The idea
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Ampersand Duck is a strange nebulous creature. Ostensibly it is a private press, but it is also an umbrella name for an artist who likes to play with books in many ways, from wayward bibliographical musings through to altering found and newly-printed pages.
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In the centre of Ampersand Duck is myself, Caren Florance,* but the name Ampersand Duck can also be applied to collaborations of varying natures.
I tend not to work with unsolicited manuscripts. In my experience, collaborations are best when people know each other or have at least met. I love working with poetry, but usually only the poetry I hear in readings or stumble upon during bouts of poetic archaeology. So please, unless you like polite rejection or embarrassed silence, don’t send your work to me.
The reality
I have a wonderful studio that holds a Vandercook SP-20 letterpress, four cabinets of metal and wood type, a book guillotine and a couple of nipping presses (along with lots of books, both for reading and for creative fodder, plus a big cushy armchair to facilitate the former).
I work mostly with letterpress (wood and metal type) and occasionally with photopolymer plate in my press work. As well, I work with a variety of materials to produce artist’s books. To earn a living, I teach book arts at the ANU School of Art, and I run workshops for various organisations that ask me to. I also do a bit of simple design work, mostly catalogues, invitations and scholarly journals, to pay the bills.
One thing that I would like to do more is artistic jobbing work: printing title pages and colophon pages using letterpress for things like print folios and artists’ books. If you are interested in this sort of production for your project, please get in touch for a quote.
I live in Canberra with my partner and son and two huge cats. If you want to know more about that, see my personal blog. It covers pretty much everything.
You can also find me at Artist Books 3.0 and I have a lot of images of my work and activities at flickr.
In the meantime, do take some time to look through this site, and please come back to see if I’ve managed to make anything new! I have tried to arrange it so that you can follow posts on topics that interest you, be it bookbinding, design work, or workshops that I run. Each category has excerpts of relevant posts. Just click through them to reveal the full articles.
* about Caren Florance
My formal credentials are that I have a Bachelor of Arts in Classics and English (ANU, 1989), a Bachelor of Visual Arts with Honours (ANU, 2002) and a Masters of Arts in English (UNSW@ADFA, 1992). I’ve worked for many years as a freelance desktop publisher and designer, and have a real and compulsive love of books and text. I’m not a professional bookbinder, but I have enough knowledge gleaned from non-accredited courses to do the things I like to do reasonably well (IMHO). I can’t decide if I’m a fine press printer or an artist who works with books, and can’t see why I have to choose. I flirt with the idea of writing something, could be anything from speculative fiction to a romance novel to the Great Australian novel, but I doubt I’ve got the stamina or the talent. So I just read, and I think about my work from the viewpoint of a reader. If you’d like to know anything else about me, get in touch. Oh, and you pronounce my first name with a long A, like Car. Blame my parents.