched before the case of 24 point Munder Venezian, composing stick in my left hand, and swiftly nipped each letter from its home. The point size was large enough that setting was easy; it is easier to identify letters when they are larger, and the letters are weighty enough that they do not slump to one side if I jostle the composing stick before the line is filled. However, my wrist began to feel just how weighty lead is after only one line was complete. The whole form felt as heavy as a third of a brick, but made up for that with character. The lowercase "g"s have a rounded cowlick, and the "e"s have a slanted crossbar like a nose upturned or a smile quirked.

I completed the quote within 20 minutes, washed my hands, swung myself into my borrowed leather coat, and chatted with Jim for another 20 minutes before I actually left the shop for a quick lunch and my 2:30 class.

I happen to hate being cold. I can tromp through snow happily as long as the stuff doesn't invade my socks, and I can twirl and skip in it as long as the wind doesn't tear through my jacket, but I much prefer a quiet evening in my room to a snowball fight. I like to look and look and look, reserving the touch for token moments. Today, joy of the snow and the window's planetarium-like view of it from the safety of the Print Shop both managed to warm me for the entire day.

Time to Catch Eyes

2007-12-02T03:36:00.000-05:00

With the body of my poem set, I was at a bit of a loss. The poem itself looked pretty, sitting quietly in Goudy Old Style, set and spaced the way I wanted it (but for the "t"s in the last stanza). What next? Oh, right. A title.

But what font would best represent the poem as well as catch the reader's eye?

I consulted Lindsay one evening during the workshop. She ran straight to a case tucked away behind the stairs and pulled out 24 pt Camelot, which is very leggy and curvy. Its serifs are subtle and it generally feels very elegant, so I went with it happily. I set the title and put it aside for the evening.

Later, 24 points just didn't feel like enough. I went to grab the 30 pt case and see if it was large enough, when I noticed an unlabeled case beneath it. I pulled it out with a little difficulty, in hopes that it was an even larger version of Camelot. It was better.

What it looks like: all capitals and large, larger than 30 pt Camelot and much bolder, with a "hand-tooled" sort of open space in each letter. Each line feels hand chiseled, no line is perfectly straight but bends or bellies a little, and this makes the font appear to move a little, even though it stands firm and bold on the page. It has life, and flourish, particularly in the "A." More importantly, it feels imposing and grand, much like the feeling I tried to create in the poem.

The only thing that bothers me about this font is that I do not know its name. Its impressions on my broadsides are like those of the crystal slippers outside Cinderella's ball, and I have the fallen slipper and no idea who she really is. I can make more impressions. I just can't give her credit.

Note: The letters in this picture are particularly juicy because I used too much ink when proofing. The edges in the final printing are more cleanly cut.

Things That Distress Me

2007-12-02T02:56:00.001-05:00

I am not a naturally organized person. I like working in a certain amount of clutter and chaos, but order has its place, especially in a shared work environment. Here are some examples of how chaotic the print shop was before Tuesday (when Mac and I worked damage control and fixed this).

This is where we keep most of the leads, which allow us to make lines of type single spaced, double spaced, etc. They aren't normally scattered about like this - normally, each is stacked almost neatly in or on top of others in the section of its width. For some reason, the disarray here bothers me more than the disarray anywhere else in the shop.

This is dangerous. Not for a person's body, aside from toes if it fell, but for a person's mind. There was a case stacked on a stool as well, and unlike this one, it fell before I could move it to a safer place. It is not particularly fun to re-sort an entire case of 14 point type that has dust and dirt all throughout because the floor where it fell was particularly dirty.

And this is why that case was balanced so precariously on the press. There was no room on the table! Also, note the stack of four, yes four, cases on the left. As far as the other cases, they're each stacked on something else as well. I believe Mac, in the background, is attempting to straighten up.

These photos predate the recent Thanksgiving break. It took us several days before the break and a good deal of Tuesday to clean up so we didn't embarrass the Press when Mr. Dissette arrived. Oh, and so, you know, we could actually work without knocking things over.

Another Freshman Profile

2007-12-01T19:07:00.000-05:00

If Katrina's distressed or bored between classes, she'll come to the print shop to sort out her head. She's a constant presence during my work hours on Friday evenings. She sort of appears at the bookbinding station, cutting cloth, stitching signatures, plotting new designs, and when something excites her, she lets it burst out of her in a flow of chatter.

"Look at this stitch work," she'll say, waving an open instruction book in front of my nose. "Just look at it. Isn't it beautiful?" She usually sighs and looks back at it herself. "I need to know how. I have to try this."

Bookbinding is her greatest passion, and even though she's a Freshman, she has her education as a bookbinder laid out before her in a shimmering timeline. Katrina will spend her time at Washington College making the most of the print shop's resources - its binding studio and Mike himself - to build an ambitious portfolio. Then, she's off to graduate school specifically for bookbinding. She worries constantly about whether she'll get in, or if she'll be able to only bind books and not print. Typesetting interests her, but she has difficulty seeing the 12 pt fonts to manipulate them.

Mike's collection of instructional bookbinding books is vast. Katrina has already immersed herself in his library. Every Friday she finds another book to borrow, another technique to try, another design to absorb.

"If I returned all the books I have in my room right now," she asked me a few days ago, "do you think Mr. Kaylor'd let me borrow some books over Winter Break?"

As of last night, Katrina has put her latest ambitious plan on hold. Josh and Jim pounced on her last night with a proposal: they want her to hand bind at least one of the "Beanball" books, ideally to showcase with the other hand bound versions in One Story's display at the upcoming Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference in January.

They've dished out creative freedom, but they want her to get the book feeling like baseball. Josh suggested stitching the cover in a baseball stitch. Katrina's contemplating white leather and how actual stitching or suggested stitching might curve across the cover.

The stitching idea reminds me of a book I saw at Oak Knoll. It's a book about the Black Sox called Ballet for Opening Day, made by Sherwin Beach Press. Every image was stitched into the book like a baseball, with much finer red thread on the cotton rag paper (plus Indiana corn husk specks).

I think Katrina can pull off an impressive cover that speaks specifically to "Beanball"'s feel as a short story, especially because it's not just a baseball story, it's got an air of darkness and mystery. And if she attempts stitching, she'll approach it in a completely different way than the pages of Ballet for Opening Day.

She's already got a baseball, borrowed from Mike, tucked away in her pocket for analysis. As soon as he handed it to her, she began turning it about in her hands, studying the thread, searching for a clue as to where it started or finished. She even ran up into the heart of the Lit House to find someone more familiar with baseball to see if they knew how baseballs were stitched.

When she realized she probably wouldn't be able to find the beginning because the manufacturers tucked the ends away so well, she began to think of the stitching as fluid and continuous. When I last saw her, she was spinning the ball in her soft hands, examining the way the stitching sat on the ball from various angles to find the best configurations for the front and cover of the book to give it graphic dimension.

That's something that Ballet for Opening Day's stitched pages don't quite have from their stitching, probably so that the stitching doesn't draw attention away from the etchings. Katrina's work can be as bold and focal as she'd like because she's dealing with the cover, which often has to sell the book.

I feel like I'm selling the college in saying this, but it amazes me that a freshman can get such an "amazing opportunity," as Katrina calls it, here. And not just Katrina: Mac and I are getting similarly exciting book printing experience and advice in helping Mr. Dissette. And the Lit House has offered to promote a project that Marian, Lindsay and I are attempting, one that I like to call "Top Secret Book Project."

I can't even imagine where Katrina's passion will get her if she can keep up with it.

Things I Find Beautiful

2007-12-01T03:04:00.000-05:00

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.

Some Breathing Room?

2007-11-30T16:13:00.000-05:00

It's time to share the shop. Here's what's happening as the semester draws to a close:

We have a guest! Printer Jim Dissette, Washington College alumnus and Sophie Kerr Prize winner now lives in the Print Shop during the day. He arrived earlier this week with an ambitious goal: to design and print a book in 10 days. One Story magazine, which publishes one story each month, has chosen "Beanball" by Ron Carlson as its 100th story. Because we Lit House junkies recently hung out with the magazine's editor, Hannah Tinti, for a week when she was our first Mary Wood Fellow, The Literary House asked Jim to come down and print 100 copies for a fine letterpress book edition of the story to celebrate the landmark.
Jim estimated that this job will require around 360,000 impressions - that is, he has to turn the lever for the Vandercook cylinder press 360,000 times before the job is done. Mac and I have elected to lend him a hand.

President Tipson loved the holiday cards the Advanced Workshop printed last year, so much so that we've got the job again this year. We're printing 2,500 cards and envelopes, but with two different colors on the fronts of the cards and a colophon on the backs, we're facing down 10,000 impressions. Each card passes through a platen press three times, and each envelope once.

And finally, in the Advanced Workshop, we still have to finish our Project #2. Last night, Lindsay trooped along and printed the quote on 348 sheets of paper. The next steps are to print our cover image and colophon. We have to get this job done before Jim needs the Vandercook to start printing "Beanball."

Last night we had three presses running at once! Lindsay ran the Vandercook, Marian ran the motorized platen press, and I ran the treadle platen press. Mac popped in and helped, too. It was a great relief for Mike, who has spent the past week and a half wrestling with the motorized platen press. It needed a new belt, but now the pulley and motor system needs to be readjusted, and it required a lot of fiddling and banging. Thanks to Mike, it finally works, but it makes a ferocious rattling roar when it's on.

If only all this excitement wasn't tempered by looming exams.

Chew Me Up and Spit Me Out

2007-11-29T09:48:00.000-05:00

Last night I stared into not the abyss but the whirling humming clanking rush and release of the motorized C & P platen press, although it often seems like it is staring back at me.

Only later did I notice my foot aches, only later did I succumb to fatigue. In the extended, pulsing moment, all I could feel was the jumbled shudders of the press. My eyes followed the swing of the bed as it tilted up toward me for each card and bowed back down to urge the card on in its kiss with the persistent type-clad platen. My hands worked on their own, retrieving and feeding each card and the next, the next, the next. With each feed of the press, I leaned in and the maw of the press gaped, trapping my eyes among the internal ink-caked iron parts that clicked and gnashed. Each of my breaths slipped into the cycle. If I happened to glance up at the clock, or down further at my hands, I was jolted from my focus and my stomach would turn abruptly, uncomfortably.

A large lever, left of the wheel that was left of the platen, allowed me to shift the platen and bed farther apart, so the type and card just missed, could not meet. When my pile of printed cards grew high enough on the shelf before me, I would throw the lever, step out of the rhythm for four or five measures. I'd set the cards aside, refresh my stack of blank ones, and step back into the rhythm and breathe again. The rhythm would break only if I pressed the switch so the press would stop mid churn, when I would dab more ink to the disc that crowned the press. Rollers slid up and down the disc with a hushing sound, picking up ink to slick over the type.

Within that rhythm, which always exists, though not often so dizzyingly or monstrously, I have room to think. If I fret or mope, I lose the rhythm. The thinking is gradual, it sneaks under my elbow or up through the churning parts of the press. Thoughts ride on the back of a feeling that ferments every time I succumb to rhythm. Not that I am one with the machine, nothing so zen. Just that I am a living part of the machine, part of a bridge between craft and industry. It's more a feeling of fitting just so in a cycle rather than straddling a gap.

Somehow when I stare, as I did last night, into the churning of the parts of the press and release my hands to move deftly in and out of them, the anxieties of my mind are released from me by my physical actions. The rest of my mind approaches a state that I can only describe as a strange disconnect from self-consciousness, the state that I generally need to write, paint, throw pottery,* or make jewelry.

I often have to stay up past exhaustion to reach that state when I am trying to write. When I make jewelry, throw, or paint, I reach it through the physical, tactile efforts that each of those crafts require. Printing seems to me to be an integral part of the craft of letterpress because it allows me to feel the way I do when I finally let go and write, even though technically, the creative part has just about finished. Sometimes I'm not even involved in the creative process, when I just print a pre-designed form, yet I still get that feeling, that state. The reason, I haven't yet figured out. I guess I'll have to print more. It's a good thing the Print Shop is hopping. President Tipson's Christmas cards require a total of 10,000 impressions in the press, my part of which will give me plenty of time for thinking.

*shape clay on a potter's wheel, not toss vases

Make Me Feel Like Magic

2007-11-20T00:55:00.000-05:00

Naptha. Say it softly, say it slowly, and be careful not to spit when you cross from the "p" to the "th." Say it and imagine you're rolling the word between your fingertips like dried glue.

The Oxford American Dictionary wouldn't know it, but it's a kerosene-like chemical that we use to clean hand rollers.

For me, naptha evokes the world of The Golden Compass, an alternate universe with thicker roots to its 19th century, in which polyester is called "coal-silk" and rooms are lit with naptha lamps. Naptha was in fact used in lamps in our 19th century, or at least a brief Google search tells me so. I had never heard of naptha before reading the aforementioned book, so in my mind naptha rests as the fuel for soft light that occasionally flickers, even as I work with it occasionally for a different use.

For the rest of our ink removal needs, we use Scrub-A-Dub: Letterpress Solvent from Boxcar Press. It's 81% Aromatic Naptha,* which I suppose explains why it stinks of slightly sweetened gasoline. Some sort of ether makes up 12% more, of interest to me only because it evokes Einstein and the outdated, even romantic, idea that something exists between atoms, between everything, conducting light, holding us together.

That 12% soothes the naptha somehow so we can use it on the press rollers without damaging them. Real naptha, unadulterated naptha is the only thing for the hand rollers, those finicky things.

Even though I know there's a difference, every time I stand at the Vanderbilt 4, a Scrub-A-Dub-soaked rag in my gloved hands, I end up dreaming of low, moody lights and Victorian furniture as I wipe the silver of the rollers back into being.

*Scrub-A-Dub contains 75% of one kind of Aromatic Naptha and 6% of another. The difference is in serial numbers that follow, and as I am not a chemist, I have clumped the two kinds together for the purposes of this post.

When Mike's Away, the Typesetters Play

2007-11-15T00:31:00.000-05:00

One Thursday evening, the Advanced Workshop ran itself.

Lindsay, Olivia, Hailey, and I scuttled around the Print Shop, searching for 18 pt Palatino. We found it up in Mike's office, with the rest of the Palatino, and lugged the case down to the Book Arts section of the studio, to the one clear table in the joint. The larger tables, sturdy refuse from the old science building, were already choked with seven cases of type, five trays of set type, boxes of spacers, and unruly gatherings of notepaper.

Mike was away at an Artist's Reception for an exhibit in Washington D.C., about which I'll post more later. His instructions were simple: set the type for the quote for the Project #2 in 18 point Palatino if possible.

First, we had to make sure there were enough of each letter in the case of Palatino to set the quote. I grabbed a pencil and scrap paper to tally while Lindsay counted off each "a," "f," and all the rest. Olivia stood with Hailey over the case to our left, and between them they counted each letter in the case. To be safe, we counted out every punctuation mark and capital letter required for the quote.

"Waitaminute," Lindsay would blurt as I counted tallies, "let me count that again, I think I missed one." The "h"s are hard to count because they hide behind the "t" in "the," and often they are silent, and escape our notice. So Lindsay would recount, and the number would change for the more accurate.

Sure enough, we found after three letters that we were short by seven "d''s. Lindsay and I were still painstakingly counting out each letter, when Olivia and Hailey dashed off to the rescue, in search of another case of 18 pt Palatino.

After a harrowing search of every case in the Print Shop and the entire leaf-riddled basement, they returned triumphantly, waving purloined "d"s and prancing. Apparently the right case was right under their noses in Mike's office, left out on top of the cabinet after a previous project.

Later, Olivia found the missing "d"s in the original case... they had been mis-sorted into the "b"s two spaces over.

I set the first section of the quote so we could determine how it would fit, if it would fit, on its page, but before I finished the first line, Olivia realized we had to figure out how to divide each of the three parts of the quote into lines that looked nice and made sense. For example, it would be rather awkward to end a line with "and," or to have two full lines of the quote above one dangling word that just wouldn't fit.

Olivia fell to that, and Marian, who arrived late, and Lindsay poked each other and giggled. Olivia held up each arrangement of words for our approval, or to ask for an opinion, and the lines shifted in subtle ways on a scrap paper as she worked. Finally, each quote became ready for its transformation from graphite into lead.

She set the type for the second section of the quote and Lindsay set the third. Hailey left early. Marian and I kept ourselves busy by peering over shoulders, and then sat by the computers to discuss our Top Secret Book Project, which was beginning to congeal into a manuscript.

Project #2 is for the Literary House itself, and the Director, Josh Shenk, gave us a brainstorming session and a few things to think about when designing: the Lit House as a haven for the arts, "shelter," and the 225th anniversary of the College. Other than that, we have complete creative control, which is a very nice feeling indeed.

That night, we had creative control of another sort. Without Mike, it was up to us to make sure the 18 pt Palatino would be big enough, but not too big. If the 18 pt hadn't worked or hadn't felt right, we would have had to brainstorm and test another font. We decided to set the type on 30 leads, because they're standard. We decided to center the quote sections - ok, that was a given, but we discussed whether or not to do it because that part of the plan had escaped our memories.

It was weird to work as a group without Mike. He's a solid presence for when we're all feeling a bit flighty, he's a subtle confidence of mastery, and without him we all had to think a bit harder, try to test our recall. But we had each other to ask, or distract, and we got the job done.

Type Flies When I'm Having Fun

2007-11-13T03:23:00.000-05:00

"Oh, you don't have to leave," said Mac. "You want to finish setting your poem, right?"

Well, I did, but I was tired.

Quiet cogs and fingernails only occupied my meditations for the first three stanzas of my poem's seven. The next three I completed in the company of Mac and Katrina. A few posts ago, I said that Mac was printing 80 quotes - he's actually shooting for 100.

After I found the box of 12pt spacers and gathered up the right length of leads, stanzas one through three took me about two hours. I completed them studiously, peacefully, and alone. Composing is a quieter task than redistributing, with only the softest clicks and the occasional clatter if I knocked a whole line onto its face. When I redistribute, I practically toss each letter to its home, and it clacks familiarly upon landing in its pile. If I threw each letter into the composing stick as I composed, I'd very quickly have a jumble of type rather than ordered lines.

Stanzas four, five and six took longer, but didn't feel longer, thanks to company. I had to keep checking and rechecking my "d"s, "b"s, "p"s and "q"s, and later I discovered that the price of conversation was a few extra mistakes. Mac and I mostly kept our silence, though. I can set and speak pretty near simultaneously now, just slower and less accurately, but Mac still has to furrow his brow and turn down the corners of his mouth just so.

He would mostly pipe up every time I finished a stanza, to insist that even though it was well past my work hours, I should stay a little longer, do another stanza, finish off the poem, anything so he could stick around and knock out another quote. I'm all for enthusiasm, but these days, after 10 pm my fine motor skills want out.

It's times like these I feel old, and I'm only 21.

Problem Solving

2007-11-09T22:32:00.000-05:00

Today, your word processing program ran out of the lowercase letter "t" as you were attempting to complete the final paragraph of an essay. What do you do?

a. Cry.
b. Stare blankly at the screen in disbelief.
c. Bang at the "t" key repeatedly.
d. Switch fonts.

I managed to avoid options a and c when Goudy Old Style, 12 pt, left me seven "t"s short in the final stanza of my poem. Option a was particularly difficult to avoid.

What I did do:
- ransacked the basement for another case of my font
- feverishly compared the letter "t" from Goudy Old Style to "t"s from Caslon Old Style, Goudy Handtooled, and a number of other fonts, hoping that they'd be close enough to match
- finished setting the poem with seven Caslon Old Style "t"s

Marian, Olivia, and Lindsay, my trusty Advanced Workshop comrades, swore up and down that they could barely notice a difference. I had to make note of which "t"s were from which case, because I myself could hardly see the difference. But Mike's keen eye nabbed the differences right away, differences that only leaped under my eye once I proofed the poem on paper. The Caslon "t" is slightly smaller, slightly higher on the sort, and the sweep of the curve at the bottom bears minute differences to that of the Goudy "t".

The solution? I'll print everything but the final stanza, and then take "t"s from the rest of the poem to fix that stanza. Then I'll send the broadsides through the press again to add the last stanza. Twice the printing? Twice the fun!

My Continued Aspirations Toward Self-Publication

2007-11-06T09:04:00.000-05:00

The task before me: take a case of Goudy Old Style 12pt and transform it into the mirror image of a poem.

Thirty-five lines, seven five-line stanzas. 1,234 characters, including spaces. Every character a minuscule* fragment of lead for me to lift from its compartment and slide into place in a composing stick.

When I copy a poem or passage into my word processor for class, I usually begin at the beginning, with the first letter of the first line or sentence, and proceed linearly.

With moveable type, I begin somewhere in the middle. I search out what appears to be the longest line, set it, and use the width of the line as a standard for every other line in the poem. Every line is separated by the lines before and after it by "leads," the line spacers. These guys are what we use to adjust spacing - instead of hitting "double space" on a computer program, I insert extra leads of the right length between the lines.

Setting the type oddly disconnected me from the poem itself. In order to process each line at a good pace, I had to hold about two words in my head at once, and then think of each letter in its order and follow through physically by reaching for it in the type case.

Recently, Mac gave voice to something I've thought for a long time, which is that when you set type, you cannot help but notice just how many times you use each letter. He spoke in reference to his tendency to pick cases of type only to find halfway through setting that he doesn't have enough "e"s.

But as I mulled further over this while setting my poem, I realized that that awareness of the individual letters, as well as the common clusters of letters, can be helpful in examining poetry.

I had thought I knew my poem as well as my own fingernails, but composing it brought out new qualities, gritty, technical qualities that lay underneath meter. Qualities that affect the whole feel of the poem. This is something more than mere alliteration. I am not quite sure yet how to define it, but I know that right now, I feel like I have caught a glimpse of the 0s and 1s behind a computer program, or the quiet cogs of an open watch.

*According to the Oxford American Dictionary on my Macintosh, the word minuscule, (which I initially wanted to spell "miniscule," a common error or alternate spelling), derives from the Latin term "minuscula littera," or, "somewhat smaller letter," in reference to what we call lowercase letters. The book nerd in me feels that I am using the word imprecisely. I refer to every letter, punctuation mark, and spacer as being quite tiny - my poem is not comprised of lowercase letters.

Oh the Little Freshmens

2007-11-05T23:57:00.000-05:00

A couple of weeks ago, I invited two students from the Intro Workshop to keep me company during my work hours in the Print Shop – well, to stop in and work on their own projects. Both Katrina and Mac had been stopping by during Mike's and my hours on Friday evenings, and both had expressed frustrations with their limited access to the studio.

It's a new policy, but unfortunately, we have to keep the fancy new computers and printer under lock and key at the expense of accessibility. In past years, the shop was open to all comers, anyone who wanted to take a peek.

The solution works to my advantage: I get company, they get extra productivity time. And neither gets in the other's way, because Mac is currently absorbed in typesetting, while Katrina's passion, nay, life, is book binding. Of the two, Mac has been constantly present, and he often tries to wheedle me into staying longer.

I first met Mac at the Freshman Orientation this summer, when I demonstrated how to use the motorized Platen press. I believe he was the first to try, or at least one of the first. He had the first mistake, of that I'm sure, a double printing after which the bookmark read "BBOOOOKKSS" instead of "BOOKS," with a little overlap.

It's absolutely fascinating to see Mac's obsession with the art take hold. He's an English and Creative Writing oriented guy and basically lives in the Lit House these days, but he also works in the Media labs and carries his MacBook around everywhere.

Yet at least four days a week, the guy's in the shop, bustling about with trays of type, carefully composing quotes. He seized the bit and ran off with the idea of setting a quote on a postcard, turning that simple project into a book project involving the setting of around 80 quotes.

But that's not all! He painstakingly searches out new fonts for each quote, delving even into the far reaches of the cricket-infested basement for better specimens. Each quote involves at least two fonts and the application of his creativity in the design.

Clearly, he's finding this dusty old activity interesting.

It does my heart good to see Mac's chin-length blond hair from the top of the Print Shop steps, six cases of type stacked before him and seven unprinted quotes cluttering his work tray.

There are others in the Intro Workshop who are going above and beyond the basic assignment. One girl has set a poem that she wrote herself, and I want to ask her about the experience. Mac just sticks out because he's always around, constantly chipping away at the monstrous task before him. By now he's confident in his pace, and he hasn't wavered from his goal of 80-some quotes, but I just hope he's consistent in taking notes, because putting away the type for 80 quotes from what could be 100 different type cases is rather daunting even to me.

His persistence is comforting when I'm tired or disgruntled. It's refreshing to realize, as I'm starting to dread leaving in May, that there are students who are even more passionate about the Print Shop than I was when I was a freshman.

Usually, very few students continue into the Advanced Class, and many, like me, have to come back after a few semesters because classes and life get in the way. I like to think Mac will be there next semester, along with a handful of the others, and that they'll manage to eke even more out of this experience than I have (which is quite a lot).

Goudy, not Gaudy

2007-10-29T23:57:00.000-04:00

It's time for confession: I have yet to design and compose and print a project of my own.

In the Introductory Workshop, back when it was Press Club, I designed and set the type for a quote to put on a postcard. I finished late in the semester (way back in Freshman year), so I did not get a chance to print it. However, I have had plenty of experience in designing within a group, composing composing composing (and distributing x 3), and printing.

A few weeks ago, a certain notion thundered its way into my skull: I have access to the most rewarding form of vanity publishing. Hooray! Over the course of a month or so, I'll be scraping together my free time to design, compose, and print one of my very own poems. Did I mention I'm an "aspiring" poet? Or that I feel that "aspiring" is a rather frustrating term. I am a student poet who aspires to publication, but I am still a poet. And an artist. But that is a rant for another day.

What's strange is that by writing about the project here and posting a picture of the finished product, I'm sort of publishing the same work twice. As far as distribution of the physical product... if my family reads this blog, I'm spoiling their Christmas surprise. But in all sincerity, the project is primarily an exercise, a portfolio piece, and the expression of a desire to see my own writing in print.

I kick-started the process several weeks ago. I chose the poem, and then set about finding a font for the body.

It's absolutely useless to begin setting text only to later find that you've run out of the letter 'e,' or similar. My poem contains almost one hundred 'e's. So I limited myself to type cases that were brimming with letters.

This meant that my selection was essentially restricted to the more famous, well-stocked typefaces. I went with the standard 12 point size for two reasons: we have more variety in the 12 and 14 point ranges, and 14 felt too big for an already bulky poem of 35 lines. Italic would make it too delicate and bold would again be too bulky.

But here, elegance and readability, my next two essentials, were on my side. Most of the popular fonts are popular for good reasons. What took effort was the search for a font that was a little more unique. Caslon and Goudy found themselves neck and neck in the race for my favor for the simple reason that I could find neither in the font list of my copy of Microsoft Word. I considered in particular the Old Style forms of each font family because "Old Style" sounded fancier, an assumption that proved true.

Pacing the cramped basement for the fifteenth time, I told myself I could not afford to spend three hours on the selection of a font, and since I already had, I certainly could not afford a fourth. I brought the Goudy up to the Print Shop to examine directly against the Caslon. The letter 'g' sold it. Caslon's has a little serif that looks like a bulbous nose; Goudy's sweeps up and comes to a delicate point.

[Picture of g's here]

The next step is to set the type.

Mandrakes and Materials

2007-10-23T22:56:00.000-04:00

Today, Oni Buchanan gave a reading and demonstration of her poetry at the Literary House. She is highly attuned to form, and many of her poems play with her ideas of form and how the letters of the poems she writes can birth further, connected poetry. Many of her poems are actually two poems layered in such a way as to create a third, or poems inside poems.

In her Mandrake Vehicles, she takes form to a whole new level. She presents a poem in three parts, three large blocks of text, and, through flash animations, lifts "light" letters from each block poem to reveal further poems.

What I find particularly inspiring is the way Buchanan sees her poems - they are constructed word by word, letter by letter, and letters have vitality. They have the ability to move around on the page, to condense and speak further.

Even though she has taken her poetry into the digital format to give it literal movement, each letter has purpose, even the "light" letters, which, in one layer of The Mandrake Vehicles, form what she calls "detritus words" that rest below the poem.

She said that she had trouble envisioning her mandrake work in book form that would retain the fluidity of the letters, I can't help but think that she just didn't find the right book artist to help her. The traditionalist in me - hah, I work with moveable type - wants to see her layers formed by physical pages, transparent and translucent as she described in her talk. I'm imagining more pages than just one for each layer - extra pages that somehow show the tumbling of the letters... something that might even end up like a flip book.

However, regardless of my impulse toward traditional form, I absolutely love the elegance of the Flash solution.

Turning Matter into Spirit

2007-10-21T23:15:00.000-04:00

For our first project, we in the Advanced Workshop resolved to let the letters speak for themselves.

Our goal was to produce a broadside that could be sent to schools around Maryland (not just Kent County, as we had initially planned) to celebrate teachers and writing. We wanted to give teachers something that would make them smile, something that they might hang on their classroom wall.

We decided that the best approach would be to find a poignant quote - but not one that would have students rolling their eyes - and give it some graphic punch. Marian suggested that we incorporate the alphabet to that end.

Of the quotes we considered, most would have generated some serious eye-rolling. We probably would have indirectly sent some seniors to the hospital for eyeball lubrication and rehabilitation.

Then it clicked. Alphonse de Lamartine cried up from our notes: "Letters are symbols which turn matter into spirit!" and shook his fists at our thumbnail sketches of alphabet arrangements. What better saying to frame with an alphabet?

I love this broadside. I love the red alphabet that marches across in the bold yet elegant Solemnis font.

But will its audience? Will my favorite English teacher from high school run her hand across the letters, a slight smile on her face? Well, she'll smile, because she'll get a note from me along with the broadside. Will the rest of the teachers appreciate the unpersonalized, yet sincere, gesture? How many of the 336 broadsides will find homes on the walls of English classrooms?

This broadside has to compete with all of the pseudo-inspirational "Achievement" and "Perseverance" posters of intimidating mountains and patriotically planted flags that tend to cover the walls of schools. I hope that it will catch eyes for its comparative simplicity. If it does its job, it will make teachers feel appreciated, and it will give students, particularly writers, something to think about.

Oak Knoll Bookstore Titles

2007-10-06T23:45:00.000-04:00

Some interesting titles of books I found in the Oak Knoll Bookstore:

Anatomy of a Typeface, Lawson.
- Note: Mike already has this book. He has two.

Adventures in Editing, Towne.
- An older work by a man who describes his calling to and delight in editing.

Illustrated Library of Travel, Exploration, and Adventure: Central Asia, ed. Bayard Taylor.
- This one was quite old, with delicious tooling in the cracking leather cover.

Book & Folks, Teall. With chapter titles including:
- "Memoirs of an 'Omniverous Reader': Pre-college Years"
- "Memoirs of an 'Omniverous Reader': College & After"
- "His Majesty the Book"
- "A Little Weeding in the Garden of Books"
- " 'Style' "
- "Freedom in the Kingdom of Books"

The Bric a Brac Series: Personal Reminiscences by Constable & Gillies, ed. Stoddard.
- With the quote tooled in the cover "infinite riches in a little room"

A Snuff-boxful of Bibles, Wilbur Macey Stone.
- With pictures of snuff boxes fitting two small and two teensy Bibles.

Oak Knoll - Initial Response, Part II

2007-10-06T23:36:00.000-04:00

Unfortunately, I did not end up with enough time to properly explore each display in the main room. One press of note is Warwick Press, headed by Carol J. Blinn, a good friend of Mike's.

In fact, Mike knew almost every person in attendance. This is only partly because Mike is a warm, genial guy who manages to befriend everyone he meets. It is a result of the attitude of the book and letterpress community. Most of the exhibitors attend this same festival annually, but more importantly, they all collaborate, exchange notes, visit each other's presses, attend workshops, and help each other start new programs. They are all in this together, and most are not there to turn a large profit. They just love to make books, print, and generally keep these traditional arts alive.

Warwick Press has a great collection of Duck books, like A Poultry Piece, which recounts Carol's memories of raising ducks and geese in her hometown in Massachusetts. She also publishes poetry and fiction, such as Smitty's Cocks, so named because it elegantly presents a collection of eight cuts of roosters.

Sherwin Beach Press had two books that caught my eye. Ballet for Opening Day tells the story of the 1919 'Black Sox' Scandal from a point of view sympathetic to the players (and critical of the owner). It has gorgeous 'baseball card' type etchings that are actually stitched into the paper with red thread. The red thread also runs in curves along the pages like the stitching in baseballs. Saving His Life by Lee Sandlin is the story of a Russian immigrant, who is actually the father of the author. The book has not been printed yet, but the prototype leather cover is supple and flexible, as it is not wrapped around chipboard or similar. It lies flat when you open it, and the proposed paper is soft but strong. The book will come not in a box but in a bag, a silk drawstring bag, which emphasizes that intimate, handle-me feel established with that welcoming leather cover. For some reason, the bag sells the book to me - or it would, if I could afford the listed $2k, that it is definitely worth.

Red Howler Press from Pennsylvania had books of energetic engravings by David Moyer, who has a knack for capturing the character of a face with the feel of a da Vinci sketch, except with more emphatic use of line and a more disturbing tone. On the sample card I took, a creased face stares up at me with uncertain wide eyes framed by large ears and wild, wispy hair. A large, exuberant hat rests its disk-shaped brim just above those ears. This one is from a book entitled Ratio et Vanitas.

The Press on Scroll Road from Carrollton, OH had a book by Edward Lear called Nonsense Cookery that was approximately two inches by three inches. It paired intricate etchings with nonsensical recipies.

And Ninja Press was notable primarily for its name, although I quite like Carolee Campbell's work as well.

Back in the University Press room, Josh Shenk, the Director of the Literary House had finished his extensive rounds and returned to man the table with Mike. I think Josh got a really good idea of how other presses, especially the University Presses, compare to ours. I know I did - I think for our size, we were well-represented.

Mike, Marian, and I headed back home just before 5:00 p.m., early, thanks to the Washington College Dining Hall's early weekend hours. It would not have been fun to miss dinner, although I was very sad to leave the exhibition. I left with a sense that I now have a real place in this community, that even if I don't pursue this art in graduate work (but I'm considering it), I "have ink under my fingernails," and I like it.

Oak Knoll - Initial Response, Part I

2007-10-06T22:29:00.000-04:00

At 8:30 a.m. I stumbled out of my suite to meet Mike Kaylor and Marian, a fellow student in the Advanced Workshop, just outside, in Mike's truck. The cabin of said truck was crammed with boxes of poster tubes, John Barth books, and a massive poster display book. I managed to fit in the back seat with all the merchandise (barely), and after a brief stop for sustenance, we were on our way.

We reached New Castle, Delaware by 10 a.m., despite a detour in Frog, DE (mostly because it has a fun name). New Castle itself is a small river town that is very much like Chestertown in its obsession with brick, its historical buildings, and its steamy weather. The morning waffled between rain and sun, and instead left us with overcast skies and heady humidity.

After organizing our third of a display table in the basement of St Peter's, we meandered along the crumpled brick-paved sidewalks to the Oak Knoll Bookstore. The books occupy two of three floors in a brick ~~row house~~ [EDIT: As Shereen from Oak Knoll corrected me, it is "in the old Opera House created by the Masons," which explains the grand staircase. It's a unique building, the tallest in town. See Shereen's comment below for more about this building's history].

After poking around for more than an hour, Marian and I poked did not even reach the back of the first room. We tore ourselves away from the tooled and gilded bindings of typography manuals and murder mystery bibliographies with considerable reluctance.

At 12:00 p.m., the exhibition room was brimming with exhibitors and visitors, all cozied in beneath blocks of fluorescent lights. Marian and I manned the table first and fielded questions about the Print Shop and Press. Generally, our visitors, especially our fellow exhibitors, were thrilled to see college students with an active interest in letterpress.

At 2:00, The Book Guys interviewed Mike about the Literary House Print Shop and his interests in letterpress printing! The Book Guys is a radio show hosted by Allan Stypeck and Mike Cuthbert. In Maryland, it airs on WBJC-FM 91.5 on Sundays from 8:00-9:00 p.m. They had a table set up with all their mysterious equipment so they could record two hours worth of programming to cover the Oak Knoll Fest and the key players in the letterpress and book arts renaissance.

Thrillingly enough, Mike was kind enough to mention this blog in his interview! If he makes it on air, that's fantastic advertising - and it might even get to NPR. Keep your ears perked if you're an NPR listener...

Composing Stick Photos

2007-10-02T14:00:00.000-04:00

The images are a little dark, but here they are to supplement your understanding of composing sticks, and the title of this blog. The one pictured here is smallish, but larger ones in the print shop are larger in length, not width or depth.

The type set in this first image is about 12 points, and says "wow," not "mom." Type is set upside down in a composing stick, but not backwards.

At this angle, you can see that another name for composing stick is "job stick."

This is derived from a type of press shop often called a "job shop" or "job press" that does mostly odd jobs, like broadsides, cards, pamphlets, and small books, for various clients. Jobs require a wide variety of type, whereas a press that publishes a newspaper or large books requires an awful lot of only a few different kinds of type. The print shop here at the college has type from both kinds of shops, so we have mountains of a few classics like Garamond, Palatino, and Caslon, in many sizes and styles, but only a handful of sizes and styles of hundreds of other fonts, as wild as Jokerman.

A Book of Magnitude

2007-10-01T22:53:00.000-04:00

On Saturday, authors from all genres and categories gathered on the Mall in Washington, DC for the National Book Festival.

I'm a book nerd so I had to attend, especially since Terry Pratchett, one of my favorite authors, was going to speak and sign books.

The event was thrown by The Library of Congress (and Laura Bush), so they had a tent set up with plenty of relevant resources and interactive displays. A big graffiti wall stretched across a whole side of the tent and volunteers stood before it offering sharpies to the masses. Said masses were guided by three questions (here paraphrased): What books have influenced you or shaped your life? What would you preserve at the Library of Congress? What will you write?

Hundreds of adults and children have signed the wall. For the question pictured above, I scribbled "books about books" and "hand-bound art books," because I was in an artsy mood.

A display at the other side of the tent contained a large, naked book. Its leaves were poster-sized sheets of foam covered with sharpie signatures from visitors of all ages. One folded sheet made a signature, although normally a signature is made up of several folded sheets. The signatures are sewn together at the fold to form the pages of the book. Along the spine, white rope represented the thread used to sew each signature together. Thick brown rope formed bands around which the "thread" was sewn, creating raised bands that, were the book to be given a cover, would show up as the thick raised bands of leather on the spine. The leather on books with that feature is actually fitted over the thicker thread that the thick rope represents.

Here you can see the scale of the book:

Here you can better see the stitching:

The top three signatures are not sewn into the rest of the book, yet.

The Library of Congress lugs this book around for demonstrations about books and book binding. It's nice to know that they save some of their attention for the restoration and preservation of books as well as the digitization of them.

Workshops

2007-09-29T01:44:00.000-04:00

[Note: Please forgive the extensive exposition, but it is necessary for cleaner, livelier posts in future that they not be cluttered with explanations.]

The Print Shop is holding two workshops this semester, one called "Introduction to Letterpress" and the other "Advanced Letterpress and Book Arts." Mike Kaylor, our Master Printer, runs these workshops.

Introduction to Letterpress involves a number of excellent lectures on the history of printing, the history of paper, the history of fonts, as well as lectures on the technical terms and procedures for setting type and printing. The students are working on making their own postcards.

Advanced Letterpress and Book Arts is for anyone who has completed the introductory workshop. At this point, students work on real jobs in order to gain experience and keep up their skills. In between the real jobs, they learn to make and bind books in the Bindery.

I take the Advanced workshop as a separate activity from my work at the Print Shop, but I do end up helping Mike with jobs that extend beyond the time commitments of the workshop, especially because the jobs are real jobs required of the Print Shop.

This semester, we're focused on three major jobs.

The first is a run of 350 broadsides to be distributed in schools around Kent County in celebration of teachers and teachers of writing.

The second is a run of 350 broadsides that celebrate the re-dedication of the Literary House that is scheduled for February to cap off the completion of an extensive renovation.

The third is a design for a new bookmark or postcard, to be used for demonstrations to prospective students, and other interested visitors or students.

The deadline for the first job looms. The first workshop has only met twice. We have done extensive research into appropriate and striking quotes, we have reviewed samples from the archives for inspiration, and we have sketched out our design ideas and submitted them to the Master Printer for review.

The next step is to envision one or two final drafts digitally, with the help of Adobe InDesign, on our brand new 30" monitor.

Printer's Devil

2007-09-28T23:42:00.000-04:00

I have mentioned that I work as Printer's Devil in the Literary House Print Shop. But what does this mean, exactly?

Traditionally, "printer's devil" is the term for an apprentice, usually the youngest, in a printing establishment. Whether the term originated because printing, when it was new, seemed magical and frightening, or if it was due to associations between black ink and the black arts, it definitely involved some of the most tedious, least pleasant tasks - bottom of the ladder, go-fer work.

Today's interns detest such mundane tasks as photocopying, or such devilish ones as photocopying with a finicky machine.

My tasks as a printer's devil, though I am directed by a kind and interested master, are similar to those of printer's apprentices and devils long ago. My tasks include: setting lines of type, organizing cases of type, fetching drawers of type, and cleaning the presses. I also help print jobs, and I get to assist in the design process of jobs.

The most devilish task for me is putting away unmarked trays of set type.

Perhaps the best way to explain this is to deviate into the realm of digital music. When you copy a mix CD onto a computer, the tracks are usually titled "Track 1," etc. You have to label each track so that you identify it later on.

For the purposes of this exercise, imagine a digital music library of 100 songs copied from 100 different mix CDs - and left unlabeled. The result would be 100 "Track 1"s. Now you want to go back and label those songs. How do you identify which is which? You play a song, and you listen carefully for certain qualities, initially the beat, then the first few notes, maybe the key, then the lyrics. You try to remember the song's title and perhaps artist. You can go online and search for lyrics to find the exact song information.

With 100 trays of unlabeled type (and we've probably got even more), you have to look at the type for certain qualities and then from that try to identify which font it is. And because it's type, and not on a computer, you have to identify the size and style, too - 12 points? bold?

My familiarity with types is growing, mostly because of this task. I spent several hours returning a 25-line poem set in 12 point Garamond, and so now I can look at a few letters and think "definitely not" or "it's worth checking it against the Garamond case."

I usually spend an embarrassing amount of time pulling out Qs, Bs, Rs, and Ps, or various other letters that may have distinguishing characteristics, and comparing them to various font cases. Does this Q have a fat tail, or a thin one? Is the B's top loop smaller than the bottom, or is it closer in size? Are there serifs? Serifs, by and by, are the little nicks that hang down from the edges of letters, like the nicks at the ends of the crossbars in a T, and the nicks that give the T a bit of a base.

However, once I do identify the type, or give in and ask the Master Printer for assistance, the process of returning the type to its proper case is soothing and rhythmic, destructive knitting. By the end of this semester, I hope to achieve this rhythm in composing type as well.

Oak Knoll

2007-09-28T16:31:00.000-04:00

Oak Knoll Fest is an annual Fine-Press Exhibition in New Castle, Delaware organized by Oak Knoll Bookstore and Press, and it is currently the largest held in North America. The festival is organized by Oak Knoll Bookstore and Press, purveyors and publishers of books about book arts, calligraphy, printing history, publishing, typography, papermaking and more. So it's not a surprise that the festival attracts book designers and Master Printers who bring their wares to showcase and sell.

The Master Printer at the Literary House Print Shop usually attends every year and invites students from his workshops to join him. I was one of those students when I was a Freshman, and in a week, I'll be going back.

The exhibition occupies the basement of St. Peter's School, which is cozy when full of vendors, despite the institutional ceilings with panes of fluorescent lights. When it's full of book lovers browsing art books and fine broadsides, the space warms right up. The vendors are open and eager to engage browsers in long conversations about paper, or their choices in designing a certain broadside.

This year, the Literary House Press has decided to participate formally in this community. We'll be displaying our fine broadsides, and a fine letterpress edition of a book by John Barth, Browsing.

I'll be better at holding up my end of conversation with other exhibitors, now that I have some experience. I can talk more intelligently about printing – the smile-and-nod technique shall rust in storage.

This year, I can point to our table and say, "I'm a part of this tradition. Look at what I helped create."

Setting the Scene

2007-09-25T23:49:00.000-04:00

Come into the Literary House, this big white house with its fresh new deck. Step into the foyer, and you'll see the kitchen straight ahead, and cozy reading rooms to your left. Turn right, though, and come down the stairs into the Print Shop, down because the shop is set lower than the rest of the House.

The light in the afternoon floods the print shop, sliding down from the high vaulted ceiling to idle along the heavy lines of the cylinder press and work tables, casually slinking to the floor in broad beams. The two tables, back-to-back, are black and pitted with age, cluttered with stacks of broadsides and reams of paper, littered with miscellaneous notes. The broadsides are fine, weighty things, basking muted greens, greys, and blues, sunning themselves.

Letterpresses and type cases line the perimeter of the room, their bulk leaving only two and a half feet or so between their fronts and the work tables. Tall windows promenade the walls above the cases, ushering green from a half-wild garden into the dusty atmosphere of the Print Shop. The walls fade out of attention, water-damaged and aging.

A broad doorway opens under a placard that declares "Book Arts," and the room beyond is darker, woodier. There is a work table in the center of the room. Another rests along the right-hand wall and offers a view into the garden. Large drills, broad sheets of cutting board, and the naked guts of books rest on the back of this work surface. Underneath, filing cabinets house the archives of posters.

Shelves line the other two sides of the room and are stuffed with books of various ages on printing, bookmaking, paper. Two new Apple computers are installed on the countertop beneath the left-hand shelves, along with other high-tech equipment to bring the medium of pixels to the studio. These computers have so far been used primarily to create a digital archive of the Literary House's posters. They are waiting to be tapped for design and multimedia.

This is the print shop: a world of iron, lead, wood, and paper, a melding of the handmade and the mechanical.

What is a Composing Stick, Anyway?

2007-09-24T21:41:00.001-04:00

My first instinct was to try to explain it myself, and the best I came up with was "a thingy I put type into when I want to set type," but that's really not a very clear identification.

So I shall direct you to The Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary's explanation:

"The composing stick is an essential tool for setting type by hand. The printer adjusts the stick to the width of the lines of type to be set, then puts the metal type in upside down, letter-by-letter and line-by-line. As several lines of type are completed, they are transferred onto a galley and held until the page of type is complete."

This primarily gives you a sense of what a composing stick does, less so what it is. A physical description reveals that it is an iron tray that can vary in length so that you can vary the width of the lines they're setting. It has edges that are just as high as the type itself, to keep the type in. It is usually three inches wide, and varies in length, but does not become so long as to be unwieldy in your hand. The composing stick is usually covered with a layer of grime from oxidization and use.

So there you have it. This blog takes its name from this tool that best demonstrates the difficulty of setting type, the labor intensive fiddling with letters. One difference: I'll be proofreading these posts, so they'll be cleaner than lines of type are right after being set in the stick.

Dear Reader,

2007-09-21T01:40:00.000-04:00

A collection of buttons lets me conjure letters from the aether, arrange them into words. With another button, those words enter cyberspace, where people all over the world can read them. People like you.

We're living through a change in the way our world is structured, a change that people like Noah Robischon of Gawker Media are calling the biggest since the one ignited by the invention of movable type.

And by "moveable type" I don't mean the blog hosting service. I mean the technology invented in Europe around 1450 C.E. by Johannes Gutenberg (and far earlier by others in China and Korea) that cost a lot of monks their Bible-copying jobs. I mean the method of setting letters cast of lead - tiny physical backwards letters that you can rearrange and drop on the floor - into a composing stick. Letters form words, form lines, lines stack, and a page of type is locked into the plate of a printing press. Ink coats the type, then a sheet of paper is "pressed" between the type and a hard flat surface. Remove the sheet and repeat with another, another, another, and you have publication of a broadside. The process' complexity multiplies if you want a book, at which point you have to muck around with folios, binding, and even more type-setting.

This technology once shifted our world on a faster track toward modernity. It made the making of books cheaper, thus more accessible to non-monk publishers. It made books themselves cheaper, so they reached a wider audience, and helped to make that audience more literate. Books could contain more topics than religion. It did more, but for now I'll let it rest here.

This technology is represented by the printing presses, type cases, and book bindery crowded into a large, airy room of the Rose O'Neill Literary House at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. This is the Literary House Print Shop and I work here, as a student. My job title is "Printer's Devil" and I work under the Master Printer, doing the dirty and tedious jobs. I clean the presses, and I set and put away type for posters and poems and books.

Four times a week, I enter this room and step back into time. Let me show you this dying technology, this growing art. At the very least, you'll step away with an appreciation for your keyboard, mouse, and word processor.