This is the result. The pages are printed on Fabriano Rosapina 220gsm, and the folio cover was designed by myself in collaboration with the University of Otago Bindery, and constructed by the bindery.

The folio cover.

The title page

‘The Sibyl’s Avenue’, by Australian poet Robert Adamson.

‘Sight-Reading’, by Australian poet Stephen Edgar.

‘The Piano’s Birthday’, by NZ poet Michael Harlow.

‘Night Sonnet’, by Australian poet Sarah Holland-Batt.

‘At the Opera’, by Australian poet Les Murray.

‘…If you like’ (untitled), by NZ poet Vincent O’Sullivan. This is a very difficult image to scan, as it is printed very transparently, so this is a photo taken from an angle, unlike the other images in this post.

‘No String Banjo’, by NZ poet Sue Wootton.

If you would like to purchase a copy (although they are nearly sold out), please contact Donald Kerr, Special Collections Librarian at the University of Otago Library: donald[dot]kerr[at]otago[dot]ac[dot]nz.

I have written about the printing process further here, plus there is more writing on my personal blog for the months of August and September, 2010. There is also an interview with me on Dunedin community television here, and for a short time there is a Radio NZ interview on The Arts on Sunday for the 17th of October here.

Twenty years ago, I visited Dunedin for a couple of days on a NZ touring holiday and loved it at first sight. I always hoped to get back here, and every time John Howard threatened to win an election, I would joke with my friends and family that I’d move to Dunedin if he did. I was getting quite serious when Kevin Rudd saved the day. Now I’ve made it back, thanks to a brilliant residency opportunity, and I’m telling people that if Tony Abbott wins, I may not go back to Australia. I’m getting quite serious about it.

The residency fell into my lap, through the generosity of master printer Alan Loney, who took it upon himself to introduce me to Donald Kerr, the Otago University Special Collections Librarian, when we were all at a conference in Brisbane called The Limits of the Book. Donald has custodianship of a wonderful collection of printing equipment, originally established as a bibliography teaching aid, and while continuing to be used as such, has also become a press in its own right: the Otakou Press. Established in 2003, it hosts an annual short-term printer in residence who produces a work that is sold – and usually sold out before the project is finished – and funds the next PIR the next year. The residency is now totally self-funded, and includes travel, accommodation (which includes food) and a stipend.

Donald and I had wonderful talks in Brisbane, about letterpress, the history of the equipment, and his liking of posters. Up to now all the printers had been New Zealanders, men, and had made books. Time for a change! We decided that I would be the 2010 PIR, and we would make posters, preferably using some of the wood type in the collection, which had scarcely been utilised.

We decided to have six poets, three from NZ and three from Australia. Donald picked out some names and emailed them all to see if they were amenable. Peter Porter and Les Murray were on his list, but PP died soon after, and we didn’t hear from Les, so we ended up with Vincent O’Sullivan, Michael Harlow and Sue Wootton batting on the NZ side, and Robert Adamson, Sarah Holland-Batt and Stephen Edgar for the Aussie side.

And then Donald got a letter in the post from Les, who doesn’t do computers. He’d LOVE to be in it. And, we both agreed, you can’t say no to Les. So. We had SEVEN poets, and I just didn’t have the time in the residency to add an extra NZer – seven was going to be pushing it. Did I mention that my edition is to be 100 of each, plus title page and colophon? That’s 900 pages, over a period of six weeks.

There was only so much planning I could do beforehand, since I hadn’t seen the type selection: read the poems (each poet sent a small selection of small, in most cases unpublished, poems to choose from) and select one for each, and make notes about what each inspired visually when I read them. We’d decided upon paper stock, and ordered it: Fabriano Rosapina, a lovely thick white Italian paper, that would need to be hand-torn into quarter-sheets.

The poems I picked didn’t seem to have any connecting theme, apart from my liking them, so I decided to go with the idea that their number inspired and call the folio PRIME, playing with the idea of seven as a prime number and also that these are poets in their prime. Since then I have realised that the connection is one of process (in the use of wood type) and that the title could have reflected that, but I’m happy with Prime.

Then

Arriving at the University of Otago, settling in to my digs at the very comfy St Margaret’s College, and getting to know my way around were all the easy things to do at the start of my residency. Dunedin is beautiful, even in the depth of winter, and surprisingly warmer than Canberra, owing to what everyone says is a mild winter. The big learning curve was tackling the presses in the print room…

I am used to printing with a cylinder flatbed letterpress, which has built-in rollers that ink the type and can be adjusted to stay at a level that rolls the type the same way every time. Here in Dunedin, they have iron hand-presses only, which means that the printer has to hand-roll the ink onto the type every time they pull a print.

The up side of that is that you can print multiple colours at once. The down side is that you have to develop a good technique of rolling sensitively to the type’s needs, and evenly, and neatly. Every time. And I had to learn how to do it FAST, because there were those 900 pages to print, and time was ticking.

I’m talking in the past tense here, but as I write I’m still in the thick of it. I’m nearly halfway through my third week of the residency, and I’m only 300 pages in…

This is the Columbian press, the grand madam of the room. She’s my press of choice from the three available to me, with her bobbing eagle counterweight and decorative dragons. I had a crash course in using her, including how to make my own brown-paper tympans and friskets.

The fact that I have to hand-roll the type, lower the frisket then the tympan, roll the bed under the platen and then pull the press handle for every. single. print. means that I am physically limited as to how intricate and/or layered these prints can be. I need to design them to be striking without being overly hard to produce.

I am also limited by the colours available to me. I can mix colours, but that means I also have to judge how much mixed ink I need for a print run, and the amount of ink varies according to how much surface area there is on the type; wood type is generally broad-surfaced and thirsty, whereas metal type is smaller and finer, needing finer layers of ink rolled with a lighter touch. When I first arrived, I only had blue, red, yellow, black and a transparent mixing white, but an ex-commercial printer who now works at the Uni of Otago library brought in a gift of some pristine tins of Pantone colours: a variety of reds (rhodamine, rubine, warm red, all fabulous and important distinctions when mixing colours), a green, orange and a good dense rich black that does not shade into grey like most offset blacks. A most welcome gift, and one I’m using gratefully.

The other limitation, or maybe I should say, addition to the palette of choices, is the type itself. The Otakou press has a house font, Garamond, which is one I use extensively in my studio as well. So there is a healthy amount of that, plus a number of drawers of assorted fonts like Gill, Imprint Shadow, Plantin, Gothic Condensed, but not in any great quantity or variety of sizes. There is also a lot of very beautiful wood type, in many sizes (wood type is measured in ‘lines’ but I don’t know what ‘lines’ actually means).

So, to print a poem as a poster, no matter what my idea is, I have to find a font that not only suits the feel of the poem, but also has enough characters in the drawer to set the whole poem and whatever I want to use around the page. I had to count every character in every poem and make a chart of the alphabet needs so that for each layout I can make sure that I can make the poem before I get halfway through and discover that there aren’t enough Hs or something. And you know poets… they tend to use strings of words with the same letters, even if they aren’t conscious that they’re doing it (I don’t even mean alliteration or rhyme… I mean just repetitions of letters generally).

My first attempt was a shape poem by NZ poet Sue Wootton, called No Strings Banjo. Donald thought that this would be one of the hardest poems to tackle, but actually, making a shape in letterpress is fairly easy if you stick to the basic principles of keeping all the lines the same length and making a shape within a block, like building pixels.

This turned into this:

Please excuse the torn base and the handwriting; this was my bon-a-tirer (good to print) reference copy for editioning purposes.

I didn’t know that Sue was from Dunedin until she walked into the studio for a peek, and to my delight she was delighted with the layout, and adored the Fancy Western wood type as much as I do.

I wasted a lot of paper on that first edition, until I worked out my rolling technique. Donald forgave me, as he knew I’d been chucked in at the deep end. I thought the edition printed ok finally, but I know that by the time I get to the end of the residency, I’ll look back at the quality of this first run and shudder.

The next batch, because I had such a clear picture in my head of the print, was Les Murray’s At the Opera. Donald wanted COLOUR, and so I decided to give him some red, a good patchy red velvet curtain of a large wooden M.

Like this one, all rolled up and ready to print as this:

Another thing that Otakou Press has in abundance are wonderful vintage image blocks, ranging from whimsical Victoriana through to cheesy ads from the 70s and 80s, before everything moved to polymer plate. Donald wondered if I might not use a couple, like this one:

He thought it might be a good way to illustrate the word lorgnette, which is the central premise of the poem, but I decided to keep everything typographical, to stay away from the ready-made images, and make people do what I suspect Les Murray wanted people to do: go and look up the word.

Now

So I’m beavering away, even on the weekends, because doing something every day is the only way I’ll get everything done. I’ve had lots of visitors, including a bunch of wonderful librarians who have been helping me tear down the paper. Part of my brief was to promote the program locally, so I’ve had interviews with the local paper, the university paper and there’s one coming up with the local tv station. I’ve talked to English students about working visually with poetry from a textual viewpoint, and to printmaking students about working with text as image and markmaking with moveable type.

I’m discovering how fast I can work if I only have one roller, and one colour, but that working fast gives me blisters. I printed 130 pages (I allow for bad printing!) in two and a half hours on Sunday to produce an under-layer for my Vincent O’Sullivan poem layout:

It’s a poem about rocks in a river forming trains like bridal veils, so I’ve printed large pine type that has a distinct wood grain in a green-grey, and will make the three stanzas of the poem into charcoal-silver clumps that will have cool watery type trails.

While that layer dries, I’m working on the Stephen Edgar poem, a fabulous piece about imagining words in the air around oneself. While my inner vision is an airy one in dull colours, what has emerged from the type and colour resources (and Donald’s yearning for colour) is quite different. It’s early days yet, but I’ve pulled from the poem the notion of sunset revealing disintegrating words, so I’m using sunset colours of pinky-red and orange and black…

This is hot off the press this afternoon, my first tentative pull in one colour to see if the composition works. I’ll be running this one through the press twice, like the O’Sullivan, which will cut into my time a bit. I can see the next two weeks being completely manic as I try to get everything printed in time for the folios to be collated by the last week. I’ve just finished talking to the most excellent university binder here about the folio design of black & white with a strip of overprinted proof inset into the front. Yum!

I have been blogging my Dunedin experiences, both printing and otherwise, at my personal blog, and there are more photos on my flickr page.

(BTW, If you’re interested in purchasing Prime, you can contact Donald by emailing donald[dot]kerr[at]otago[dot]ac[dot]nz. Because the press is not-for-profit, they retail the PIR produce at very affordable prices, and pump all the money back into the residency. This folio of seven posters will be only NZ$250 plus postage and packing (for the whole folio, not individual posters). We’ve already sold a third of the edition, so don’t delay if you want one.)

Cross-posted at Slow Making.

Definition: the ridiculous habit of talking through your arse hat. Proof.

My small contribution to Australia’s 2007 election struggle.
Still available, a great souvenir of a thankfully bygone era.

Poster, 510 x 230 mm, handset letterpress using wood and metal type, printed on cream coated offset paper.

Due to the nature of type and ink, each one has its individual qualities, and they look grand and glossy on the coated paper, and slightly bitten into the surface. Yummy!

The chase has been dismantled, so while there has been no final edition number, there will be no more printed, so stocks will run out, and there are only a few left.

AUS$13 EACH
Thanks to the non-weighty goodness of paper, multiple copies (within reason) can be sent with only one postage charge.
Contact me for more details or to purchase. I will send you an invoice that can be paid by Paypal, EFT or cheque.

Remember the days when spam filters were just finding their legs, when all spammers had to do was reap some unsuspecting text from the internet to meet their text quota and then imbed some insidious or merely inane message? Ah, those were the days, and this is a souvenir of those days.

Handset, letter by letter, in wood and metal type, and printed in two colours on tyvek (a plastic stock) and card. 8pp, with a hand-rolled and hand-stitched cover.

Edition of 100.  AVAILABLE

Author: Rosemary Dobson
Artist: Rosalind Atkins
Design & Production: Ampersand Duck

Printed 2008, released 2009

Colophon

Poems to Hold or Let Go is the second volume in the Ampersand Duck fine press series, ‘Selected’.
Printed with photopolymer plate using letterpress processes in Garamond, accompanied by two exquisite boxwood wood engravings on cream 125gsm rag mould-made Magnani Vergata laid paper, in a cased binding of teal Buckram and letterpress-printed navy Wibalin with a dustjacket of wood and metal handset & printed Wibalin. 56pp. 240 x 163mm. Edition of 200.

A view of one of the printed sheets in production, featuring one of the two Ros Atkins wood engravings

About the book

Poems to Hold or Let Go is a selection of 41 poems by beloved Australian poet Rosemary Dobson that spans over 60 years of outstanding writing. It is a conceptual rather than chronological selection, leading the reader on a journey through the poet’s themes and preoccupations, then forking off into an autobiographical direction. The volume includes three later poems that have never been published in book form. The two original wood engravings act as portals to and from the journey, with two seminal Dobson poems acting as prologue and epilogue. The title is chosen by the poet, and suits the philosophical meanderings the reader will undergo.

This whole volume was designed with great care in consultation with Dobson, and the printer’s late-process surprise gesture to her was the use of metal Garamond type in the dustjacket design that had once belonged to her late husband, Alec Bolton, proprietor of the Canberra private press, Brindabella Press.

About the contributors

Rosemary Dobson

Born in 1920, Rosemary’s career as a writer of poetry began at school (Frensham, in the Southern Highlands of NSW). Rosemary’s career continued with early acceptance of publication in literary journals. She has published altogether since then 14 volumes of poetry, two books of prose and (in collaboration), two volumes of translations from Russian poetry. She has edited several anthologies. Her most recent volume, Untold Lives and Later Poems, won the 2001 Age Book of the Year award.

Rosemary has received a number of literary awards including the Patrick White Award for Literature (1984), the Australia Council’s Writers’ Emeritus Award (1996), a DLitt from Sydney University (1996) and the Order of Australia for services to Australian Literature (1987). In June 2006 she won the NSW Premier’s Special Award.

She was for some years on the Editorial Staff of Angus & Robertson, publishers. In 1951 she married Alec Bolton, printer and publisher and Founding Director of Publications at the National Library of Australia. Subsequently taking early retirement he founded his own printing press, the Brindabella Press, much praised for the standards he set in all aspects of book publication. He published 23 books, nearly all of poetry, before his untimely death in 1996.

Rosalind Atkins

Rosalind Atkins is a highly regarded printmaker whose prints have been published in conjunction with the works of some of Australia’s best-known poets, including Les Murray and Judith Wright. She graduated from RMIT with a Bachelor of Fine Art and followed that with a Graduate Diploma of Fine Art. She is a member of the English Society of Wood Engravers. Rosalind has exhibited extensively, and is collected widely by national and international institutions as well as private collections.

Prospectus

Every ‘Selected’ volume has a letterpress-printed prospectus that is sent to press supporters and other interested parties. If you would like to be on the mailing list for these, please contact me.

All volumes are signed by the artist and printer; a limited number early in the edition are signed by the poet.

Author: Nan McDonald
Artist: Jan Brown
Design & Production: Ampersand Duck

Printed 2007, released 2008

Colophon

Transmigration is the first volume in the Ampersand Duck fine press series, ‘Selected’.
Hand-set letterpress in Bodoni accompanied by relief prints on 280gsm Arches BFK grey paper, in a cased binding of ochre Buckram and relief-printed navy Wibalin with a dustjacket of acid-free acetate. 40pp. 240 x 163mm. Edition of 90.

About the contributors

Nan McDonald

Born in 1921, Nan McDonald also began her career writing poetry at Hornsby Girls’ High School where she contributed poems to the school magazine, twice winning the Ethel Curlewis prize for verse. Proceeding to the University of Sydney, she graduated with second-class honours in English.

In 1943 McDonald joined the editorial staff of Angus & Robertson Ltd. There she worked with such people as Alec Bolton, Beatrice Davis and Douglas Stewart. Recalled by Rosemary Dobson as ‘the best book editor in Australia’, she made a considerable – though largely unacknowledged – contribution to the publication of Australian fiction and history for some thirty years.

McDonald’s poetic output was small but highly regarded, with poems appearing mostly in Sydney journals from the 1940s to the 1960s. Her first collection, Pacific Sea (1947) won the first Grace Leven prize for poetry in 1947. Her poems appear in most modern anthologies, but critical perspective is still lacking.

McDonald spent much of her time in the Wollongong region, commuting to Sydney to work. She died of cancer in January 1974 at Mt Ousley.

The 14 poems in Transmigration revolve around themes of birds, sea, bushwalking and human interaction and interference with the environment.

Jan Brown AM

Jan Brown is a sculptor who sees drawing as an integral part of her work. She has a passionate interest in living forms, especially birds and animals.

Jan taught life drawing at the Canberra School of Art for many years, retiring as a Senior lecturer in 1987. Her initial training was as a part-time student at East Sydney Technical College, and later as a full-time student at Chelsea School of Art, under the direction of Henry Moore.

She was born in Sydney in 1922, and has travelled widely overseas, living in London for ten years and returning to London and Europe on a regular basis. Her home, since 1957, is Canberra, where she lives with her husband and family.

She has been actively involved with the promotion of the visual arts in Canberra and in 1992 was made an Order of Australia and also an Emeritus Fellow of the Australia Council. In 2005 she was honoured in the ACT International Women’s Day awards.

Jan’s drawings for Transmigration were not made for the book, but selected by her and the printer from her extensive drawing archives. Her drawings, many made in the same locations that Nan was writing about, were scanned and cast as photopolymer plates, then printed as embossments, slightly inked with transparent ink to darken the paper colour.

Jan Brown and Nan McDonald were exact contemporaries. They both cared deeply about the same issues, and frequented the same walking paths. They never knew each other.

This is the front of the 4pp DL-size prospectus for Transmigration
Every ‘Selected’ volume has a letterpress-printed prospectus that is sent to press supporters and other interested parties. If you would like to be on the mailing list for these, please contact me.