Finlay Press is a private press established by Ingeborg Hansen and Phil Day. They began printing in Goulburn, NSW, Australia in 1997. In 2001 the press moved to Braidwood, NSW, where they designed and printed numerous publications before closing the press in 2009.

Hansen and Day were graduates of the Graphic Investigation Workshop (GIW) at the Canberra School of Art (now ANU School of Art), where they studied under Petr Herel and Peter Finlay. Herel, an advocate of the artist book, head lecturer of the GIW, and founder of the Artist Book Studio (ABS, est. 1994), and Finlay, a compositor and printer by trade, both inspired Hansen and Day to continue making books after their graduation. Finlay’s name was chosen for their press name largely because of Finlay’s life-long involvement in letterpress printing; he started as an apprentice compositor then worked professionally as a printer, a teacher of all aspects of book production in numerous technical colleges, and he assisted other private press printers including Alec Bolton in the early days of Brindabella Press – a role in private press productions that Hansen and Day thought would otherwise be overlooked.

Hansen and Day’s first collaborative book was Imaginary Thoughts and Their Beings (1995), printed in the ABS. Hansen supplied a prose poem while Day supplied eight etchings. Earlier books by Hansen were often unique copies featuring her own writing, some including textiles for pages, most of them letterpress printed onto cheap coloured papers. Day’s earlier books were more typical hand-made book productions utilizing tradition printmaking and letterpress techniques printed onto art papers.  In 1996 Hansen and Day collaborated on a zine called PAB (taking its name from the initials of the French poet Pierre Albert-Birot), and invited others to contribute to each issue. There were 3 issues in an edition of 100 each. In 1996 the Artists Book Studio was separated from the Graphic Investigation Workshop to make an independent studio space. Herel chose to stay with the GIW. The ABS was renamed the Edition and Artist Book Studio (E+ABS) and was headed by Diane Fogwell. The E+ABS employed Day as its first printer and binder. Hansen was also employed as a printer for some titles. By late 1996 Hansen and Day had started gathering equipment to found a press. By 1997 they had printed their first title Burly Gryphon, dedicated to ‘Peter and Petr’ (Finlay and Herel) under the press name Finlay Press.

Finlay Press set out to work with authors and artists domiciled in Australia. The press wanted to establish a close working relationship with its contributors. Some authors, such as Gary Catalano, Julian Davies, and Robin Wallace-Crabbe had more than one title published; Wallace-Crabbe also contributed as a visual artist to three book titles, one folio, and a broadsheet.

The earlier books were printed under the imprint Yabber Yabber Publications as a publishing arm of Finlay Press. The publishing arrangements were simple: Finlay Press supplied half the money for the edition, and the remaining contributors supplied the other half, making all contributors publishers of the title. The finances were used solely for covering the cost of paper, nothing else. Once the edition was completed Finlay Press retained half the edition and the remainder were divided equally among the contributors. Hansen and Day closed Yabber Yabber Publications to gain complete control over all aspects of each title knowing that this would allow them to create a house style and print larger runs, and further books used the imprint Finlay Press.

Early titles from Finlay Press were printed in small runs ranging between twelve to thirty copies (with the exception of one title, The Seven Proses, which ran to two hundred copies). These early books were experimental in binding and layout, but were always true to the traditional notions of a book. Conscious of contemporary changes in paper, inks, bindings and printing techniques, Hansen and Day continued to find a way to a house style suitable for editions of over one hundred that was affordable on both money and time.

Later titles, editions between 25 to 150 copies, were printed and bound with a firm house style. Each publication used Magnani paper folded on the fore-edge, stitched with a Japanese binding and bound with a French false cover, then inserted into a slip case made from cardboard (usually a kraft stock). Some titles employed a concertina fold. Almost all titles were printed letterpress using hand-set Baskerville (with the exception of titling). The first title printed in the house style was Light and Water: Forty Prose Poems 1980-1999 (2002).

One later title deviated from the house style: Goodbye Eggcup. Two titles, I’ll Build You a Stairway to Paradise and Day by Day didn’t sit comfortably within the house style. I’ll Build You a Stairway to Paradise, a poem by Hartmann Wallis, is about a girl who is the sexual desire of an art student. It is accompanied with a lithograph by Day containing overtly sexual images, and the slip case is drawn on (not printed) with a felt pen; neither the subject nor use of felt pen comfortably sit with the printed nature of previous titles. Day by Day, a collection of poems by Pierre Albert-Birot, translated by James Grieve, is given a similar treatment. Its brightly-coloured card slipcases have more in common with Hansen’s pre-Finlay Press titles, and Day’s use of potato prints rather than ‘fine’ press techniques was unusual for the Press. One of the poems, ‘St Vincent’s Day’, is clearly not a Birot poem. It is most likely an original composition by Grieve. The production and content of Day by Day still fits with the Finlay Press house style, but the aforementioned details of the book, while still reserved, show the beginning of an abandonment of the house style. Day by Day was to be the last title published by Finlay Press.

By 2005 Hansen and Day wanted to print lengthy prose, particularly fiction, in higher editions, but the practicalities of doing this with hand-set type was simply not possible due to time, and limited type stock. James Grieve approached Finlay Press with the possibility of printing a novel; using linotype was the only possibility, but this didn’t solve the problem of binding approximately 500 copies. The solution was to create a new publishing arm. Hansen and Day discussed these ideas with Julian Davies and Robin Wallace-Crabbe (two author/artists they had already collaborated with) and enthused by the idea of independent publishing they founded Finlay Lloyd. The name Finlay, again, came from Peter Finlay and was retained from Finlay Press, and Lloyd was the name of Davies’s father, a man who had little interest in books. The first title, a collection of essays loosely discussing the fate of the book and literature titled When Books Die could be seen as a loose-fitting manifesto; it was released in 2006.

As mentioned before, the press disbanded in 2009.

ALL IMAGES BELOW ARE CONTENT © INGEBORG HANSEN & PHIL DAY, FINLAY PRESS. The copies are mine, and the images themselves are © Ampersand Duck.

Bibliography (basic, will add to it as more details come to light)

Early editions (Yabber Yabber, individual designs)

Burly Gryphon (1997)
- Ingeborg Hansen (prose)
- Phil Day (etchings)

Hungry Magpies (1997)
- Bernard Hardy (poetry)
- Ingeborg Hansen (lino cut, wood engraving)
- Phil Day (etchings)

Bomber (1997)
- Emma Veal (poem)
- Phil Day (etching)

Offerings (1997)
- G. W. Bot (poem, lino cuts)
- Ingeborg Hansen (binding)

Fth (1998)
- James Pollock (short story)
- Ingeborg Hansen (lino cuts)
- Phil Day (etchings)

The Last Lost Doughnut (1998)
- Robin Wallace-Crabbe (play)
- Ingeborg Hansen (typography)
- Virginia Wallace-Crabbe (bichromate photographs)
- Phil Day (lino cut paper masks)

Pandora’s Cat (2000)
- Robin Wallace-Crabbe (poem)
- Ingeborg Hansen (typography)
- Katie Clemson (lino cut)

Formingle
- Craig Charlton (musical composition)
- Kirsten Wolf (handmade paper)
- Phil Day (etching)

I, I Am, A Blind Man (1999)
- Petr Herel (etchings)

Household: Eleven Poems (1998)
- Gary Catalano (poems, lino cuts)
- Robin Wallace-Crabbe (lino cuts)
- Ingeborg Hansen (lino cuts)
- Phil Day (lino cuts)

Jabberwocky
- Julian McLucas

The Seven Proses (2000)
- Bernard Hardy (poems, wood engravings)

Finlay Press (with a house style)

Light and Water: Forty Prose Poems (2002)
- Gary Catalano (poetry)
- Robin Wallace-Crabbe (etchings and lino cut)

Pile of Hair (2003)
- Julian Davies (short story)
- John Pratt (etchings and woodcuts)
- Phil Day (Monotypes)

Through Hoops (2005)
- Gina Dow (poetry)
- Phil Day (copper engravings and linocut)
- Ingeborg Hansen (wood engravings)

Familiar Objects (2005)
- Phil Day (essay, lithography – some copies hand-coloured)

Goodbye Eggcup (2006)
- Phil Day (poetry, copper engraving, collograph)

Cat’s Eye (2008)
- Julian Davies (short story)
- Phil Day (copper plate engravings and monotype)

I’ll Build A Stairway To Paradise (2008)
- Hartmann Wallis (poetry)
- Phil Day (lithography)

Day By Day (2009)
- James Grieve (translations of Pierre Albert Birot poems)
- Phil Day (potato prints)

Print Folios

Top Ten Twentieth Century Monsters
- Phil Day (lino cut, copper engraving,  monotype)

Four Men and Their Ideas on the Erotic
- Ingeborg Hansen (lino cut)
- Robin Wallace-Crabbe (photo etching)
- Robert Jones (lino cut)
- Julian Davies (monotype)
- Phil Day (copper engraving)

Broadsheet

An Egyptian
- Hartmann Wallis (poem)
- Robin Wallace-Crabbe (etchings)

I’ll put you out of suspense: the quick answer is NO – but also YES. It all depends, of course, upon what you mean by the word ‘book’, and this is, in a roundabout way, what we’re all talking about, isn’t it?

Provenance
Now, my very hastily-prepared abstract reads as though I’m going to give a blow-by-blow account of the 2009 conference of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand (or BSANZ, as its members thankfully dub it, because it is a bit of a mouthful): I’m not. I came back from the conference all fired up and wanted to share the love, but I honestly didn’t listen hard enough to all the papers to sound absolutely authoritative, and I don’t think you’d enjoy it if I did.

It also sounds as though I went to Bristol for the 2009 Impact conference, but I didn’t. I did participate in the Bristol research project about how artists positioned themselves as book makers and publishers, but I only did so at a safe distance, through the ether.

This paper came about because I was struck by the common questions in these and other (mainly online) discussions about the book, its form and its future, regardless of whether the participants were academics, artists or general punters: what is a book, does it have limits, what is the future of the book, and does taking it online change everything? A disclaimer: his is more of a traveler’s meanderings through our common book world than a straight academic paper, because I find it hard to stay on track most of the time, let alone when I’m trying to walk in a straight line…

As you can see from this one component of my submission to the Bristol discussion, I frequently find myself wandering through the various continents of the book world without much of a guidebook or even a plan. Sarah Bodman and Tom Sowden provided interested parties with this standard chart, and asked us to identify the areas in which we publish as artists. I ‘publish’ broadly; I like finding ways to present ideas and text, and I love collaborating with others who have their own book ideas, so my range tends to balloon out. This is why I position myself overall as a private press, a term that gives me the personal freedom to avoid pinning myself down, and why I don’t actually put the word ‘press’ after ‘Ampersand Duck’, but keep the name open, so that it is like an umbrella that sits over my activities.

BSANZ
In July 2009 I decided to travel up to Brisbane to attend the annual BSANZ conference, entitled The Limits of the Book. I’m not a PhD student, nobody funded my trip, and I wasn’t at the time a BSANZ member, although I am now. Essentially, I went there to cold-sell myself and my books. As you can see from the Bristol chart, one of my activities is to produce formal, traditional, hand-set, letterpress-printed, hand-bound fine press poetry books.

Fine press books are listed on the chart at the far right-wing end of Bristol’s art book-making scale, even further across, oddly, than Livre de Luxe or Livre d’Artiste works and they seem at the moment highly unfashionable in Australia, which is perhaps due to the steep decline in awareness of what a private press is and does, thanks to an entire generation of printers and book people ageing and fading away and not passing on their knowledge along with their equipment. Printers and fine binders tend to be shy, solitary creatures, and fast-moving technology, combined with a generational shift to instant gratification has probably forced that very steep and slippery decline. Fine press books take a lot of planning and concentration and time, and hence they cost a lot of money compared to even the nicest commercial hardback book. The decline of awareness of their production is another factor in their being unfashionable.

BSANZ, as an organisation, is full of the kind of people who know (at least in theory) about the sorts of things I do with letterpress, if not with book arts and that was its primary attraction as a group to visit. The membership is stuffed with academics and librarians, and other seriously bookophile individuals. Not many members, unfortunately, are actual makers of books, and this is one of the reasons I decided afterwards to join as a member, to add to the physical production knowledge base. I noticed that the biggest cross-over group between BSANZ and the book arts community is the Rare Book Librarians, and you’ll find at least one here today: Des Cowley, who also attended the BSANZ conference, and may care to comment further about what I’m saying later.

Bibliography, in itself, is a slowly dwindling academic pursuit, also outwardly unfashionable at the moment, and also, like traditional letterpress and fine bookbinding, tenacious in its survival among the few who choose to pursue it. Bibliography is the formal study of written and printed works, with two branches, textual and physical bibliography. It spans the classification, careful description, historical analysis and study of books and manuscripts and ephemera. It’s a broad field of study: even if books vanished tomorrow, there would still be bibliographers working away on what has remained, branching out to explore the reason why books stopped being needed, and debating the pressing question of why people still persist in having bookshelves in their homes. This is only if scholars still by then choose to identify themselves as bibliographers: most who do are of a certain age, those coming up behind seem to prefer to be identified with Cultural Studies, or some such new labelling of their departments.

Once upon a time (and most of us are old enough to know that this time wasn’t so long ago), most English departments, as they were known then, offered some form of bibliographical unit amongst their courses. Some even had their own press and some type lurking in the library or the basement, allowing students to sample hand-setting type for themselves, so that when they studied the problems of say, nineteenth-century book sections that were printed out of order, or wrote a commentary upon the peculiar spellings in a Shakespeare play and whether they were due to Shakespeare’s ingenuity or the dyslexia of the compositor who set the page, they could speak with some personal authority.

Unfortunately, traditional presses are quite big, and type is dirty and mildly toxic, and both collect dust, and do not compare with the satisfactory minimalism of a laser printer, so most presses were discarded by university administrators. I think Monash University is the only campus in Australia to still have a consciously bibliographical press, but even they have been cast out of the English Department and sent to live across the other side of Melbourne with the – gasp — artists at their Caulfield campus, which has been a bit of a culture shock. I recently heard a rumour that Sydney University is talking about reviving their bibliographical press, and ANU has fully functioning letterpress facilities at my department in the art school, but the English department just doesn’t seem to be interested. And so fewer and fewer people are formally taught how to produce a traditional printed page.

When I saw the theme of the BSANZ conference, The Limits of the Book, I thought attending the conference would be a fruitful thing to do, to make contact with the last group of people who might support that side of my work, because I have a personal commitment to not just work with letterpress, but to share what I learn with others, as a kind of ‘tradition bearer’. I have also made an effort to interact actively with the Canberra Bookbinder’s Guild, for similar reasons: while I’m not a formal or trained binder, I figure that they need an injection of people who actually care about the craft.

Interacting with BSANZ wasn’t much of an exotic excursion to me; I should confess now that I am no stranger to bibliography, and in fact, it is what got me here today. I started my adult life thinking that I would be living within its realms; I was studying classics and English with the view to being a librarian or a teacher. I did a course in Bibliography and Scholarly Editing in the early 1990s with Professor Paul Eggert at ADFA@UNSW. Paul regularly took advantage of the ANU presses to send his students over for weekend workshops to experience handset letterpress. My particular weekend workshop changed my life completely and I decided to take physical bibliography literally, and become utterly physical with books and try to always be around letterpress equipment – but not before I’d ingested some of the core concerns of bibliography: the importance of every single physical part of a book as a carrier of meaning, the difference between certain states of text, and the need to keep proofs and records of your process as an author or maker. For anyone who has had me as a teacher, this is why I’m always banging on about books needing a colophon that is designed into the work, not included as an afterthought on a scrap of paper that is easily lost.

So once I finished with ADFA@UNSW I changed track completely and went to ANU art school, to get as close as I could to their letterpress equipment, and I haven’t left yet.

I thought, when I turned my back on what had really been my parents’ expectations of my career, that I’d escaped bibliography, but when I went to the BSANZ conference in July, I discovered that it had stayed with me like a shadow, and I acknowledged to myself that bibliographical concerns matter to my work, and that the scholarly continent of bibliography isn’t across the globe, but next to that of books as art, in the same way that Asia is joined to Europe.

I think as book makers, we all bring our personal interests and strengths to our books, no matter how obscure or even domestic. I always thought that I was a late bloomer when it came to making books (I didn’t get to art school until my 30s), but I know now that my early studies, my passion for reading novels and poetry, and my freelance work with desktop publishing and design all served a crucial apprenticeship that fed into my work once I was freed from the demands of study and a small child. My journey provided a perspective that informs my ideas about books, just as your journeys inform yours.

Epiphany
Back to the conference: what conference participants made of the ‘Book’ and its ‘Limits’ interested me. The program was diverse: it started with a paper on scholarly publishing, and moved swiftly to online ideas of ‘The Book’ before returning to what a presenter jokingly termed ‘hardcore bibliography’. Then there were a number of optional sessions, and I made my choices according to my personal interests: I attended a wonderful talk about illustrations on the margins of medieval illuminated texts, another one that explored the movement of diaries from paper to cyberspace, and a session by Doug Spowart on the rise of online self-published photobooks. Later I chose a talk on author Jasper Fforde’s online paratexts that explored his use of a website to not only promote his novels but to supplement and extend them; also a session about the way poet Susan Howe challenges the printed page, and lastly a study of popular Feminist book blurbs and covers.

But it was a moment in the first part of the conference that made me sit up and think, and to convey it properly, I have to build up the context.

The keynote speaker, Andrew Schuller, was talking from the scholarly publishing sector, about the shift of scholarly works away from physical books into digital publishing because of the costs in producing limited numbers of such books commercially. Among a lot of cogent points about copyright, authorship and textual fluidity (a term I love), he talked about books as artifacts (things that are solid, finite and cannot easily be replicated) as opposed to books as content (‘freed from bondage’, in the eyes of electronic publishers). The former, he said, encourage ‘proper’ deep reading comprehension; the latter, a lighter, multi-layered reading. I mention that last bit as a slight digression, since the ‘artifacts’ and ‘content’ are the dichotomy I want to emphasise here. Still, I’m sure we’ve all noticed how much reading has changed with the move to multifaceted platforms for text (and this was touched upon yesterday by Lyn Ashby).

There were a number of young up & coming academics speaking at the conference, who were mostly exploring digital and online texts and their presentation. Kate Eltham’s topic, early on the first day, was ‘The Book As… Searching for a New Metaphor for the Book in a Digital Age’. It was a great talk, and I’d like to read you a bit of her abstract:

What new metaphors will replace the ‘book as print object’? This presentation explores five different conceptual frameworks for the book with case studies of contemporary usage.
The “book as text” (example: blog books, podcast books, e-books)
The book as “art object” (example: artist books, special print editions)
The “book as a game” (Example: Alternative Reality Games)
The “Book as Place” (Example: comment Press, books as conversations)
The “Book as web service” (Example: The networked book)
What conclusions can we draw from the proliferation of new metaphors for the book and its role within contemporary culture? Certainly it is clear that digital platforms have permanently amputated the content of books from the container in which that content is distributed. We can also observe that the book is moving from a thing (noun) to a process (verb)…

I’m going to come back to her list again later, but first I’ll stick to this pivotal moment. As she talked, I was watching the room around me (I like people watching at events more than the event itself at times) and there was a palpable air of discomfort coming from some of the more traditional people in the room, who clearly wanted to return the discussion to more solid bibliographical topics and were wondering if this was to be the tone of the rest of the conference, in which case they looked as though they wanted to duck out for a while to sit among the books in the library upstairs.

Straight after Kate Eltham, Alan Loney stood up. Alan is a poet and private press printer from New Zealand, and is highly respected there in a way that cannot be replicated here in Australia because New Zealand seems to have retained a close-knit community of fine bookbinders and letterpress printers (craft is strong there because their TV stations are really bad). Alan followed his heart to Melbourne, and prints there as Electio Press, as well as writing poetry and books about books. Alan stood up for his talk, titled ‘The Limits of the Book as Object’, and one of the first things he said was a kind of manifesto:

I know the limits of the book: they are the front cover, the back cover, and the spine.

There was a strong wave of relieved laughter, and that palpable air of concern relaxed. The lines had been drawn; there was now an ‘us’ and a ‘them’ in the room.

There was another moment of ‘us’ and ‘them’ shortly after in Alan’s talk when he said that his definition of a book is a codex with a text, and only the combination of both created a Book (capital B), and he followed this with a disparaging remark about artist’s books, on account of their frequent lack of text and substance. My back stiffened at that moment, and so did Doug Spowart’s, I noticed. Of course, I felt strongly that I had to defend artist’s books, and did so in question time afterwards, then Alan and I carried our discussion about this on through the lunchbreak, most amiably.

But what he had said about the limits of the book as an object resonated with me through the conference and beyond. I disagree violently about the book having to be a text-filled codex, but I have come to believe that the fundamental premise of a book is its physicality. It is, primarily, a tangible container of ideas. It does not have to have text in it, but a book without text still holds the idea of text: our minds provide the textual connections as we gaze at it; a blank book holds potential and is defined by the absence of text. Even a book sculpture is a physical container of implicated meaning and metaphor.

Consequently I’ve come to think that there ARE limits to the book. I think that there are only so many ways you can push the idea of a physical book before it stops actually being a book – although my personal spectrum of physical book-ness as an artist is really very broad. I think that if you remove the book container from its contents, you are left with information. This information can then be presented in myriad other ways, none of which has to be called a book. So if you’re actually asking if there are limits to the way text or information can be presented, then there are no limits , no limits at all. There are now many alternative choices.

I’m not trying to deny the potential of online text, I just think it’s just a matter of our being brave, of jumping to a new way of thinking. Poet Judith Beveridge has said that poetry was a matter of naming things, and I think art is also a matter of finding names for things too, and of finding new things for names. We need to find new names for text and information online that aren’t book-based.

As you probably know, I blog, and in the past I have thought of my blog as a kind of on-going artist’s book, but now I am happy for it just to be a blog, a contemporary (and probably completely ephemeral) publishing entity in itself and an experience that allows me to think about my life in a way that a written diary doesn’t (I also have a written diary, because there are some things in life you just can’t blog). I also really respect the Kindle, because the Kindle doesn’t call itself a book. It is a container that holds text, and it doesn’t pretend to be anything else. In fact, it has been so successful at being itself, that I have heard people use the word Kindle as a generic term for a text reader in the way that people now use Google for any internet search, not just a Google search. A bit of imagination and ingenuity will allow us to move forward with information transformation and presentation and allow the book to just be itself, 3D in the real world.

Orientation

Now, Did anyone spot the anomaly in Kate Eltham’s list of examples, above? They are all virtual entities, except for the artists’ books. This, combined with Alan Loney’s dismissal of the genre, made me realize that we, as an artistic book-making community, aren’t taken seriously by bibliographers unless we are working with ‘serious’ book formats. I think this is a great shame, as we share so much. The genre of artists’ books is so vast, and if you step back and look at their production broadly, they are an ongoing dialogue with the future of the book as a physical artifact, and are and will be worthy of serious scholarly investigation outside of book arts criticism.

Young academics are getting there; Kate Eltham, even though she lumped us in with alternatives to books as physical containers, showed a wonderful selection of artist’s books, including altered books and a fabulous book concept by Shelley Jackson, who uses a vast number of people who have allowed themselves to be tattooed with one random word each to create short stories. Now that is truly a physical book.

I encourage all of you to take interest in BSANZ: it seems to be branching out, stepping up, shifting generationally. Last year’s conference was apparently better attended than ever before, and the 2010 theme, sited in Melbourne, is called To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Texts. Perfect theme for artists, don’t you think? Why not present a paper, attend, or try to exhibit something nearby? It would be great to move our books and our ideas outside of our tight circle of artists, to show – not prove – but just show – that books as art are relevant, fruitful and engaged with the book as an object as it transforms over time.

Uncharted waters
I think I’ve covered a few of the questions I mentioned at the start of my talk: I don’t think anything I’ve said should be treated as a definitive answer, despite the fact that I tend to state things confidently – not only am I a Libran, and apt to change my mind easily, but every experienced traveler knows that you have to take cultural perspectives into account when seeking the truth. As far as the future of the book goes: I’ve got two completely differing endings to this talk. I wrote each one separately, and put them side by side. I can’t decide which I like best, so I provide them both, like one of those choose your own adventure books.

The first, I call
i. post-apocalyptic zombie hunting

There was an underlying theme at the BSANZ conference that kept popping up its head like an uncontained zombie: the Death of the Book (say it out loud with a capital D, capital B).

I don’t think anyone in BSANZ actually believes this, but the debate is certainly fun. I don’t think any of you really think it either, because you all know, as book artists, that the shift away from the book as the primary provider of information frees it up again to be an object of worth and beauty, and beefs up its importance as a cultural symbol that can be used as a metaphor for all kinds of things in an art sense. The Death of the Book  is basically a media beat-up.

I don’t believe in the Death of the Book because of one simple and possibly, you may think, far-fetched fact: humans have not got their act together enough to have sufficient energy to run the internet at current capacity when peak oil runs out. We are living in a weird time of paradox: this is a golden era for information, but a future dark age for record-keeping. It’s an era of amazing accessibility if you happen to be in the first world, but there’s not a lot of access for the third world, and that divide is only going to get more dramatic in the future.

As information is increasingly only accessible online, then we really will have Haves and Have-nots, everywhere. We’ll have a literacy divide as wide as that of the dark ages, when reading was a privilege, only accessible to those who could afford the books. This is my post-apocalyptic extension of the very real question ‘how does the information contained in books survive the constant shifting of software that leaves much behind and only translates what is deemed relevant?’. As someone who has worked in desktop publishing pretty much from the moment it went onto computers (I just felt a grey hair go PING), I have witnessed many incarnations of books fall by the wayside, trapped on disks, drives, sticks, all holding files that are now impenetrable.

The Academy Editions of Australian Literature, a project I’ve worked with since its inception, has spent the last 20 years (PING) trying to perfect a way to strip down their carefully researched and formatted scholarly editions into some holy grail of simple code that can coast along the surface of a very rough software (and hardware) ocean. I don’t know how successful they’ve been, but it’s been a long journey in a very leaky boat.

Do you remember in the mid 1990s, people were getting grants right, left and centre to make computer books that were quite akin to games; lots of movement across the screens, lots of interactivity… for a while. There’s very little interactivity between software and/or hardware developers, and very few of those ‘books’ are still able to be used on our computers now. Our information only accessible for relatively short periods of time.

If you think I’m exaggerating about any of this, take a look at these Anselm Keifer sculptures of unreadable lead books:
and tell me how they are any different from this:

And then look at an object with text.

The benefit of this last image shows that even if something is depicted on the surface in another language, it’s still decipherable if you take the time. With no surface information, or a reliance on technological mediation, data is easily lost.

In a nutshell, I think books will survive anything the internet can throw at them, but maybe just not in the quantity at which they’re being pumped out now. Crap novels can and will easily survive as e-texts, and that will save a lot of trees. Quality books, if printed well and bound properly, will always be collectable, and therefore people will continue to make them, albeit a bit slower and perhaps with more consideration, and artist’s books, if made well and interestingly, will always be valuable – and increasingly relevant as ongoing commentary, societal reflection, and a way of extending an active artistic practice.

ii. the fairytale ending
Bibliographers, especially those interested in physical bibliography, spend a lot of time with the anatomy of books. They can give entire papers on individual parts of book anatomy, such as Victoria Bladen’s BSANZ session on medieval marginalia.

Called ‘Gardens at the Margins: the Limits and Porous Borders of Renaissance Texts’, it was a quite magical talk with the most exquisite images that I can’t, of course, source, about how the margins of illuminated manuscripts were the medieval space to imagine and be creative, a space that evolved over time to the frontispiece of the printed book, and has since moved to book covers, and just like many book covers (especially science fiction covers), the marginalia often had very little to do with the actual contents of the page or book, as if it were an open space, completely outside of authorial control.

This idea translates beautifully into the making of an artist’s book: in my workshop for the forum, Print to Book, I was exhorting my students to think about every part of a book structure, codex or otherwise, as fertile ground for meaning and content, to not just print on the pages or the cover. I was saying that every kind of material you use feeds into the reading of the book and can enhance what you are trying to say. And that it is important to have something to say, rather than just creating empty vessels.

If we look at the traditional terminology of book anatomy, it is redolent with metaphor and suggestion. The top of the book is the head, the base is the tail. Between the two is the spine. We can start talking about the book as a reflection of the human condition, but what human has a tail? I guess if we’re being sensible, we can rationalize that bookbinders couldn’t stomach the thought of calling the lower part of the book something as base as the bottom.

But combining head and tail allows the (capital B) Book to be an indefinable polyglot creature, a unicorn perhaps, or a mermaid, surviving elusively in the corner of our vision, roaming the forests or oceans of our vast book continent. People obsessing about what a book is and is becoming seem to want to catch one of these creatures and pin it down, as if to prove that these magical entities are fakes, like weird false mermaids constructed from fish skin and displayed to gullible punters in freak shows. But they are not: here be dragons, lustrous glimmering seamonsters, and even though they are deemed to be dying out, or even extinct, they will linger long on the edge of our cultural maps, and we are the people who will keep them alive, in all shapes and forms.

My first ever purchase was a small Adana tabletop platen press that came with a cabinet of type, advertised on the internet. My father and I drove up to the Southern Highlands to collect it, and I was really excited to see all the trays, even though they were faces that make me groan now: lots of 6pt script faces and decorative fonts, obviously for printing business cards and invitations. I also got lots of rusty dye-cutting blades and mystery objects, the sort of stuff that lies in boxes around the studio and rarely gets used, if ever. I still have a few of those boxes, still waiting for me to take the time to really go through them. Being inexperienced, I didn’t know what to look for in a press. I still have that Adana, but it doesn’t have platen clips for the tympan padding, and I haven’t stirred myself to get some, so I haven’t got it working. It just graces a corner of the studio.

I didn’t need it because at the time I was working at the art school (I still work there) and I had presses to use when I could be there outside of work. So my collecting was quite casual because I had nowhere except my rickety old weatherboard garage to store things, and certainly no studio space.

A year or so later contacts I’d made from former jobs and studies contacted me about taking some type that was being deaccessioned from one of the local universities. That was two cabinets of usefulness, mostly Bodoni and Times.

Walking through a junk shop in the Blue Mountains yielded a gorgeous Adana tabletop 10 x 8 platen press in good working order for $600. I was nervous about the money but figured that if I’d found it on the internet, the shipping would have pushed it out of my league, so I took it home, pulled it apart carefully (a big line of newsprint with the pieces laid out and notated in the order they came apart), cleaned it up & touched up the paintwork, and then put it back together. I’m not a person who understands machines, and the fact that there was one washer left over made me very nervous. Apparently that leftover washer is a common occurrence, and it’s made no difference to the smooth operation of the press. You can see it working in this post.

I now have two proofing presses, although one (an Asbern) is stuck in a friend’s shed down in the far south coast of NSW where Dad and his ute managed to haul it in preference to getting it back up the very steep Brown Mountain after I bought it very cheap from a disguntled ex-partner of a printmaker who had left him and skipped the country. That purchase was sheer luck, and I was looking forward to using the Asbern whenever I got the space to house it, but when my art school ex-boss moved her studio from Braidwood to Canberra and decided that she didn’t really need a letterpress press that she’d never used, she asked would I like to buy it from her? Luckily I’d just sold off a polymer platemaker that I’d stashed in my garage and I had some funds, so that’s when the Vandercook SP-20 joined my stash. It was in pristine condition, and came to Canberra comparatively easily, so it’s been my working press ever since.

Here’s a view of my home garage, once I’d cleaned all the junk out that had surrounded the printing gear. This is the day it all got moved out into my new ANCA studio. The blue tarp is keeping the Vandercook nice and dry.

This is the ANCA studio when I first moved the press & type into it, c. 2009. The red table is a printer’s stone, which is a printing cabinet topped by a slab of steel which is hardy and flat and built for composing and planing formes before moving them onto the press. It was also in my ex-boss’s collection, and it came to me as well. Her husband had been using it in his carpentry studio, and the drawers were full of gorgeous whirly wood shavings! Cleaned out and repainted (with a coating of Penetrol for the top), it’s one of my most prized pieces.

I spent three years at ANCA, and halfway through that time I sold a few books and had some cash to spend, so decided to settle on a house font and buy some fresh type from M & H Typefoundry in the US. Choosing was really tough, but I eventually chose to supplement my few drawers of Garamond and Gill. The day it arrived was very exciting. The letters were so clean that I could handle them without getting the usual grotty fingers!

 This is old type.

My first studio at ANCA was only temporary (you can use their wonderful facilities for a maximum of 6 years) and while I was there I had the opportunity to purchase a beautiful collection of type from the Finlay Press when they disbanded.

Much of the type had belonged to Alec Bolton of the Brindabella Press (that’s his handwriting on the labels). I was working with him when he died, and the typecases had originally been offered to me, but I was a new (and single) mother with few funds, and couldn’t take advantage of the offer. I will always be grateful to Ingeborg and Phil of the Finlay Press for deciding to offer it to me for the same price it was sold to them, all these years later.

So by the time my partner and I found a house with room for a home studio, I had a wonderful but unorganised collection of type. Moving it was, as usual, gruelling, and I’m also grateful to a wonderful local bunch of piano movers who, although outwardly cheerful whilst doing the job, gave a huge sigh as the last drawer slipped back into the last cabinet and they could go home and rest.

So now I’m firmly established in my home studio, and feeling that I have enough. I have seven cabinets of type, including a cabinet of wood type that, in the same way as the metal type, was collected in odds & sods over the internet and via people who know that I’m interested. I’ve started saying no to any offers except wood type (and an iron handpress, if I can find one with a frisket), because it’s really not how much you have, but what you do with it, and now that there’s no more moving on the horizon, it’s time to start really working again on long-term projects rather than the short choppy things I’ve managed to do over the last three years.

So this summer I set myself the project of getting all the type rearranged into a working order, establishing what I did and didn’t want (I’ve been passing on odd trays of type over the years too… the bulk of my Times went to Andrew Schuller’s Wyrdwynker (sp?) Press and various 6pt fonts have been given to ceramicists etc who can play with them in a non-printing craft context), and cataloguing them.

With the help of Mr Padge the Studio Cat, of course.

I have put together a type sampler, inspired by many others that I’ve seen over the years.

Old typesetters used to feature samples of large font sizes by setting words or phrases that would fit the space. I decided to do the same, which was surprisingly difficult since many of my wood faces haven’t got complete alphabets. It was a lot of fun, though, and I discovered lots of things about my collection, like the fact that one font (Tudor 12pt, I think) doesn’t have any cap Es, which is very frustrating, and I hope that they fell into one of the boxes of crap in the move, to be discovered later. Another typecase had some fantastic ornaments in the back row, which I moved into my already fantastic ornament case, inherited from the Brindabella/Finlay presses.

So now I feel a bit more organised, and my type sampler is going to make life a lot easier. Onwards and upwards!

Otherwise:

The ANU School of Art has a special place in my heart. It, along with the Australian National University in general, is one of my life’s sacred sites. Way before I ever thought of going there (when I was doing an Arts degree in very non-art subjects), I lived in group houses with art students and earned money there by life modelling. When I discovered that they had a great letterpress set-up, and that letterpress was my destiny (it was really like that: a major epiphany weekend), I went to night classes at the school to build up a portfolio, and then I went to the school itself as a student. Straight after graduating, I was hired by the bit of the school that has a letterpress studio and I’ve been there ever since, teaching and helping. I even design their promotional flyers, some years.

Every year I see students that I think would be fun to work with. Sometimes they’ve been in one of my classes, sometimes I’ve just seen their work around the school and thought that it would translate well to print. That’s why I decided to join the Emerging Artist Support Scheme (EASS) which the school has in place to help students transition to a world without art school.

EASS is a bundle of fun, ranging from international scholarships to cash prizes to residencies. There are also collectors who happily use the scheme to get first pick of the work in the graduating exhibition, and they pay a premium on the prices to help with the cash prizes.

My contribution is a residency in my studio to make a letterpress broadside. Originally I thought that these would be very traditional in format: a piece of text either rendered completely typographically on the page or accompanied with imagery. The more it progresses, the less I care about the traditional idea. What I seem to be doing is giving these people access to my equipment with a ration of paper and seeing what happens — the only mandantory aspect is that they have to finish with an edition that can be sold (with the proceeds split between us). So it’s become more of a letterpress print residency, really.

So far I’ve had 4 ex-students, with two of those working with me as I write this, so I’m not totally sure what they are producing, but the experiments so far have been wonderful. I also keep aside ten copies of the edition for a future folio / exhibition pack. Each person also gets a letter outlining what they’ve achieved and the skills they’ve acquired, so that they can apply to use letterpress equipment elsewhere. I think it’s a pretty good deal.

If you’re interested in what we’re doing, buy a print, they’re all available at the Duckshop (to get there, hover your mouse up there on the web header, you’ll find a drop-down box that will take you to it) and very reasonably priced. Each print sale lifts the confidence of the resident who made it, and encourages me to keep doing this. Or if you’d like to be an EASS patron yourself, click that link at the top of this page and get involved. It’s a lot of fun and satisfaction.

List of recipients to date:

2010
Natalie Azzopardi
Peter McLean

2011
Helani Laisk
Jonathan Webster

We weren’t all professional binders; I consider myself a complete amateur as far as fine binding goes, but I’m pretty good with alternative bindings. Some people were complete but very interested beginners, others were professional conservators or librarians or just plain interested. A lot of people *were* professional binders, and it was good to just sit behind my trade table in the breaks and listen to the conversations happening around me.

There was a woman from NZ in the ranks, and the rather fabulous Jim Canary came all the way from his Lilly Library in Indiana, US of A.

It was an action-packed weekend, but not as exhausting as something like Impact 7. The organisers ran a tight ship, dividing the mob into four sub-mobs so that we could all attend all of the demonstrations:

1. tool making with Jim Canary, who showed us that we don’t need fancy equipment to make finishing tools, and (most importantly), we don’t need fancy finishing tools to make amazing designs;

2. leather inlays and onlays,with German fine binder Barbara Schmelzer;

3. sewing headbands with Fabienne Nicolaj, who helped us through both the French and Dutch sewing techniques;

and 4. edge decorating with Joy Tonkin, who shows us lots of interesting ways to decorate a fore-edge, from graphite ‘gilding’ to paste combing. Here she is embossing into the graphite with a (cold) finishing tool.

My contribution to the event was also about fore-edge decoration, but while Joy was talking about decorating the surface, I was talking about hidden fore-edge paintings, like the contemporary ones done here and here. I’ve never done a fore-edge painting, but Donald Kerr (my host during my Dunedin residency) showed me a couple of beauties from his collection and Joy asked me to share my joy, so to speak.

I also had a trade table, selling my books in sheets for other binders to play with, and I was alongside all sorts of traders: Pepe, from Pepe’s Paperie, who is transforming his Phillip store into a serious supplier of binding materials; people selling leather, and paper, and type ornaments for gold tooling. I bought a stack of gorgeous Tibetan papers from Jim Canary, who has been going to Tibet annually to help their papermaking industry.

I learned so much over the weekend, about a whole lot of things: how to work with unbacked cloth instead of bookcloth, about the incredible collection over at the Lilly Library (including a huge miniature book section), about how medieval Irish monks worked in their scriptoriums, about titling in fine bindings, and there was lots of discussion about the need to keep teaching and training to keep bookbinding alive.

One thing that had me rivetted and then thinking hard was Rosemary Jeffers-Palmer’s report-back on the Society of Bookbinders Conference in the UK. They have an annual members’ exhibition, and while there are the usual categories: best fine binding, best alternate binding, etc, they now have a new category: THE COMPLETE BOOK. By this, they mean artists’ books. Complete, because every part of the book works together to make a whole; the binding and the contents cannot be separated. I fell in love with the thought of that description, the complete book. It’s such an inclusive phrase, and wonderful if you think that most traditional binders don’t have a lot of respect for artists’ books. This is a very good way to improve that relationship.

We had a bit of socialising too: there was a cocktail cruise on Lake Burley Griffin followed by dinner at the Yacht Club, and on the final night we had a BBQ at the house of a Canberra Guild member.

As part of the conference fee, the Tonkins are producing the proceedings of the conference as bindable sheets, so we’ll all have fun making our own personalised souvenirs of the weekend.

If you would like to see more photos from The Gathering (which isn’t a scary cult name, as some of my friends joked; it’s the term used for when you bring together all the signatures of a book to sew together), there’s some at my flickr page.

It all went so well that another guild felt brave enough to put themselves forward to host another gathering — in two years time, in Melbourne. We in Canberra are very hopeful that this will eventuate, because we know that there are many more binders out there, and Melbourne is such a booky city. Bring it on!

Luckily the conference was mostly indoors (unlike the filming session of Winners and Losers attempting to work on the grass just outside the conference) so apart from a wild wet trip over to another Monash campus for an exhibition opening, we all stayed pretty snug.

(A detail from Scott Lyon’s Fleurons exhibition at Postbox 141 in the city)

Impact7 was a densely-packed intellectual experience. In fact, many complained that there was too much content, and indeed, with six parallel sessions at any one time that weren’t strictly aligned, it was very hard to mix and match the papers and try to catch a broad range of topics. There were many streams of subject matter, from traditional printmaking to digital media, from letterpress to artists’ books. The two hot topics seemed to be cross-media platforms and artists’ books. I can’t speak for the media sessions (merely that there were a lot of them), but every session on books was standing-room only.

Highlights of the conference for me were (in no particular order):

• All of Sarah Bodman’s showcasing of international artists’ books. She also brought a selection of books inspired by Ed Ruscha, and left them out for people to handle without gloves, which was fantastic. I like her relaxed approach to the book world.

(Sarah wore many hats during Impact, both as speaker for herself, for her collaborator Tom Sowden, and as a session convenor. Here she’s talking as herself & Tom about their Bookarts Manifesto project, which was a wonderful project because, unlike Drucker’s attempts to categorise everything, the BM acknowledged from the outset that it is impossible to define the genre, and then went on to explore just how crazy big it is. This is an image of some of the ways different artists positioned themselves within existing categories, adding more and rearranging the elements for themselves. I was excited to see my contribution to the project on the top left of the image!)

• Seeing all of our Book Art Object works in one spot, arranged by theme. Some of the books haven’t been distributed yet, so it was a treat to see the newer ones. There were four BAO members at Impact: myself, Sara Bowen, Rhonda Ayliffe and Amanda Watson-Will, and we spent some time together, out of which a new theme for the next edition has emerged, based on a work by Sarah Bodman. We all spent time blogging about the conference (27 posts in the week between us!) so head over there if you want to see some BAO perspectives (that link takes you to one of the Impact posts, rather than the general blog).

(None of my Impact photos are very good! Here’s Rhonda, standing by our wall of BAO books.)

• Paul Coldwell talking about Paula Rego and her Nursery Rhymes book (one of my bookshelf’s treasures, albeit as a Folio Society edition)
• David Ferry, whom I encountered in Korea years ago, giving an hilarious talk about Double Acts/Double Takes/Double Entendres that had us all chortling.

(Here Ferry is illuminating all the various characters in The Biscuit Nativity from Vis magazine.)

• Talking face-to-face with Book Arts high priestess Johanna Drucker at the end of her skype keynote talk, as I asked/made an observation about Fluxus being a dress rehearsal for the archive headaches that the internet is giving curators and librarians. Like many people also observed, her talk was a difficult and frustrating experience thanks to the vagaries of skype (low quality sound, drop-outs etc) but the moment that her face appeared, things just seemed better. A shame she hadn’t talked to us with occasional images, rather than attempted a powerpoint-like presentation.
• my session, not for the fact that I talked, but because the two other presenters were also discussing letterpress issues (despite our session title lumping us as ‘Globalization, national identities and the post-colonial perspective’) and at the end we managed to have a conversation between the three of us and the rest of the room, which was wonderful.

(An image from Jacqueline Naismith’s talk about her NZ design students, working with letterpress to explore visual notions of local food; this is ‘colonial goose’, which was a popular colonial dish of stuffed mutton flavoured to taste like goose!)

• Braving the storm and getting drenched in order to be at the launch of Monica Oppen’s exhibition and book The Silent Scream: Political and Social Comment in Books by Artists, an amazing array of books by an amazing array of artists (and I’m chuffed to be included in that array).
• ANU’s Art History Professor Sasha Grishin outing himself as a zine reader in the last day’s panel on zines, and then proceeding to talk about his habit in terms of a drug user. Wonderful! Followed by a mini zine fair where I stocked up on all the back editions of Plastic Knife, among other things.
• All the amazing exhibitions around the campus, of which I’m sure I didn’t see all, no matter how widely I wandered.
• Experiencing Ruth Bain, the conference manager, who seemed to have swallowed The Little Book of Calm. She was incredible.

There was so much to do, so many thoughts to think. It will take a while for my brain to process all this new information.

(These are some of the people who weren’t rushing around between sessions trying to see & do everything.)

I caught up with lots of people I haven’t seen for ages, some who I only get to talk to at conferences, and met a whole heap of new people. I keep hearing of people I missed, which isn’t hard because there was a transient conference population of 300-400 people. Woah!

(Ancora Press, with Brian McMullin showing his printing skillz in the background)

I also popped downstairs to Monash’s Ancora Press, which is probably the last surviving bibliographic press in Australia. A bibliographic press is one used to explore traditional textual issues, teaching English students about how books used to be make and the kinds of errors and subtleties that arise from hand-setting and printing. Ancora Press is now shared by the English department and the Art/Design department, which makes an interesting mix and also makes it hard to keep the type ‘nice’… traditional printing methods and graphic design/art methods are completely at odds with each other, a topic I find endlessly fascinating, having one foot in each camp.

(Nicci Haynes and Genevieve Swifte, my Canberra comrades. Genevieve is showing her portfolio.)

(Here’s my portfolio table, looking as colourful and attractive as I could make it with travel luggage limitations!)

(A dark photo of master printermaker John Loane)

John Loane (Veridian Press) talked about his longstanding and ongoing working relationship with Mike Parr as a keynote address. It’s rare to have John talking without Mike dominating the space, and this time Mike was overseas, so the audience had John all to themselves. The talk was fabulous, but it struck me most of the way through that if a woman presented a body of work this gendercentric, she’d be typecast as a radical separatist. The only female presence in what we were shown (over decades of work) were some breasts Parr had drawn on himself. I get to talk to John a lot because he’s living in Canberra these days, but he’s a humble man, and it was nice to see more of what he does and says.

(Here’s a pic of Rhonda Ayliffe on the left, Paul Uhlmann (WA) in the centre and Nicci Haynes on the right. There are other interesting people at the table but out of shot: Iona Walsh (Canberra designer/printmaker), Amanda Watson Will, Sara Bowen, Annie Trevillian (Canberra textile printmaker). We’re eating at a fab little Sri Lankan cafe around the corner from the conference.)

And finally, a bit of Melbourne texture. I had a great week, and look forward to seeing what emerges from all the ideas and connections. Congratulations to Marian Crawford and Ruth Bain for a STERLING effort!

Actually, I knew Natalie would do honours, because her work is excellent, but she’d just spent a semester doing letterpress with me in class, and I didn’t want to wait another year and have her go all rusty on me. So I snaffled her when I could. I thought she could make her broadside in the uni holidays and then get on with her year.

That was a good plan, but… she got very interested in the process, and one idea led to another, and before we knew it, four months of Tuesdays had flown by and she’d produced four posters out of the one allotment of paper. I bet her teachers are pleased that we’ve finished, because now she’s really got no excuse but to do her honours work, which has very little to do with letterpress (she’s a Photography student who studied Book as a complementary unit).

Here she is, back in Summer, starting on her Mario design, using grid paper to aid her set-up. The type tray is full of type ornaments not unlike these ones. After doing the Mario set-up, I found a box of dot ornaments, and she liked them so much that all the other prints restraint themselves to a dot matrix, so to speak.

I’m really happy with what she’s done. She’s learned a lot about type and presswork, and that if you plan ahead, you don’t have to print the same colour twice (or even three times, in one case!). But when the work is all intuitive and experimental, sometimes good things happen from the accidents of other things. Some of my favorite work in this project wasn’t able to be editioned, and we have a couple of copies each.

Like this page, where she has offset the ink by pressing one print against another to create a fantastic ghostly effect that works so well with the theme.

So the final editions reflect the planning she put into them. She started by thinking about Mario:

And this was a real learning curve, trying to decide how to make it a three-colour print. In the end it became a two-colour print, because we thought that the subtle patterning in the rest of his shape would be overwhelmed by the dots if his face & hands were printed in a solid colour, so we came up with the idea of embossing his skin.

There are 55 copies of this print, because we’d split the original paper ration into three smaller piles of 60 each, and she’d printed the first colour run of this and the next before deciding to play with the Space Invaders and thus dividing the ration even further!

And so then there is the Pacman print, of which there are 50 copies:

And then we get to the two Space Invader prints:

This one has 20 copies,

… and this one has 14!

The wood type was the last thing printed on all of them. Natalie knew what she wanted, but it was a matter of finding the perfect font and working out the colours. Originally we’d thought of printing all the text in the same spot on each poster, in one unifying colour, but once she looked at all the prints together, it was obvious that they needed individual treatment. Which meant three more colour runs! With letterpress it isn’t just a matter of changing a colour; you have to ink up the press, print, then clean off the press and then start again. It’s laborious, and takes patience and dedication, which Natalie has.

While they’re editioned, each of the prints is really an individual, as feeding the paper through the press is done by a human, not a mechanical process… there are slight variations of alignment which means that your print, signed by the artist and chopmarked with the Ampersand Duck mark, is really your own print, and not a unit in a mass-produced project.

So. These fabulous broadsides are available from my Duckshop (<== on the sidebar, to your left). Don’t miss out, they will hopefully all sell, and that may fund a part of Natalie’s next project, whatever that may be. I’m positive this won’t be her last printing experience!

Stay tuned for a very different broadside experience when Peter McLean makes his edition with me.

The Two Fires Festival is a celebration of poet and activist Judith Wright’s impressive double legacy, and an opportunity to explore the ongoing relevance of that legacy in today’s world. It aims to stoke the two fires of arts & activism. This year’s festival will be taking up the challenge of Coming Together.

Coming together with me on our Small Publishers’ Panel were Stephen Mathew of Ginninderra Press, Rob Riel of Picaro Press and Wagtail Books, and Alice Gage of Ampersand Magazine.  We were wrangled by Phil Day of Finlay Lloyd Press.

Account written the day after:

Speaking on the panel was fun. Phil took his wrangling seriously, and even though armed with a formidable list of intelligent questions, allowed himself to sacrifice some of them and let us ramble on — and then pulled us back to the Important Issues. It was a good mix of panelists.

As I said on my personal blog, I felt a bit like I was in one of those Sesame Street clips that sing one of these things is not like the others. All the others were digital or off-set print publishers, fraught with commercial pressures, hell-bent upon getting new writing out there, everywhere, in an attractive and affordable manner. I, on the other hand, put out small editions, hand-crafted, with a vague eye to making money (something I have to address very soon) but focusing more on the object than the accessibility. However, the more we talked, the more we had in common. For example, Rob Riel has a similar interest to mine, of looking at Australia’s poetic history, and rifling through the dross to find gems to republish. He now has a series of poetry reprints called Art Box, reproducing what he considers to be good out-of-print volumes. Is he creating a canon? I hope so, to some extent. I don’t think Australia has one for poetry apart from Lawson-Paterson-Gilmore-insert names here-big gap-Wright-Murray

We talked a wee bit about design, a lot about accessibility, more about the Future of The Book (we didn’t really get anywhere on that point, of course: the oral poets, who insisted that here is now and we don’t need to put stuff on paper ended up selling books of their work later in the day), had some healthy interjections and questions from the audience, and I got to poke Phil with a stick a little bit, a beloved hobby of mine for years now because he takes it so well (we used to go to art school at the same time).

I also got to spend some time in the Braidwood Book and Print Room, a not-to-be-missed experience for anyone who loves eclectic books, fab prints and works on paper, and a gorgeous setting. This is a bookshop that doesn’t care that it lives in a small country town; it has a distinctly European sensibility and doesn’t stock anything you’d expect to find. It’s very easy to find: as you’re travelling through the Braidwood town centre on the way to the coast/Batemans Bay, you turn left onto the highway, and not far along on your right is a blue house and a sign saying ‘bookshop’. You are there. Please do go there, even if only via the website. [POSTSCRIPT = no longer there, sadly. Another good idea bites the dust...]

While I was watching the show I remember thinking that, in my limited experience of Australian letterpress, and in my broader virtual observances of overseas letterpress, there seems to be two kinds of letterpress enthusiasts: those who live for the print, and those who love the machines. I’ve only — to this date — known one person who combined elements of both, and he produced beautiful work.

Myself, I’m a print person, someone who loves what the process does rather than the process itself. I’m not particularly interested in the machines, and when something goes wrong with a press I’m working with, I’ll try to fix it intuitively, but if that doesn’t work I’m not afraid to look girlie and call people who are much handier with a spanner and screwdriver than I.

Canberra has a Museum of Printing quite close by in Queanbeyan; it’s full of machines of different vintages, and that use different technologies, from iron presses to platen presses to cylinder presses and a working linotype machine. It was set up from the remnants of the Queanbeyan Age newspaper, and the people who run it (all volunteers, many of whom worked on the newspaper) love their machines. They get them working, they maintain them lovingly, and they print off the odd souvenir flyer to show the public what the machines can do. I don’t think there’s a lot of print production happening there, and because I don’t worship the machines, I don’t go there very often, which is quite remiss of me.

I bet all the QPM volunteers watched the Stephen Fry/Gutenberg show, and marvelled over the building of the wooden press; I bet they don’t know, like I didn’t, that a similar labour of love was happening just down the highway a bit. In Australia? Where most of our presses have been scrapped? Where it’s impossible to buy new metal type? Where the once quite healthy private press movement is now almost completely non-existent? Really?

Yes, really.

Let’s start with a little bit of printing history, a bit of context. I listed some printing presses above, but you probably don’t know what I mean. Forgive me if I make a mistake here, I’m not a print history expert, I’ve just absorbed a few things in the time I’ve been involved with letterpress.

So, this is a press very similar to the one used by Gutenberg.

It is a wooden hand press, with most of the parts being wooden, and only some of the moveable parts of it made from metal, because it was very expensive to use metal at the time, as you can imagine. In fact, this press technology was the dominant form of print production for centuries, until the industrial revolution allowed metal casting to be a lot cheaper and large cast shapes were made possible. This allowed people to produce much more durable designs and you start getting presses that looked like this:

These are called iron hand presses. Similar concept to the hand press, in that you lay the type flat and press the paper onto it. Anyway, with all that marvellous industrial production capacity, from this point on press development went gangbusters, like everything else in the modern world, and presses changed shape rapidly over two centuries:

That first, wooden press is also called the Common Press, because while there were many variants and slight improvements (and, I’d say, complete wackinesses) to its design over the centuries of its dominance, commonly they were all wooden with metal screws.

I’m pretty certain that, up to now, we haven’t had a Common press in Australia, as we were colonised around the time of the Iron Press. Did you know that the First Fleet had a press on board? I read somewhere that there was no-one able to use it, so it festered in a hut for many years before being hauled out and put into use. One day I’ll find that fact again and actually write down the details.

I received a hand-addressed letter a month or so ago, in gorgeous penmanship of a kind I haven’t seen in years. I had only seen the sender once in the last fifteen years, and that was only a few months before the letter arrived. He’s one of those wonderful eccentric Australian people that set themselves up in the bush and do whatever the hell they want and the rest of the world can be buggered. When you get talking to them, they’ve had an interesting life, and are usually very well educated. This man, Richard Jermyn, is no exception.

I don’t know a lot about Richard Jermyn. I’ve been told various stories, such as he is an ex-Navy man; he was an architect, so forth. I don’t really know what is true and what apocryphal from the various stories. What I do know for certain is that he has a strong interest in letterpress and printing, and used to have a private press in the bush near Bemboka, NSW called the Indian Head Press, named for a nearby peak in the Bega Valley. He lived near my parents, who have a lot of respect for him, and they took me to meet him when I first started showing an interest in type and printing. I lost contact with him; he sold his Bemboka property and moved further south. Apparently he gave a lot of his equipment to the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, and only kept the basics, and that’s the last I heard for a long time.

Then earlier this year I taught a bookarts workshop in Bega, and he popped in to say hello. I had a couple of my fine press books with me, and I was delighted when he looked through them seriously, with care and attention to detail, and then looked at me soberly and said ‘good pressmanship’ with the same sense of approval that the farmer says ‘good pig’ to Babe at the end of the movie, and I felt so happy I thought I would burst. I have had the pleasure of having my books admired by good people, but when an experienced pressman praises, it really means something.

So, the letter. It was only a computer-generated and photocopied invitation, but the content was very exciting.

Of course I went, how could I not? I took my mother, a local historian who could also appreciate the importance of the occasion. It was a most enchanting experience: driving down the highway to the furthermost eastern corner of the state, turning into a rough narrow dirt road just off the main road to discover a large green Colourbond shed surrounded by the usual scrap and detritus that is common to most farm barns, plus a rugged vegie patch and a rudimentary washing line full of simple clothes: shirts, worker’s shorts, socks. Outside the door of the shed was a table set up with wine and nibblies. Not wanting to drink, I asked for something non-alcoholic, and was poured a glass of water from the tap attached to the rainwater tank.

A bit of chat with the others gathered around – mostly friends and press-making collaborators, only one other person having anything to do with printing – and then we were allowed into the ‘Tin Tent’ to discover a completely different world.

I was expecting… I guess I was expecting the usual printer’s set-up, arranged around the inside of a green tin shed. I wasn’t expecting the ambience of hand-cut wooden beams and carefully yet carelessly arranged arrangements of various collections – saws, lathes, timbers, chains, plugs, books, tins. among many, many collated things – up the walls and on a big mezzanine that is obviously a living quarters as well.

It was a living working space, one indistinguishable from another.

Richard had arranged for some local musicians to sit up on the mezzanine level with violin and harpsichord.

They played (exquisitely) from above as we entered and saw, in a cleared space at the far end of the shed, the press that Richard and a group of friends had built by hand.

You see this picture? Look at this:

It was gobsmackingly wonderful to stand and look at this working replica of early printing history. I can’t begin to convey how privileged I felt to be there when it pulled its very first print.

I had borrowed my mother’s digital voice recorder, and managed to record Richard’s opening speech.

I’ll provide a bit of it here, to give you an example of the gobsmackery:

This was started at the beginning of the year; I think the first of January I started to first put plane to wood. I might just go through quickly a bit of the language of the common press, the various parts, and you’ll see on the printed matter that I’ve made a bit of an explanation and some of the background, but basically this press was derived from plans … from a double volume book called The Common Press, which is the documentation of the common press that is in the Smithsonian Institution in America. Without the plans in this book I would not have contemplated it, but I looked at it and thought ‘I’ll have a go at this’. Just shows the things you can do in a moment of rashness.

The original plans called for oak, elm, beech timber, and the big departure has been that this is not European timber, this is all Australian hardwood. This is where Les and other people have come in. So, from the bottom down: the Feet are the hobs of the Tathra Wharf (there’s a story behind every piece), the Cheeks are (pretty ratty, you can see the difficulty of getting big enough timber)… basically wharf timber from North Bega.

These pieces… that’s the Head, and the other big lump down the bottom, that’s the Winter; those two pieces take the whole of the impression. These are dove-tailed into the cheeks, there’s a big dovetail running up in here, top and bottom, and those pieces take the whole pressure of the press, and these are Roads and Traffic Authority guideposts.

[laughs from viewers, someone says: they don’t make guideposts like that anymore!]

You can see a bit of the original timber there, I’ve written the dimensions there: 8 1/4 x 7 3/4 x 24 3/4, and that’s the offcut. So that’s the Winter. And somewhat ironically, the Summer is this little strip here…

If you want more of that verbal tour, you can download the files and hear for yourself. I’ve broken it into chunks, and apologies for some of the incidental noise, especially my iphone beeping at me. I taped until I stopped to have a go myself. None of the chunks are more than six or seven minutes:

Part 1: Richard Jermyn: Acknowledgement of the local Aboriginal peoples (this is about 30 seconds; I didn’t mean to separate this out from the rest of the acknowledgements, but I was experimenting with the sound software)

Part 2: Richard Jermyn: thanking all those who were involved

Part 3: Richard Jermyn: Details about the parts of the press and what materials they used.

Part 4: Richard Jermyn: a live recording of pulling the first print

Part 5: Richard Jermyn: more live printing

Part 6: Richard Jermyn: an explanation of the metal screwthread and how it was made

The detail, the terminology, it’s all something you’d expect to see and hear in a museum, but it’s alive and well in a tin shed in Pambula. Amazing. Apparently this press will outlive anything built in European wood, thanks to the hard woody goodness of our Australian timbers.

Look at that woodcut of early printing again. See the inkballs used for printing? Richard had even put together a couple of those, made with wooden handles, horsehair and the remnants of a friend’s leather jacket. They worked really well, and he put a friend on printing duty while he supervised the press working.

On dabbed the ink, the paper (dry, not damp: he didn’t dampen machine-made paper) was inserted onto the guides, the tympan (made from real vellum) lowered onto the frisket and the whole lowered onto the forme (which is the locked-up type). Then he got friends to turn the handle that moved the type under the platen, and pull the lever that lowered the platen onto the type to make an impression. That prints the first page. Then the forme is rolled further along and the second page of the sheet is printed.

When the tympan was lifted to reveal a (fairly roughly) printed page, we all sighed deeply, no one more than Richard himself, who had very bravely and generously waited until we were all assembled to see if his press actually worked. This is what we took turns printing:

Don’t bother counting the typos: we know they are there, but there wasn’t time to change them, because the music was playing, and the wine was being slurped, and we were all taking turns to use the inkballs and turn the handle, and pull the lever – which, incidentally, explained a lot to me about why there weren’t many women in the trade. It’s hard work to pull that lever! I don’t think I could possibly print on that press regularly, although it would be akin to working out on a rowing machine, and probably very good for me.

Just in case you can’t see the image of what we printed, the book he used to build the press was called The Common Press: being a record, description & delineation of the early Eighteenth Century Handpress held in the Smithsonian Institution by E. Harris, C. Sisson (London: Merrion Printers, 1978). He used local craftsmen to help with timberworking and the blacksmithing.

He showed me the book after we stopped printing (only because we ran out of paper!) and it is incredibly detailed, with cross-sections, x-rays of inserts, plans and materials. Still, there’s no way I would look at something like that and think ‘I could do that’. I only do that with pictures of things people have printed.

I think everyone came away from the Tin Tent that day feeling privileged and excited. Richard had invited the local media but they didn’t show, and it’s their loss. Richard told me that he has happily spent $10,000 building this press. There is a thread on Briar Press (a great place to learn about letterpress) about the possibility of building such a press, and I can’t wait for Richard to receive the praise he deserves for achieving it. He hopes to move it to somewhere more accessible, but in the meantime he will show it by appointment to anyone who is interested. You can read his contact details on the letter at the start of this post, otherwise feel free to email me and I will pass on his details. If you want to see more images of the press and the day’s proceedings, go to my flickr set.

Richard Jermyn
[cross-posted at Ampersand Duck the blog]