Some Breathing Room?

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

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

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

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

"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

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

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

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).