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."
Showing posts with label letterpress. Show all posts
Showing posts with label letterpress. Show all posts
28 September 2007
21 September 2007
Dear Reader,
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.
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.
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