Hello, it's been a while hasn't it?

I'm still alive, thrashing my way through jungles of Henry Lawson, deserts of proposal-writing and bogs of tax.

Just thought I'd give you something to look at while I finish it all up.

Best. Link. Eva.
KTHXBAI

Rare Book Summer School: 4

I left you hanging there, didn't I?

You know, we worked so hard last week, and everyone achieved what we set out to do: print an edition of letterpress poetry broadsides in essentially 4 days. I was so happy on Friday night, and then started fading on Saturday. By Sunday I was home and transformed into a floppy pile of lacklustre. I managed to drag myself to a movie, purely to chaperone Bumblebee and his new GIRLFRIEND, and I also managed to mostly get myself together to prepare for my first uni class of the year, but it was all like swimming in porridge.

Today, I am much better. I had my second class of the year, because YAY, my typography course is running! Tomorrow, with a sleep-in, I'll be tip top.

The Rare Book Summer School class was a wonderful experience, predominantly because it was full of people who knew enough to be able to contribute to the week in their own way -- this is usually the case in my classes, because I always frame the class as a 'pool of knowledge' rather than a teacher/student pyramid. So we pooled our experience, discussed things equally, and as much as they listened to me, I listened to them and we all learned.

At the beginning of the week we were told about the last Melbourne summer school on 2010 (they are on every year, but they alternate between NZ and Australia) when Carolyn Fraser of Girlprinter and Idlewild Press fame taught the letterpress component. The class set a complete short story as a book, and one of the participants, the equally famous wood-engraver Rosalind Atkins, carved a block for them, and they had so much to do that by the time the end-of-school reception was held on the Friday evening, the class turned up an hour late, hot and sweaty, clutching one still-damp copy of the book to show the rest of the RBSS.

We all laughed at this admiringly, and joked that if we finished on time, we should go to the pub and still turn up an hour late, pretending to be stressed and clutching our wet prints.

So imagine our shock to find at the end of Friday that even though we'd finished, and we'd pretty much cleaned up, that we were still collating and folding a 'belly-band' for the folio at 6:15pm! The reception was to be at Kay Craddock's antiquarian bookshop in Collins Street, and we were at least half an hour away by train and foot at the Monash Caulfield campus. Our programme said that it started at 6.30, but someone mentioned that they'd heard it was starting at 6pm! Eek!

We gathered ourselves and our wet prints, ran for the train, charged up Swanston Street and into Collins Street, and rushed, hot and sweaty, into the cool elegant bookshop where everyone was swanning around in a clean we've-been-looking-at-rare-books-with-academics-o-wot-fun sort of way, clutching our folio of brand new wet prints. Only to find that no-one believed we'd come straight from the studio and instead they made jokes about coming from the pub! GAH.


There we are, caught at the hot sweaty apologetic moment, with me clutching the prints. (That lovely tall man on the left is the epic Robert Heather, who not only works at the State Library of Vic but also administrates Artist Books 3.0.)

Serves us right for being cocky, eh?

There are lots more photos here at flickr, and I'm hoping the others will upload their photos too.

Many, many thanks to everyone who stayed and played, and also to Des Cowley, Librarian and Superhero. It was great fun.



PS: Sandy blogged about her RBSS experience too. She not only did my course, but also one before mine on artist's books. What a great two weeks! She's slowly putting together her own letterpress studio, and my small contribution (besides the training) was to spot a gorgeous and clean type cabinet for her in a second-hand shop in Fitzroy on Saturday. She haggled with the owners and now it's hers! Huzzar!

Happy New Year

I couldn't decide. So I've put them all up.

Actually, my biggest new year's resolution is to Reclaim my Brian. Or even my Brain. I am going to cut down on Facebooking, pare down my game-playing, and start blogging and reading and writing again.

So you have full permission to nag me if I don't update at least once a week about something printy or booky. It's been far too long.

Oh, and I'll Remember to Breathe again too.

And a late online happy birthday to Colonel Duck, who was born on New Year's Day, the same day as his grandfather.

Helpful cats

I thought I'd sort out a few typecases yesterday, since I'm working on a type sampler for myself (and those who like to collect such things). The big triumph was finding a whole drawer of 12pt French accents in Garamond, just as I have a visiting artist who is setting a French poem. Huzzar! We'd been wondering what to do re. accents and now the problem is solved.

Padge came and helped. One minute he was here:



and the next time I turned around to replace a case he was here:





He's a very helpful cat.

Let me show you more ways that he helps in the studio.



Paperweight.



Keeping things upright.



Load tester.



Security.



Stocktaking.



Press operator.



Chair warmer.

Pooter's main job is Padge-washer.



He doesn't like being a printer, mainly because of the silly hats they have to wear.

The morning after the night before: a photo essay

Mutiny

I've had a crappy half a day. Once I realised it was going to be craptacular and I was going to be miserable, I decided to put a stop to the normal day's plan and sook at home with a fire and the cats. I didn't feel well, and then I got a couple of bad news emails. So, as I have already stated on Facebook, I took Paul or John's advice: I lit a fire. It wasn't good Norwegian wood, it was quite hard-to-burn farm wood, but it cheered me up and in the end I got quite a lot done, between marshmallows. The cats had never seen open flames before, and were quite backwards in coming forwards to lie with me on the floor. They snuggled up behind me on a chair, and I rejoiced in the joy of portable laptops and cushions.

In honour of cheering up and stumbling upon it again in my archives, I am revisiting one of my all-time favorite personal posts. Here it is, titled Pride and Piracy, from waaay back in 2005:

It's been an entertaining day, but only on-line. Laura posted her excellent critique of the P&P movie, Pirates of Pemberley which has sparked all sorts of conversations. I thought I'd add another element to the fun: a visual one. Here then, are my P&P vignettes, whipped up with a dash of photoshoppery. All credit for the original images goes to the wonderful pirate image archive.

















Oh la!

Time not only flies, it throws crap in your face

Colonel Duck couldn't resist scanning the photo mentioned in the last post:



Oh, youth is indeed wasted on the young. This photo makes me feel quite crusty.

One of my hands and both insoles have broken out in dermatitis thanks to something stoopid lurking in the carpets that only emerged when I tried to clean a few spots, and I have an inflamed Achilles tendon from standing wrongly at the press too long, which behaves itself when I walk on smooth ground but breaks out in flame if I tread any path rougher than concrete. I walked across the tanbark from my studio to Nicci's studio today to say hello and spent the next hour saying OW. Ow ow ow.

Sigh. Judging from watching my Aged Poet deal with extreme old age, it's all just going to get worse, so I might as well enjoy the fact that my eyes are working and I have all my own teeth, even if I do have these annoying aches and itches. At least I don't have a womb anymore. That's one bodily adjustment I'll NEVER regret.

That purple bracelet is actually a hairband. Looking at it completely connects me to her, 22 years later. Be prepared, but in a nice way.

Signing up for Wordless Wednesday

House hunting

More adventures in real estate. This is a whole new world, and one that makes the head spin.

Last weekend we saw some amazing places, and by amazing I mean the full spectrum of 'oh wow' to 'WTF?!!?'

Best WTF was a place down the road that was completely unrenovated and still furnished. Best Beloved stood for ages in the loungeroom, gazing open-mouthed at a reproduction of a painting of a man teaching his son to shave, witnessed by a beagle. Later he said to me incredulously, 'It wasn't just the subject matter that was awful; it's the fact that [a] someone decided to paint it in oils and [b] someone else thought it was good enough to reproduce it!'

Bumblebee ran down the hall, past the pink & green bathroom with lime green shag carpet, and called for me to come & look at the cupboard in the spare room. When I got there, he opened the door onto a whole other wing of the house with a 'rumpus room', cocktail bar and home office full of lion kitsch (the owner was a member of the Lions Club of Australia, judging by the number of certificates on the wall telling us so). So I quickly stood behind the bar and B called BB down and said the same thing, opening the door on to me doing my best 1970s housewife pose, asking, 'Hello dear, had a hard day? Would you like a cocktail?'

Given that we're not interested in any renovations, I don't think that was our dream house. It may be someone else's, especially if they don't want to renovate, but live in a retro heaven. You'd have to get rid of the smoker's fug, though, which lingers in the drapes and walls and shagpile.

The best house we saw I'm going to hug close to my chest, because we've shifted from what an agent called 'passive clients' to what they probably call 'emotional suckers' and I don't want to jinx anything. Suffice to say that in the past two days we've interviewed a few agents with a view to putting our house on the market after Christmas, and we now have a long and daunting list of things to do to our place over the next four weeks. These agents, they don't waste a second. They seem to work all hours, and their enthusiasm is amazing. We have a shortlist of two really lovely women to work with, and it's a tough call, because they've both got really good qualities in their own very different ways.

But the speed at which this is happening is doing my head in. If we don't get this house, we're ok, I'm sure something will turn up, but the whole family is in love with it, and no matter what else we find, this will always linger in our hearts as a ghost house. I'll tell you more as things firm up, or fall through... and I'm starting to declutter. I don't have the energy for huge tasks at the moment, but Best Beloved is a very goal-orientated person, and now that he has a concrete reason for doing things, he's powering along. I'm just going to move around the house putting things into boxes and doing little jobs like touching up paint scratches and repairing door handles etc. I think I'm going to tell the family that any help in lieu of Christmas presents would be much appreciated.

In the meantime, I've written a post at Book Art Object about the Claire Beynon piece I've finished.

Catch it while you can

My television appearance last week has come on line, and I suspect it's for one week only, since there doesn't seem to be an archive page...

Watch it here if you dare. I'm sandwiched between a few other guests; the whole show is 29 minutes long, but you'll find me between 13:07 and 18.10 minutes.

I pleasantly surprised myself, as it all went by in a blur and I was nervous that I blathered, but apart from being all chin and hands, I didn't too too badly with the very short time I had!



Having a lovely clean-paper day today, sorting and sifting the prints and getting them ready for collation into the folio covers. Tomorrow I'm catching a bus to Oamaru to meet the boys and driving back to Dunedin with them. They're staying the rest of the week with me at the college before we head off on Sunday for a bit of a South Island jaunt, weather, wildness and all.

Rolling along

So. Week four, and I'm on schedule, I think. I've printed 5 posters, and two of those have been double layer printings, so that's at least 700 pulls of the press already.



The folio cases are being made at the University Bindery this week. I've been overprinting all the poster images on a few sheets and they're going to be cut into strips and inlaid on the front of the cases. That's another reason why I love this place... they still have a university bindery.

I'm lying on the couch in my flat, listening to the wind howling outside my window. We had a couple of beautiful days, quite warm with no rain, and then today the rain came back, the temperature dropped, and the wind started up. There might be snow, who knows? It doesn't bother me, I'm in t-shirts in the warm studio, looking out at the world through the big glass window. Last week I watched a line of children leaving the museum carrying sleeping bags, having just had a sleepover there. On Sunday I glanced out from my work and witnessed a Haka ritual:



Why do I need to go anywhere? But I do get out. I got some crazy op shop bargains, two colourful light merino jumpers (one red, one purple) for $8... one was $5, and the other was half price for $3! My feet have been killing me, so I went looking for some Crocs (fabulous for all-day standing on concrete, as I may have mentioned before, and much safer for clumsy sorts like me than tripping on rubber mats) and I found a pair for $6! Happy feet, happy Duck. Within half a day of wearing them, my feet stopped complaining. Bliss. I do only wear them in the studio, though.

Anyhoo, I was going to show you some work. Here goes:

When I last left you (apart from the last post, which jumped forward a bit), I'd printed the first layer of the Vincent O'Sullivan river poem



and perhaps the first layer of the Stephen Edgar poem, Sight Reading...



With the Edgar poem, I'd found boxes of a fabulous outline font, very carnivalesque (is that a word?), with solid letters and outline letters that could overprint, and I knew I had to find a way to use them.



Edgar's poem is all about potential, and ability, and confidence, and strangeness, and... lots of things, but the visual image he provides is one of floating text, and the keyword for me was sunset. So my first layer was in pinky red, and then I added a second layer of orange and black:



to make:



I kept thinking about whether to use found text, or to just randomly pull letters from the box and arrange them, but in the end, after wandering around holding the poem loosely in my head (which is something I do a lot, because I have a dreadful memory for words, but the sense of things lingers, especially visually), I hit upon the phrase YOU WILL ALWAYS WONDER, and I used it all through the print. I like to think that people will discover it in the print at some point, and it will extend the reading slightly.

That print wasn't a hard one to set up and print, but it was laborious, especially with the two print runs.

The next one, Vincent O'Sullivan's river poem (it has no title), but excruciatingly tricky. For one thing, getting the second layer of colour to work with the first was hard, as I have no scales, and can't mix colour accurately. Took me over an hour to get the colour right. And then there was the layout:









It was like doing a jigsaw puzzle. And even once I'd got it all set up, a lot of it wasn't working properly because the wood type I was using was so old and worn, it needed to be packed up a lot.

I'd hoped to get it all printed by Sunday night, but I spent Saturday faffing with it, and then I went to see the bands, and I spent the rest of the night dreaming about rolling it up. I woke up on Sunday determined to resolve it. So I mixed a stiffer ink for the text (silver and black, to make a dark silver), and I changed the layout a bit to make rolling easier, and then I rolled up my sleeves and got stuck into it.

I did finish it on Sunday night. Late Sunday night.







I'm happy with it. I wanted watery, I wanted elegant, plus churchy and bridal without being saccharine. I think I got there. It's very subtle, and a lot of its printing is embossed as well as inked, so you have to hold it and shift it around to get the full effect.

Then it was time to pull it all apart, make another frisket,



and start on another one. I gave a little taster of it this morning, because my last big post about printing was reposted on Spike the Meanjin blog, and I thought I'd better have something printy online at the top of my posts.

This poem, by Sarah Holland-Batt, has a dark, dreamy mood to it, which I wanted to convey visually. I decided to try some more freehand rolling, straight on to the paper, which gives a very velvety feel to the colour, a plum colour meant to evoke squid inkiness.

But! first I had to adjust the platen of the Columbian, which was listing rather badly to one end... I asked the magical Library Custodian (that's what they call the helping background staff: the tea ladies {yes, they also still have those}, the maintenance and cleaning people) if he had any WD-40, and lo! he did, even though no-one else, including Donald-the-Special-Collections-Librarian, knew what I was talking about.


Have tools, can wrangle bolts.



I have a wonderful book, belonging to the library, about printing with the iron handpress, and it goes into a long and complicated explanation about making the platen straight that involves pressure tests with little tags of mylar etc. I don't have time for that, so I used a spirit level. It's now not perfect, but it's close to perfect and it took ten minutes.

Back to Night Sonnet.



Having straightened the platen, I then try to print a forme that has an extra amount of pressure in one corner... doh. I was embossing the title and the wooden O (to make a moon) so that I could hand-roll ink over the top and make the embossing POP. Unfortunately, if I embossed hard enough to make the moon pop, everything couldn't print clearly. So I compromised, and made it a dark moon, with outlines only, which works with the surreal musing of the poem.



Excuse the tatty header on that example... it's what happens if the roller hasn't got enough ink on it: it gets sticky and pulls the fluffy paper apart rather than depositing ink. You only do it once (or twice).

It was such a gloriously easy print to do once I got the pressure working: one colour, good easy rolling with no overlaps on the press, a couple of strokes with the roller on the bench, and done. I got the whole edition done at a leisurely pace today, and now I'm onto poster 6.

I'll leave you with a photo and a link.


I can't believe this man could get to GG with a name like that. I wonder if he collects Hardy Boys novels?

Also: you have to see this. It's the best LOLcat link EVER.