So, Meliors, how's the letterpress?

Well, thanks for asking. It's ok, but I am frustrated by a few technical challenges. Mostly by the lack of a fitted frisket, which appears to be to blame for the Arab's annoying tendency to suck up into the rollers any paper bigger or floppier than a postcard.

A frisket has entered the building but it looks nothing like the one illustrated here, which was previously my sole source of frisket-identification. I, and everyone else who I accost at TKPT on the subject, have never seen a frisket in action, so we aren't exactly sure how to attach it to the Arab and what to do with it once it's on there.

But I know that you don't want to hear about my frisket problems, and I won't even start in on my money-down-the-drain tympan paper story. However I do think you should know that my card printing (and remember card is all I can print without a frisket) is in hiatus while the guillotines are being sharpened.

So printing, yes, I am doing some. Today I finished printing delicate little strips of Japanese tissue paper on the proofing press. The proofing press is not as reliably sharp as the Arab but expresses no desire to suck paper into an inky paper jam, for which I am grateful. I am making a flag book edition called Love Falls. It's an exhibition book, by which I mean that I have designed it for display rather than for handling. It hangs vertically on the wall and the flags fall down like a waterfall. I expect that people will be just as likely to read it from the middle outwards as from top to bottom, and for once, this poem is resilient enough for any kind of idiosyncratic reading.

Now that the flags are all printed, I'm going to set type for the covers, and by the time those are done the guillotines should be back and I can make some business cards. So I'm happily dividing my TKPT time between technical problem-solving and actual printing and it's all good.