#michael koppa

Typography Tuesday

Typesetting on a Winter's Afternoon

This week we present selected page spreads and cover from Stan Nelson's Typesetting on a Winter’s Afternoon, printed in Liberty, Wisconsin by Michael Koppa in 2018 at his Heavy Duty Press in a limited edition of 26 copies signed by the author and printer.

In the late winter of 2018, after a three-year effort, Mike Koppa completed printing the text of letterpress printer, type founder, and type and printing historian Raymond Stanley Nelson, Jr.’s lyrical essay Typesetting on a Winter’s Afternoon, with Koppa himself setting type, we're sure, on many a winter’s afternoon. Nelson's essay was originally published in Parenthesis No. 3, May 1999, but Koppa had received a copy of the text in a letter from Nelson in 1998, when Nelson was Curator of the Print and Graphic Arts Collection at the Smithsonian Institution.

Nearly 20 years later, Koppa edited the text with Nelson’s permission, setting it in 10 pt. Century Oldstyle (designed by the prolific Morris Fuller Benton, a Milwaukee native, and one of Koppa’s favorites), with 4 pt. leading, and titling in 18 and 36 pt. Huxley Vertical. The text was printed on Zerkall Laid paper and a translucent Neenah Classic Crest UV/Ultra II. The use of the translucent paper offers a text block that cascades dimensionally through the book’s pages, mandating a particular cadence to the reading. The book also features subtle typographic prints representing recurring elements in the story: a window, a clock, and winter depicted as persistently falling snow using six-pointed asterisks printed strategically in ultra-ultra-light translucent blue on the verso of every page.

The book also includes three, not-so-subtle vintage cuts where certain emphases are required: “They were BOLD and vigorous”; “Bad letters, over-inking and poor design”; and “Attention requested.” The signatures were Coptic-sewn, and in the early months of 2019, Koppa created the 26 one-of-a-kind, non-adhesive covers that the book slips into. Each unique cover is made of pages from the 1923 Specimen Book and Catalogue of the American Type Founders Company, which included a specimen of the Century Oldstyle used in this Heavy Duty Press printing.

View other posts featuring the work of Michael Koppa.

Typography Tuesday

In March 2023, we posted about our friend, Wisconsin graphic designer, letterpress printer, stonecutter, radio personality, and collage and book artist Mike Koppa and his little adventure in type cleaning. He was engaged in bathing an entire case of 10 pt Franklin Gothic Condensed type, which led him to cleaning more cases of Franklin Gothic in different sizes, which led to him printing a book using every piece of type he had cleaned. The result is this book, Understanding This Book, or, Zen and the Art of Metal Type Maintenance, or, Let's See Your AI Do This by Augustine Maxwell Jones, a pseudonym Koppa has used in the past. The book was printed in 2023 at Koppa's Heavy Duty Press in Liberty Township, Wisconsin, in an edition of 18 copies. It is essentially a list of the 20 steps it took to the ultimate printing of this book. He writes:

When all my drawers of Franklin Gothic type needed to be cleaned, the mundane but necessary shop maintenance task turned into a book about the process. The result is a 20-page book featuring every last sort from nine California job cases of genuine ATF Franklin Gothic typefaces—maybe not older than the hills, but definitely older than me—in varying stages of wear, arranged according to a variety of strategies only likely to occur when composing individual metal types by hand. The final product of this very spontaneous and time-crunched project is a bold book conveying the frantic experience of creating it, while celebrating Franklin Gothic in a typographically jazzy manner.

We can attest to the great pleasure of exploring this typographic adventure. In the colophon Koppa states that the book is:

HanD seT In all soRTs of TRue ATF FRanklIn GoThIcs, In vaRyIng STaGeS of weaR buT SoakeD & ScRubbeD aS clean AS ThEy'RE GonnA GET, baREly pRoofED, AnD pRInTED on EnouGH HAhnEmuhlE BIbLIO, BuGRA, & InGRES TO yIELD 18 cOPIES.

A fine tribute to Morris Fuller Benton's Franklin Gothic!

View other posts featuring the work of Michael Koppa.

Typography Tuesday

This week we present our most recent acquisition, Viroqua, Wisconsin, graphic designer, collage artist, letterpress printer, and book artist Michael Koppa’s 2022 Heavy Duty Press book 8t Bags about the Natural World printed on Kitakata paper and hand bound in an edition of 88 copies. 

This project began while drinking a particular brand of tea that included inspirational quotations by major historical figures printed on the tag of each tea bag. These quotes not only inspired Koppa to think about the world, but also to design and print a new book that not only included eight quotations from the tea-bag tags, but also the word “Bag” printed in all 80 fonts found in the Heavy Duty Press print shop. The numbers associated with each font serve as an index to be referenced in Koppa’s forthcoming book, Just My Type: Specimens. The remainder was printed in hand-set ATF Century Expanded, Oldstyle, and Schoolbook types, all printed on a Vandercook SP 15 flatbed proofing press named “Spiffy.” The book is slipped into a muslin fabric bag that was screen-printed by The Factory in Milwaukee. In the colophon, Koppa writes:

8t Bags was inspired by winters spent close to nature, a tea habit, time available to catalogue the type inventory held by The Heavy Duty Press, our not-particularly-religious but church-supporting neighbor routinely stating, “I don’t care where people get their moral code as long as they get it!” and living with the awareness that eight trillion (more of less) plastic bags are floating about the natural world in the 21st century A.D. Nature Deficit Disorder is a real thing. Reforest North America! Et cetera.

View other posts featuring the work of Michael Koppa.

Decorative Sunday/Milwaukee Monday

Our regular Decorative Sunday editor, Senior Special Collections Graduate Intern Sarah Finn, freshly returned from Rare Book School, is deeply enmeshed in her summer research on biological depictions in early Western books, which she will be posting on this week. So, we’re stepping in to help out with these collage pages from the Milwaukee grocery fanzine (”The Nation’s First and Only”) The Sphere by Milwaukee-born-and-raised Wisconsin designer, collage artist, letterpress printer, and book artist Mike Koppa.

Early in his artistic career Koppa started The Sphere (1993-95) to support his parent’s iconic East Side Milwaukee institution Koppa’s Farwell Foods and its very popular Koppa’s Fulbeli Deli. This brilliantly-designed zine, with its goofy cerebral humor fused with promotions for the grocery's produce, services, and wares, is literally a labor of love and includes several of Koppa’s early collage works that exhibit the social, political, and environmental commentary that would become the hallmark of his mature work. Of the zine, Koppa writes:

2019 Book Artist Series Lecture: Michael Koppa

Book artist, letterpress printer, collage artist, graphic designer, and stonecutter Michael Koppa will offer a discussion of his career, focusing on his process and his bookwork, on Tuesday, September 24, 2019 at 6 p.m. in the fourth floor Conference Center of the UWM Golda Meir Library, 2311 E. Hartford Ave., Milwaukee, WI. See the exhibition Michael Koppa: The Work of 30 Years in the library’s 4th Floor Exhibition Gallery, which opens tonight and remains on view through November 1.

Born and raised in Milwaukee, and a graduate of the art program at UW-Madison, Koppa settled in Viroqua, Wisconsin, and re-established his Heavy Duty Press at a studio dubbed “Der Klubhaus” in rural Liberty, Wisconsin. His presentation will highlight the development of his work from the artist’s zine series The Sphere, which he produced starting in 1993 for his parent’s grocery store, the iconic Koppa’s Fulbeli Deli on Farwell Ave. in Milwaukee’s East Side, to his latest 2018/19 Heavy Duty Press production, the exquisite letterpress artist’s book, Typesetting on a Winter’s Afternoon.

National Pickle Day

We thought we’d jump on the Pickle Day bandwagon with this ad for Pukumbers by Peter Piper’s Pickles from the June 1994 issue of Milwaukee’s own grocery fanzine, The Sphere. As far as we know, it is the world’s only grocery fanzine (could that be possible?).  Published from September 1993 - October 1995, The Sphere was produced for one of East Side Milwaukee’s landmark institutions, Koppa’s Fulbeli Deli on N. Farwell Ave., by one of the founder’s children, the designer, letterpress printer, book artist, collage artist, treehugger, and all ‘round Milwaukee raconteur, Michael Koppa (Son o’ Koppa).

Staff Pick of the Week - Nessie

Even though Hailey left our employ a week ago (sob!), she still sends us one last staff pick (now, that’s loyalty). Hailey has had a fascination with myths, the unknown, and the natural world since she was about knee-high. This developed into a fascination with animals, all manner of mearcstapa and monsters--and the desire to one day become a cryptozoologist. While graduate school for library and information studies may seem like a very different career choice, books and literature have proven to be a boundless mine of material, particularly while working for Special Collections.

So, for her last pick of the week, Hailey commemorates with Nessie by book artist Michael Koppa, letterpress-printed in an edition of 10 copies while he was still a student at UW Madison.