I was one of the Called, and I designed and printed some very little letterpress broadsides. I didn’t have a lot of time to work on them, as I was preparing to travel to NZ to make some much bigger broadsides. Funnily enough, printing small is just as tricky, maybe even more so, than printing big. So the edition sizes for each poster varies. And there’s one series of images, and then a few fun ones that just begged to be made.

If you’d like to see the process of putting the exhibition together, and all the wonderful studio visits made by Anna-Maria to the craftspeople involved, here’s a link to all of her posts on the subject.

THE SERIES

These letters do not spell anything out deliberately; they were chosen to go with the images, which are little metal ornaments that I bought from eBay years ago. Feel free to make them spell things; Anna-Maria made them spell R&D in the show, others may want the word FORD, or maybe your name is DROF. Heh. The letters are 72pt Gill Sans, printed in a bright sexy red. All have little hand-filed deckles at the head and tail, and are numbered and signed.

Each of these is 45 x 32 mm in dimension, so you’re probably looking at them at a larger scale (which won’t do them any favours).

They’re not really meant to be lined up together, so I didn’t put a lot of effort into making the height of AMPERSAND DUCK match up. I designed each one as an individual, taking into account the balance of each image on the ‘page’.

Edition numbers are:

D: Dragonfly — 20

O: Owl — 20

R: Rat — 20

&: Ampersand — 10

F: Frog: 20

They are all still available.

THE OTHERS

Speaks for itself.

45 x 32mm, in an edition of 9. Still available.

Hammer Time. Hand-coloured.

55 x 32mm. Edition of 6. Still available.

Almost Ace. I just love this one. In amongst a box of miscellaneous letterpress stuff was this tiny little logo with the letters ACF, and I’ve looked at it for years wondering if anything could be done with it or should I just chuck it. One day… BING! I saw the way forward.

Printed on red Japanese washi, 42 x 30mm. Edition of 11. Still available.

All of these broadsides are Aus$15 each plus p&h.

Every few years the Technical Officers put on an exhibition to showcase the fact that they, too, are professional artists maintaining their own practice. In 2009 the show was called Art-i-Techs, and it opened on Wednesday 25 March at 6pm in the Foyer Gallery of the School of Art, Liversidge Crescent, Australian National University.

The show ran from 25 March to 4 April 2009.  I showed Transmigration (along with its prospectus), Pr0n Coktales and a couple of informal bindings.

A wide view of both my plinths

Transmigration + the prospectus for the book

on the left, pr0n coktales, and on the right, a few fun books I made to demonstrate techniques to students

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

Printed 2008, released 2009
&Duck Selected 2

Colophon

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

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

About the book

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

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

About the contributors

Rosemary Dobson

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

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

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

Rosalind Atkins

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

Prospectus

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

Purchasing

Aus$350.00 ea +p&h
Also available in binding sheets: Aus$150.00ea + p&h

STATUS: Available

Contact me for more details or to purchase. I will send you an invoice that can be paid by Paypal, EFT or cheque.

All volumes are signed by the artist and printer; a limited number early in the edition are signed by the poet. Early sales will therefore obtain fully signed volumes.

Also

Associated with this book release is an exhibition of various fine bookbindings of the sheets of Poems to Hold or Let Go. Thirty sets of book sheets were set aside for this purpose and numbered in roman numerals as a separate deluxe edition. The exhibition was called Books to Hold or Let Go.

Collaboration details

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

Printed 2007, released 2008
&Duck Selected 1

Colophon

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

About the contributors

Nan McDonald

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

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

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

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

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

Jan Brown AM

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

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

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

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

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

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

Purchasing

Aus$350.00 ea + p&h
Also available as binding sheets: $150.00 + p&h.

STATUS: Available

Contact me for more details or to purchase. I will send you an invoice that can be paid by Paypal, EFT or cheque.

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