If your browser won’t load the image, click here to be taken to the digital file.

The hard copy is 240 x 92mm, printed on two weights of Kraft paper and hand-sewn in a horizontal format. If you would like to purchase a copy, wave your mouse over the top of this page to find the red drop-down Duckshop link. Or contact me directly.

For images of the production, have a look at my letterpress flickr set. For the story of its production, click here.

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!

Once I got thinking and printing, I was hooked.  So, I present to you my first line of letterpress cards, sold exclusively at the Craft ACT shop:

White Light: a vintage letterpress cut and 36pt Latin Elongated typeface, printed in pewter ink on Fabriano Tiepolo paper and accompanied by a metallic pewter envelope. 140 x 140mm. Limited edition of 45 prints.

Black Light: a vintage letterpress cut and 36pt Latin Elongated typeface, printed in silver ink on Black cardstock and accompanied by a Marshmallow white envelope. 140 x 140mm. Limited edition of 50 prints.

Sorry Tree: wood type printed in a metallic brown ink onto a hand-rolled sea-green background ‘smudge’, printed on Fabriano Tiepolo paper and accompanied by a recycled brown envelope. 140 x 140mm. Limited edition of 40 prints.

Mulberry Love : 2-colour wood type print in orange and mulberry, printed on Fabriano Tiepolo paper and accompanied by a metallic moss envelope. 140 x 140mm. Limited edition of 45 prints.

Aren’t they nice? Each edition is limited, meaning that if I use that design again, it will be in a completely different colour run. Hopefully they won’t last long, so don’t miss out…

Update
A Christmas card, printed on Rives BFK paper:

and a general lovey-dove one, perhaps for Valentine’s Day but pretty much useable anytime if you make the inscription what you need it to be (I tend to use ‘MWAH MWAH’, which turns it into friendly air-kissing!)

‘Lippy Kiss’ comes with a black envelope. The colours have been custom-mixed directly on the press rollers, just like hand-mixing your own blend of lipstick!

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

The folio cover.

The title page

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This turned into this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cross-posted at Slow Making.

Artist’s book. BFK Rives White 250gsm paper, watercolour, thread. Text (from a song by Machine Translations) produced using wood type letterpress. A set of two concertina books.[The text below is cross-posted from my personal blog]

The Pillowbooks is an artist’s book comprising a complementary pair of concertinas. It was made for my exhibition Pressings: Recycled Bookwork, and sat so quietly in the show that I don’t think many people noticed it.

The rationale for my exhibition was that the works in it were made from the remnants of other work; there were altered commercial books and pieces made from larger/more formal book projects that I’d been working on over the years. When I printed Transmigration, a fine press book of poems by Nan McDonald and drawings by Jan Brown, I printed the edition on paper called BFK Rives Green, which is a lovely eucalypt grey-green colour. I also printed a much smaller, spare edition on BFK Rives White, and those pages are still sitting waiting for me to resolve them… but there were off-cuts from both editions. The green offcuts became part of the fine press books by becoming endpapers, and some of the white off-cuts became The Pillowbooks.

It’s a devilishly hard work to document, because the back piece is clean-embossed and standing, which means that the light is never right for a photograph. The front piece lays flat, which also makes it hard to get a good clear shot at the same time as the back piece.

So I’ll describe them to you: The Pillowbooks is a set of two concertina book-structures containing the same piece of text. The text is paraphrased from a song called Be My Pillow, by Australian outfit Machine Translations, from the album Happy. This is what the MT website says about the song:

Be My Pillow is about a great love affair between two home-furnishing impersonators.

Yes. Well, right. In fact, it is a full-bodied, multi-layered and heart-smackingly rich paean of yearning that sounds amazing through headphones and that I never get sick of. The words on these sheets of paper are

NO WAIT NO STAY
I WANT YOU TO
BE MY PILLOW

I was listening to the song one day and it made me think about relationships as pillows: how when you’re not in a relationship, you yearn for the comfort and companionship of a lasting relationship, and then when you are in the thick of a comforting long relationship, you can still yearn for the crispness and freshness of a new encounter. And from another angle: being aware that any relationship worth its salt doesn’t stay fresh and surprising; it wears in, gets comfortable, becomes old. If it goes past comfortable, becomes lumpy, do you accept that and keep on, or do you look elsewhere? If I stick with the pillow as metaphor here, do you keep the old pillow or buy a new one? Do you freshen up with a new pillow but hold on to the old pillow for sitting up in bed, for support? Do you ever just want to borrow a pillow for a while if you’re feeling a bit flat at someone else’s house? Is using someone else’s pillow wrong? Do you think upgrading is decadent, unfaithful? Do you hate holding on to old things, and prefer making a fresh start every few years? Does the idea of taking off the pillowcase and seeing the pillow stains make you feel queasy? Do you leave pillow maintenance to somebody else?

Pillow books have been described as “a collection of notebooks or notes which have been collated to show a period of someone or something’s life.”

So here are two ‘pillows’: one is fresh, white, crisp, stiff, embossed with the words (I used wood type, printed letterpress), folded in one concertina direction so that the first fold is a valley-fold, hand-sewn at one end (like the decorative end of a pillowcase) with crisp unwaxed linen thread that emerges from the thick fluffy paper jauntily. The paper deckle is at the top of the sheet, so the concertina can stand upright.

The other is folded in the opposite direction, mountain-first, and lays horizontal. It has also been embossed with wood-type, but the indented letters have been stained with watercolour, in the colour that pillows go underneath the pillowcases, from pools of drool and seeping hair-grease. The hand-sewn threads at the decorative end are limp and aged (really old: antique Victorian-era cotton, straight from the factory spool!). The paper deckle is at the base of the sheet; it doesn’t stand up easily, and is quite unstable when it does.

Old, new. Fresh, used. Permanent, temporary. Loved, rejected. People can have such differing viewpoints about what is necessary, what is important, what they like/dislike/value. All of these thoughts sit in this simple piece of work.

I like the idea of making work that connects with specific pieces of music. So much of what I do and think about is accompanied by a soundtrack in my head, and to make concrete connections with this soundtrack excites me. I think hearing Be My Pillow is important to the reception of this work, but of course it isn’t essential. It’s an optional enhancement.

no wait
no stay
this will help you
along the way
no love
is lost
and i want you
to be my pillow
(extract from lyrics written by J.Walker)

The Pillowbooks, 2009.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I offered to make a promotional poster that could double as my work in the show.

'wood chop' is on the left, 'fairy floss' on the right

This was the first thing I printed in my new studio, on my new press, and I used the poster to test out what Kitty the Vandercook could do… so each poster took multiple passes of the press. The metal type (the names) took two passes for each colour scheme, and the wood type (the top half of the poster) took four passes of the press each, one for the background colour run (hard to see in the reproduction!), two for the main colours, and one for the — hand-applied — rainbow roll on the number. The stars were then hand cut and stamped.

The poster itself is quite large; we scanned one to make an A5 invite for the show.

One of the (many) lessons learned with these posters is that soy-based ink doesn’t like drying on coated paper stock. I can’t buy oil-based ink locally anymore, so the learning curve was a double one working with the press, and working with the ink. Still, I think they worked out ok. There are 10 of each colour.

These are still available, and priced at Aus$50 each plus postage and handling.

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

(I also made some quick splash posters to hang around the campus. They were souvenired pretty quickly!)

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

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

Edition of 100.  AVAILABLE