#handset type

[image description: photos of a letterpress print and one of the handset type forms used to print it. The print says "we have always been here & we always will be," in the blue, pink, and white stripes of the trans pride flag. end description.]

Spotlight: A Day in June

Today I was searching the collection for something to post about and ended up looking at what we held by Sylvia Plath, thinking of the rich descriptions of summer scenes I’d read recently in her unabridged journals. Much to my delight, I found A Day in June, an uncollected short story from 1952 by Plath whose descriptions of a bright June day seemed to fit with what I’m seeing outside our windows today. 

Published in 1981 by Embers Handpress in an edition of 160 numbered copies, the text is hand set in Monotype Garamond and printed on handmade Barcham Green ‘Hayle’ papers. It was printed at The Fish Inn in Sutton Gault, Ely, England. The cover paper was handmade in the Auvergne by Richard de Bas.

The description of a June day reads:

“It’s one of those perfect days in June you try to describe but never quite can. Take the smell of fresh washed linen; of sweet grass drying after a rain; take the checkered twinkle of sunlight in a meadow; the taste of mint leaves cool on the tongue; the clear-cut brightness of tulips in a garden; green shadows, thinning to yellow, thickening to blue... the dazzle... the hot touch of sun on your skin... blinding arrows of sunlight glancing off the deep glassed blue of the water... the exhilaration... bubbles rising, bursting... the gliding motion... the liquid singing of water past the bow... shifting specks of color dancing: all this to love, to cherish. Never again such a day!!”

I hope you can get out and enjoy this perfect June day—maybe go down by the lake and put your toes in the cool water with the sand beneath your feet, or rent a swan boat on the lagoon at Veteran’s Park. 

#ArtsyFriday

With time at home to try out new recipes, plan our gardens, and enjoy good books, this small artists’ book from Alisa Golden at Never Mind the Press has a little bit of it all! Cinnamon & Saffron: regarding love and squashes tells the story of a blossoming romance illustrated with varieties of squash labels. The handmade book is only 9 x 13 cm and with green handset type on golden pages and green exterior, resembles a squash itself. The book closes with a recipe for corn and bean stew cooked in a pumpkin. Bon appetit! 

--Laura

x-Collection PS3557.O53253 C55 1997  

ok this is—disproportionately exciting to me and no one else i think, aha, it is: a 5 x 7 digital print for lineart and some colors; then a handset pattern for her dress and the border; then masked off around her dress and the pattern printed in two colors! almost, almost exactly as according to plan.

like, i’m going to do a whole bunch of things differently next time,* but all in all this went really well and it is proof that what i want to do in the future can be done & done at my quality goals!! which is!! very cool for me personally, and anyway when is it not a good day to give Satya time & attention & a new outfit

[image description: photos of a letterpress printed broadside of a poem by a pediatric patient, as part of the yearly publication of poetry from the Writer’s in the Schools Program at Seattle Children’s Hospital. This poem is called Black Panther, the Night Hunter. It illustrates the black panther as if in low light, with a combination of fuzzy-edged, textured pressure printing and handset type for the panther's spots. the text and panther's eye are printed in metallic silver. full text under the cut. end description.]

WIP

done with this year's Words of Courage broadside! WoC is a yearly publication of poetry broadsides written by patients at Seattle Children’s Hospital, and designed, printed, and bound into portfolios by local letterpress & book artists. this year’s whole edition will be scanned and posted there in a couple weeks & previous years are always there to see!

this one was pretty nerve wracking for me because i did a lot of things i'm not really used to but at end i think it's good! and feedback has been positive so i'm working on believing it. i can say with certainty that i loved this poem the instant i saw it, and i did my best to make a panther that matched it. fearless, cool, tangible but not tame.

All the background is basically a series of tone plates (blank lino block) and a single multi-layer pressure plate pass (and a touch plate to deepen the dark background under the poem). The poem & the eye are handset type printed in silver, and the panther's spots are a whole bunch of handset pieces masked off to trap to the silhouette of the panther from the pressure print.

pressure printing is extremely simple as a process but i guess how i would say it is. my comfort zone is usually complex but reliable processes. not a huge fan of surprises in the output. control freak behavior. and the concession to control that i made was, basically, i planned it so all the tone plates and pressure printing went on first and if it wasn't layering the way i wanted, or wasn't getting the effect of low-light nighttime values that i wanted, i could ripcord out and pivot to a more known quantity without losing any good printing that i'd already done. and if the gray values just weren't adding up be to dark enough I could also just keep adding tone plate passes until i achieved sufficient contrast for the silver, as much of a pain as that would've been.

there was in fact about a week where i thought i would just have re-do the whole composition so that the fuzzy pressure print, the panther, etc., was all confined to a discrete box on one side of the sheet, and i would have to print black on clean white for the text. i just never wanted the poem to disappear in the mid value ranges—BUT a fellow printer friend and several other people really encouraged me to go with it, just push the darkness on the left as much as i could and do the touch plate and such. i'm glad i listened because flooding the whole sheet really is the way to make the panther seem unconfined, like it could approach you. in another context i also wouldn't have questioned the way the silver text can disappear at some angles, and pops out with shine at others; camouflage is completely appropriate. I just got anxious because the poet & their poem is obviously the most important part of this project in particular, but i regained confidence in it as an appropriate text treatment the closer it got to being finished.

i think i had the absolute least trust in the process when all the background was printed, and the poem, and the colophon, and i just thought, oh no, this isn't going to be anything :( but then i put that big shiny eye on and suddenly i knew it was going to be good :) still had the spots left to print but that's the one thing i've practiced a lot and i could envision it clearly. that was of course the real source of my anxiety during the whole thing. nothing technically out of the ordinary here, but i'm not practiced in envisioning so much variable texture, and i have little confidence in my taste with textural ranges. what if i simply don't know what Good looks like?? perhaps. must do it first to learn it, nerves included. Can't always be panthers.

[image description: photos of The Disco Elysium Tarot, printed letterpress in an edition of one from handset lead type and linoleum blocks. It is a complete 78-card tarot deck printed primarily with white text and illustrations on medium grey cardstock, in a custom dark grey hardcase box with a hand-marbled orange and yellow endsheet. The backs of the deck are decorated with an illustration of a sprig of may bells, and a quote from Smallest Church in Saint-Saëns: "None of this matters at all." The interpretive meaning of each card is expressed on its face with a small excerpt of the game's text. The Minor Arcana are divided into four suits of Harry's Attributes—Motorics, Psyche, Physique, Intellect—and each card in that suit is a quote from a skill under that Attribute. The Major Arcana are assigned quotes from other sources like NPC dialogue or Thought Cabinet problems & solutions. Pips for the Minors are counted with diamonds like the game's skill points; each actor or title is printed with their in-game color, but made shiny & metallic with bronzing powder.

each piece of text was set in handset lead type, assembled from individual pieces for each letter and space, and printed relief on a chandler & price clamshell press. end description.]

🎊🎊 Desert Bus for Hope starts for 2023 on nov. 11th and i have made an item this year for the craftalong that will be up for giveaway between 6am-12pm on Monday the 13th! 🎊🎊 It is a full tarot deck based on Disco Elysium and it has several pieces of my heart & soul in it but NOT my blood because i put a bandaid right on that :) donations for this and any other auctions & giveaways for Desert Bus go to Child's Play Charity.

notes: i did not make a whole new interpretive model for this deck, apologies, that was outside of my scope. it's generally compatible with a Rider-Waite model, with Motorics for Wands, Psyche for Cups, Physique for Swords, and Intellect for Disks. (full distribution of text listed by card, linked below. any spelling or transcription errors you find there, i promise i fixed them in print—that's copied from my digital mockup which was copied hastily from screenshots.)

i also do not track hours on these kinds of projects because that way lies madness, but i will say: i knew how much time it would take to print it. it was a lot but i was not worried about it, i know how to print. i was very worried about how much time it would take to absorb the sheer amount of text, and distribute it across the cards, and really get an array i believe in. i was right to worry, and i have absolutely had a few anxious nightmares about discovering the Perfect excerpt that should've gone in and i missed it, and the suit of Intellect made me want to lay on the floor a few times, but still! i believe there's many versions of a deck you could make from this game and this one is a good one.

i think the Minors fit really well with the double-edged sword of Harry's skills, their advice, their priorities. the circular way the Fool-World assignment works out makes me smile every time. The colors on The Star came out so nice. i think Justice fulfills some of my favorite things about Kim's character & purpose in the story. i worried sometimes that editing to such short clips would lose too much of the politics of the game, but of course you can't really take them out and they're especially present in the Majors—the Devil and the Hierophant, The Star and The Sun. i've wanted to design a tarot deck for years and i love this game deeply and i let this idea percolate for a few months and it never stopped making me laugh so here it is, & given a beautiful purpose :)

i also literally could not have done this without xyrilin's Disco Reader and the FAYDE On-Air Playback Experiment to navigate the dialogue and skill checks. Really couldn’t have tied the whole concept & colophon in its final bow without the Disco Reader :)) thank thank thank, they're so fun to investigate that it was honestly very difficult to focus on my task instead of veering off and exploring every branch in an extremely disorganized way.

actual printing went well honestly, very few problems! i think that means i'm getting pretty good at planning one of these monstrosities, although perhaps it also means i'm not challenging myself enough. hmm. no that's silly there's 78 ding dang cards in this thing. anyway the drop & replace formes worked well, no registration issues. mum convinced me to overprint another half a deck's worth of cards when I was printing backs & borders and of course she was right :/ there were a handful of cards that actually had better line breaks and fewer lines total in true type than in the digital mockup, so i needed all the spares I had to put those new short quotes into the appropriate border breakage. next time i will not question her.

handset in Garamond, Eden Bold, and secret Neuland.

WIP : full text card assignments

bonus photo of the kind of trash notes i always take to plan things like how many borders were printed with space for short excerpts vs long excerpts, and how many of those are majors vs. minors, because they have a slightly different frame at the bottom edge, etc.

[video description: process video of making a small letterpress print from handset type. "Is this the worst day of my life or did I only eat half a banana for breakfast this morning" is the text, with a decorative rendering of a balance scale beneath. on the light end of the balance scale is a pile of curse symbols; on the heavy end of the weight is a banana. each element of the print was assembled from handset type, relief letters and images cast in lead and assembled one piece at at time. the balance scale is built from pieces intended as decorative brackets and borders. end description.]

etsy

i feel like i haven't done something like this in a while, just a quick fun game with type?? messing around. goofin. the moon is a banana now.