Last week, the UANews interviewed me about why book art matters and why our Collective promotes old printing processes like letterpress. Here is the video the reporter put together from the interview. (Note: ignore the photos of my Talking face. It’s not pretty.)

This weekend, I had the pleasure of meeting the master of Vandercook letterpress machines, Paul Moxon. Paul was in town for a week or so, offering demos, workshops and a lecture to the Book Art Collective. I’m posting the main article on that blog, but wanted to give a shout here too, since a lot of us like letterpress.

It’s basically understood that Paul knows everything there is to know about Vandercooks, proof presses made by Vandercook & Sons beginning in 1909. In addition to working as a printer and artist, he maintains a website, VandercookPress.info, where anyone can access information about presses.

In the 59 years the company was in business, about 30,000 presses were manufactured; there are currently about 1,500 Vandercooks documented in existence. And what do you know, 23 of them are in Arizona; 4 are kept by the Book Art Collective. Last year was the Vandercook’s 100th birthday and Paul orchestrated a Centenary Print Bundle with lovely prints from shops throughout the country.

The workshop this weekend covered basic operating procedures of the presses and we brought him in not just to teach, but also to fix up our new machines. This summer, the Collective acquired three new presses, one of which seems to have been outside for, well, years.

Paul was gracious enough to travel here from Alabama on the weekend of his birthday. So happy birthday, Paul! Thanks so much for spending some time with the Book Art Collective. We hope to have you back soon.

For two weeks or so I had this idea that I just needed to see. In our letterpress lab, there are dozens of these old (or still-in-use) logos, many of which harken back to another time. So, I ordered some beautiful Pop*Tone Papers from French and, as soon as they arrived, got to work on these notebooks.

Although I’ll likely continue on with the series, each will be printed in its own edition. There are between 5 and 10 notebooks in each of the colors shown here (totaling about 35 notebooks total). All are hand stitched (in what’s known as a pamphlet binding) with brightly colored endsheets. The corners are rounded at 1/8 inch. They are about 6 x 9 inches, with 64 sheets (front and back).

Check them out here!

As an aside, today’s my birthday. Happy birthday to me!

This past weekend, I had the lovely pleasure of meeting Barbara Tetenbaum, a letterpress artist, bookmaker, writer and teacher, among other things. She came to lead a Pressure Printing Workshop for The Letterpress and Book Arts Collective, of which I am a part.

Pressure printing, a term coined by Barb, is an experimental letterpress technique in which a low-relief collage is made with thin objects (string, stickers, lace, thread), arranged into a composition (or not), glued onto a sheet of paper and then placed underneath the paper to be inked. The resulting image is similar to a rubbing, though (in my opinion) much more polished and lovely looking. Barb notes that the final piece is always better than you are, meaning that a simple arrangement can result in a beautifully finished piece.

Explaining registration and use of the (not-yet-inked) MDF board, which is topped with plexi glass

One of the most exciting learnings from the workshop was our binding technique, a whirlwind binding. The story behind the whirlwind is fascinating. In the early 1900s, caves were “discovered” by a monk in the ancient city of Dunhuang, in the Chinese province of Gansu, which contained thousands of manuscripts of various forms evincing the diversity and breadth of the art of bookmaking. The manuscripts, for which content was the driver of the forms, dated from the 5th to the early 11th century. Holy crap is right.

The binding techniques, with descriptions and instructions, are freely available here.

So. For the workshop, each participant created her own low-relief collage and then printed a small edition on silky kitikata, a handmade Japanese paper. Each person received one of every print, trimmed the pages to book size and bound them into a whirlwind book. The [modified] whirlwind is convenient for this project because each page size is the same, but they are glued such that a sliver of every page is visible, creating a lovely kind of pattern reference when the book is opened.

A few of the pressure printed compositions from the workshop

I’m still finishing up my binding (I’m slow…). Pictures to come. Anyway, the workshop was successful. An excellent combination of getting to know a strong thinker and eloquent speaker in the world of bookmaking, of learning technique and making something pretty. We also had a party with lots of delicious food, which helps too. Workshops are a great way of integrating yourself into your field.

Barb’s beautiful work can be found and purchased here. (I highly recommend having at least of her pieces in your collection.)