On Saturday for the first time I printed from a polymer plate on the Vandercook at AS220 (part 2 of my 3-part class on letterpress printing).  Students were asked to choose an image (black and white, with no shading), and to send it to a pre-press servicing company which produced the film.  Here is the image I sent:

And here is the negative which was produced from it:

Then we placed the negative on top of a photo-sensitive polymer plate with a layer of backing, exposed it to fluorescent light for about 5 minutes to bake the image in, placed the plate in a warm water bath, lightly scrubbing “away” the film which was in the negative spaces with a flat, soft brush (mine took about fifteen minutes, since it was rather large, about 8 x 8 inches), and then used a hair dryer to finish the process.  Here is what the plate looks like:

 Once dry, you peel off a layer from the backing, to reveal an adhesive side.  The white stuff you see here was a little bit of paper that got stuck (by mistake) to the backing.  The reason for the adhesive is so that the plate does not move when you print (these are too flimsy to lock into a chase).

   Using a precision-milled, flat block of steel which is locked into the bed of the press, and guided by a grid printed on its surface, we placed our plates, inked the rollers with a nice smoky red (red mixed with a little black), and ran our prints.  Given the level of detail in mine, I think it turned out rather well for a first time effort:

For printmakers, the possibilities are greatly multiplied if you have access to this process.  This holds true for makers of books as well, of course.  In fact, it was this process which made it possible for me to issue a quarterly series while in my previous position.  The following cover was produced from polymer plates, which were created by scanning 19th-century type ornaments from specimen books, incorporating them into a computer-generated design, and producing negatives of that design:

Tags: Washington Press

This morning I attended the publications/editorial committee, where we discussed the new peer-reviewed journal that the CBAA plans to publish (titled Openings: studies in book art). The first issue is planned for November, and we discussed various ways to generate submissions and to attract peer reviewers.

After that I attended a session of three presenters: Michele Burgess (San Diego State U.), Martha Carothers (U. of Delaware), and Kitty Marryat (Scripps College). All of them presented work done by their book arts students, and even though their courses and programs vary in many ways, several issues were brought into focus for me as I plan a small program at Trinity. First and most important: if I wish to encourage and facilitate student work in the book arts, it will require a detailed plan, with specific deadlines and a structure of oversight and advising built into it, as well as a period of brainstorming, to move the project from the head into the hands. This seems obvious, but it must be emphasized at every turn. I simply do not have the time to do what these people do (since my main function is not as a facutly member), but Kitty made the valuable observation that one can customize this work–from a 3-hour project to that of an entire semester. One other necessity is to make sure that all major work is accompanied by a process journal, written by the student.

The next session I attended featured Matthew Aron and Shawn Simmons (book artists and designers), Cynthia Thompson (Memphis College of Art), and Laura Capp (a recent recipient of a PhD in English literature from the University of Iowa). Aron and Simmons gave a theoretical talk on “authorship in graphic design and artists’ books,” which was not particularly useful to me. Thompson’s talk focused on keeping the book arts in the curriculum by incorporating traditional type and book design into the larger design arts (this is, of course, more useful to folks who have design programs, like the Hartford Art School). Laura Capp’s presentation, “On my way to becoming a scholar, I cried and learned calligraphy,” was about how her experience in learning calligraphy in many courses taken at the Iowa Center for the Book provided first a creative escape from, and later a valuable perspective on, her dissertation research. Specifically, Capp described how the act of painstakingly writing out some of the poetry she was studying slowed her down enough to perform a much closer reading of the work than she would have done otherwise. I found this a valuable confirmation of what I already believe–which is that once one educates the hands in the act of producing texts, the head understands and appreciates far more deeply the thousands of original works in special collections. More importantly, that deeper understanding can often lead to more grounded and thorough interpretations.

The last session I attended was on “Librarians and Pedagogy,” and featured Laurie Whitehill-Chong (curator at the Rhode Island School of Design), Ruth Rogers (curator at Wellesley College), and Tony White (Director of the Fine Arts Library at IU). All of them spoke about artist’s books being useful in discussing book structure, and I heard for the first time the concept of “hybrid” as applied to books and media. Most interesting to me was Rogers’ acquisition criteria for artist’s books: relevance to the collection, relevance to the curriculum, the extent to which the book documents contemporary issues, the level of craft present in the book, and that it is a book which has in it “more than one reading,” (i.e., does one wan to read it more than once–a subjective but valuable criteria).

I will not go into the other events (tours and receptions) at the conference for obvious reasons, but I came away with a great deal to think about, and many excellent new colleagues.

Tags: conferences

The first session was the best of the day:  Martin Antonetti (Smith College) reported on a workshop sponsored by the so-called Alliance to Advance Liberal Arts Colleges (formerly the “Mellon 23”): Amherst, Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Carleton, Denison, DePauw, Furman, Grinnell, Harvey Mudd, Haverford, Macalester, Middlebury, Oberlin, Pomona, Reed, Rhodes, Scripps, Smith, Swarthmore, Vassar, Wellesley, Wesleyan, and Williams.  The workshop was held at Oberlin College (Oct. 29-30, 2010) and its theme was “book studies;” this term was defined as encompassing book history and book arts, and (further) as embracing all formats from cuneiform to digital. The goal of the workshop (2 days of meetings, spurred by a pre-circulated questionnaire) was to explore the role of book studies in liberal arts education. The presentation topics focused on curriculum building, structuring a book studies course, integrating book studies into other courses, and faculty/librarian interaction. The need for blending the hand and the head was acknowledged as primary. Also, book studies speaks to the current revolution in reading and writing digitally, and can be articulated as a timely response to larger technological changes (it can provide a useful historical and theoretical context to new media). One of the conclusions of the workshop was the necessity to minimize costs by embedding aspects of book history in existing courses, and offer summer seminars for faculty members in printing, and other book arts. The central goal of the workshop looking ahead is the publication of a manual or textbook for institutions to use in developing book studies. Some of the obstacles to succes were identified: some institutions had too few rare books for examples; a reluctance of faculty to acknowledge the discipline; the difficulty of assigning the program to a department; the separation between library and departments; curricular negotiations; stigma related to craft; regulations on librarians teaching for- credit courses; the perception of book studies as non-scholarly (antiquarian); and finding political will and financial resources. One concrete outcome in that at Smith, book studies is an approved concentration as of December 2010.

The second presenter of the first session was Ruth Rogers (Wellesley), who discussed her team-taught course “Papyrus to print to pixel: a history of the technologies of the word” (or “P3” for short). Wellesley has a full book arts program, and its director (Katherine Ruffin) is an inspiration. Rogers and Ruffin taught the course, but it became so unmanageable in scope (and popular) that they had to divide it into two courses.

The second session (with three presentations) was less interesting but still useful, in that two of the presenters were library school students, and had solid special collections-centered projects. One student had examined two scrapbooks created by John Ruskin, held at the Lilly, and the other presented on the 1960s artists’ journal De-coll/age as not only a work of art in its own right, but as a source of writings by artists and a record of otherwise unrecorded art events. The final presenter offered a critical appreciation of the work of book artist Gaylord Schanilec.

Finally, there was a 2-hour keynote by well-known artist Ann Hamilton about her work, but I found little of use in it.

Tags: book history

For the next two days I’ll be attending (and blogging about) the second biannual conference of the College Book Arts Association (founded in 2008, see www.collegebookart.org), “a non-profit organization fundamentally committed to the teaching of book arts at the college and university level.” The conference is at Indiana University, where I went to library school over a dozen years ago. As I begin to plan out a program focused on the book arts and the history and future of publishing at the Watkinson, I’ll need to grow a network of professionals I can rely on for advice and collaboration. In fact, this has already begun—Kitty Maryatt of Scripps College (and a CBAA member) gave me some great advice and contacts for getting the Washington press up and running. It was Kitty who led me to my press “expert,” and she also suggested I attend this conference. Her website at Scripps is also a fount of useful information.

I was SUPPOSED to attend the opening reception tonight at the Lilly Library, where I cut my teeth on rare books, but the Philadelphia airport got in my way.  First we had no pilot, then no crew, and by the time I got to IU (14 hours after I left my house), it was all over.  I trust tomorrow will be more productive.

As one wise bookman said, “the only way to begin is to begin.”  Saturday night I began educating my hands instead of my brain, in my first letterpress class.  This is one of three sessions I am taking (on Saturdays) from my friends and colleagues at the AS220 Community Printshop (http://www.as220.org/printshop/), which is just opening its expanded facility.  They were happy to see me (finally) in front of a case of type (we’ve been collaborating on projects for 3 years), and I have to say that my first experience setting type (5 lines from a Tennyson poem in 24-point Kennerly italic) was one of immense satisfaction.  Composing stick in hand set at 21 pica, hunting for letters and placing (and spacing) them, was actually more fun than I thought possible.  “That’s a good sign,” commented Morgan Calderini, head of the printshop.  “Most people find that the tedious part.”  I’m sure I will find it so eventually, but all I could think about was how VALUABLE it would be to an undergraduate to hand-set a few lines of type in terms of understanding the sheer labor involved in producing a book on the hand press.  It is a small (but profound) window into a wider world of understanding. 

Our instructor was Katherine “Kat” Cummings, a Brown graduate of a few years back who worked for a while in the financial district and then decided to feed her soul.  Aside from AS220, she  also works with Dan Wood (http://www.dwriletterpress.net/), and is an excellent teacher (shown here with me).  The four students in the class set our lines, locked the “form” into a chase with wooden furniture and quoins, and placed it  on a Vandercook proof press (a much easier machine to work than my Washington press, but these are my baby steps).  We tightened any lines that were loose with wafer thin spacers of copper, tapped it all with a wood block (not sure of the term), and spread silver ink (we were printing on red paper) onto the rollers.  We all had a turn cranking them over the type, and we made about two dozen copies.  We cleaned up with vegetable oil (it’s a green shop), re-distributed the type, and put everything away.

Another thing that struck me was how well Kat demystified the whole process.  Printers (like some librarians, and other specialists I could name) tend to create an aura of mystery and difficulty around their work; understandable, I suppose, because everyone likes to be perceived as having a unique skill. However, as one of my mentors often says, “even rocket science isn’t rocket science.”  Most anything can be learned, with an applied will.  I’m eagerly anticipating a time when I have all the materials to hand and can work with the press in earnest.