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

Melbourne didn’t really behave itself for Impact7; I know everyone makes jokes about the city having four seasons in one day, but to turn on its wettest Spring day in 100 years was just showing off, don’t you think? On the wednesday, while I was sitting at my folio table showing my wares and talking to people, the sky went pitch black and the inside lights started flickering as lightning and thunder raged outside.

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.

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!

When I gave the prize to her, she hadn’t officially left the ANU School of Art; they have a strange system where you do three years of study, then you exhibit as a graduate, and then you find out if you are doing Honours, and then you do another year and then exhibit as a graduate again. It isn’t unusual to win an exhibition prize as a 3rd Year graduate, and then be still study when you exhibit as an emerging artist. Of course, most of the time Patrons are warned when someone may be getting into Honours, but that’s not a foolproof system…

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.

According to their website,

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...]

If you did watch the show, you’d remember that Gutenberg didn’t actual invent the press itself, as hand presses had been used for printing woodblocks before his time. No, he is the Father of Letterpress for inventing a process to easily cast individual metal letters for the purposes of printing. It was much more of a jeweller/blacksmithery type of invention, really, and of course it revolutionised information technology as the world knew it.

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]