Getting my hands dirty

A row of freshly brushed lower case 10pt c's

I bought myself some lead type the other day. There's two fonts, a 10pt condensed sans serif that I haven't identied further yet, and an 18 point Gill, which, if I could only own one typeface would be it. Bonus! They come in a funny old cabinet with only four of the original 10 drawers, so lots of empty spaces (which I have plans for).

But first job is cleaning and sorting my new type. It looks like they are complete, nearly unused founts, but instead of being correctly sorted into their upper and lower case drawers*, they all are crammed into the upper case compartments. It's a long slow process removing each complete set of letters from its tiny space, checking and cleaning them and then putting away into their traditional place. Fortunately there's not much pied (mixed up) type, or it would be an even slower process.

The before photo

I'm guessing that my new fonts haven't been touched much, if at all, for the better part of 50 years. Transfering the accumulated filth onto my fingers isn't so bad as some type drawers I've cleaned where there was as much mouse poop, insect carcasses/nests and unidentified sticky stuff as dust and wood shavings. At the rate I'm going it's going to take about 12 hours to complete this project. And then I can start thinking about finding a printing press to use it on!

The after photo: clean 10pt lower case a's

*Printing geeks: mine are not California cases

Leaky Sink

One of the simple pleasures that I find most soothing from day-to-day is doing the dishes. Arriving at my pro-dishes stance came late in life, but the epiphany was worth writing a poem about. The poem came with a clear vision of the artist's book it should be made into. Since my vision demanded I learn letterpress printing, I embarked on that, much more complicated pleasurable pursuit, and eventually was able to print and make a small edition of handmade, letterpress books called Do the Dishes , possibly the zenith of my artists book and letterpress practice to date.


Sadly, at the moment, doing the dishes at my house is no pleasure. My sink is leaking, and even washing dishes in a bucket (not nearly so much fun) is a hazardous affair around the flooding. The plumber says he may come tomorrow. In the meantime I am trying to minimise my production of dirty dishes so as to avoid having to wash any in the next 24 hours.

Anyone care to join me in eating out?



Do the Dishes is available in my Etsy shop

Non-Linear Time

I'm learning to make digital stories from my poems. I have just finished my first attempt and proudly posted it on You Tube. Have a look! Its only 44 seconds long.



I made Non-Linear Time using Windows Movie Maker, the software that came bundled with my laptop. It's very easy to use, but with limited flexibility, which is why I've gone for a very simple little film. Anything fancier could only have been cheesy.

The images are of some letterpress printing I did back in the early days at Te Kowhai Print Trust in 2007. I was going to make an artist's book of my poem, Two Kinds of Time, but my ambitious experimental approach outstripped my letterpress skills at the time and after printing these pages I got frustrated and went onto other, easier projects. But I've hung onto the printed pieces of tissue, thinking that one day I would go back to making Two Kinds of Time.

Two Kinds of Time actually does have a book existence. I was inspired to write the poem a few years ago when Tim Jones first mentioned that he was going to be editing an anthology called Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand. After a long wait Voyagers, edited by Mark Pirie and Tim Jones, is finally out on Amazon right now and will be available in NZ early June. But for some reason Two Kinds of Time is one of those poems that has kept nagging at me for concretization*.

So, last week, inspired by the digital storytelling course I am taking through Artmakers and impatient to be doing more than I could in that context, I thought I'd try to make a little film on my own. I've developed a storyboard and worked on images for the whole poem, but it's a demanding project to squeeze into a busy life and I've decided to do a George Lucas and start in the middle of my story. Eventually I hope to make parts one and three of Two Kinds of Time (Linear Time and When You Sleep) but for now, I have released Non-Linear Time on its own.

*There are a few nagging poems waiting in the wings, they know who they are!

A hard day's print

I finally got to print my pattern today. That big Western press turns out to be Very Hard Work. This evening I feel like I've had six hours of cardio and pumping iron at the gym (on top of my four hours of communting because the trains are on Christmas holiday timetables).

For a start, the press is too wide for me to reach all the lays and grippers to get the paper straight by myself. You have to stand on a pedal to lift the grippers, and if I ran around the other side of the press to reach that end of my big paper, I couldn't be standing on the pedal. Thank goodness Tiffany was volunteering at the Museum today, as she was willing and able to help me with positioning almost all of the twenty or so prints I took.

When it came to turning the cylinder with the paper attached, it was too heavy and the sweep of the handle to high and wide for me to manage with one hand, which was problematic as I felt I needed to keep one hand on the paper so it wouldn't fly off into space or the inky rollers. Eventually (after only about four or five bad prints) Tiffany and I worked out the best way to do it, so that half way through the turn I entrusted the paper wrangling to her and threw all my body weight via both arms into a smooth sweep of the cylinder, inevitably ending with a spontaneous grunt and a little bounce as both I and the paper suddenly came round to the end of the cylinder's turn.

The heavy workout on the cylinder and the full-body stretches with the lays and grippers were interspersed with the on-going inking drama. I won't even tell you about the performance I went through buying the inks and then trying to mix the tint I wanted before settling for the ubiquitous shade of green that characterises half my possessions, (which I really intended not to use this time, really: its embarrassing to have that much of one colour in my life).

No, the main inking drama was due to the broken oscillating roller only oscillating in one direction, so I to slowly push it back the other way every two or three minutes. If I got distracted for say, five minutes of struggling with the grippers or something, then the ink got all stripey and I had to manually oscillate in both directions at length to make up for my neglect.

Plus, since my pattern is made up of about 30 different kinds of old worn-out type and not even seven (7) hours of makeready persnickitiness could achieve uniform height, I had to supplement the (semi) automatic rollers with some judicious hand rolling before every print (and don't forget that the form is so wide I have to stretch my body right across it, or run around the press, to reach the whole thing).

Since hand rolling was only half way to helpful, I soon started reinking the oscillating roller between every single print as well, even though its cheating because a good printer doesn't use more ink to cover up the inadequacies of her composition. But I did today. Because, well, I was really running out of options and with only two weeks left in Melbourne, I am running out of time at the Museum.

However, before I launched into the hard work and intense concentration of printing my big pattern, Sakura kindly helped me take some proofs of the Jewish logos on the small press that she's been using. They turned out really well, most of the chops in surprisingly good condition given their age and the circumstances in which I found them.


I'm going to take a proof of this with me to Temple Beth Israel next Shabbat and see if I can get some of the older congregants to help me identify all the old Melbourne institutions represented here. If any readers would like to see a higher resolution photo of this proof, and perhaps discuss future uses of this resource, please let me know.

Old Paper

I'm almost ready to print, after 25 hours of composing, proofing and make ready (7 hours just for sticking pieces of paper on the back of each piece of type to bring it up to the same height as all the others). Since I don't want to waste expensive paper, most of my proofs have been on some very old newsprint that was lying around at the Museum. Old newsprint is brittle, weak and discoloured, but it seems to be a fashionable look. At least four people have gotten very excited about the paper when I showed them my proofs.

Perhaps people focus on the old newsprint because they can't think of anything nice to say about my proofs. I can only bear my proofs right now for technical purposes, knowing that once I print on Italian 200gsm hot pressed cotton rag paper with carefully mixed translucent ink, it might start looking how I want it too. Maybe people are politely deflecting attention from my ugly proofs onto the funky old paper.

It's the vintage look I guess, that genuine 'old' faded paper look that an acid free paper would only achieve after a century or so of careless stewardship, but that newspaper takes on after a day or two sitting in the sun. The newsprint I'm proofing on has probably survived twenty or thirty years of warehousing and virtually crumbles at touch.

It's one of those things where I can see that something is attractive in the current fashion, and if I squint and tilt my head right I can like it well enough as irony, but I know it's not for me. I'm too practical I guess to be seduced purely by the look of it. I need to see that it will do what I want, and other than the ephermeral purpose of showing me which pieces of type I need to lift, old newsprint offers me nothing as a printer or book maker.

A forest of type

After twelve hours it's nearly finished: the rainforest pattern viewed from the top .

One of the things I most enjoy about letterpress is the pace, slow and deliberate. This is not the way that professional printers did it of course, because they were caught up in a chasing deadlines and money, which is why hand composing was eclipsed by linotype in the 1880s. But hand composing is my meditation, my creative process (one of them) and I like to do it slowly. Mostly I have set my own writing in fairly conventional rows of type, but sometimes I like to use the typefaces as shapes and create patterns without (textual) meaning.

The project I have started with at the Melbourne Museum of Printing is proving to be fiendishly time consuming. It's a large (40x60cm) pattern, intended to evoke the complexity, density and lushness of the rainforest edge (inside healthy mature rainforest it tends to be very open below the canopy). I am pillaging every drawer of sans serif type I can find in the Museum, mostly extracting 'O's 'S's and 'V's, with a few other letters for variety and volume. I didn't want to have any avoidable areas of white space, but I have pretty much run out of suitable type, so there are going to be a few white patches, hopefully covered up the with overprinting to come later.

I have used every size of sans serif I can find; from condensed grotesque wooden type so big that its not even numbered (well over 100pt) to a miniscule 8pt Gill. I've spent about 12 hours on it so far, and am almost ready to take the first proof. At which point, all the variations from type-high will be revealed and I will have to painstakingly go over the whole thing and build up the low type with make ready. This is inevitable whenever you use old wooden type and/or mix together different type faces.

Working in the Museum means a lot more (knowledgable) people are looking over my shoulder as I work, than I was used to at Te Kowhai. It's reassuring to know there's good advice and a helping hand when I need it.

My large patterned piece is also raising a lot of eyebrows and the most frequent comments express concern for how long it will take me to dis it after printing. The limited bench space at the Museum is littered with galleys filled with projects that visiting printers abandoned without dissing, so it is an understandable concern. Dis-tributing the type back into the 20+ drawers from whence it came will probably take as long as the composing did, but I have taken methodical notes and am psychologically prepared for it!

In the dusty chaos of the most accessible of the Museum's warehouse storerooms I found a drawer of old Jewish organisation logos and ornaments. Here they are, being set up for proofing, as soon as I can access a press.

Letterpress at last

The old sign built into the Salavation Army Printing Works building, near Parliament.

One of my two reasons* for coming for Melbourne was the Melbourne Museum of Printing. The museum offers access for artists to use some of the tiny proportion of their collection that is accessible and in working order (95% of it is in storage!). While I was in the rainforest I had lots of time to think about my next letterpress projects, but I didn't want to decide exactly what I would do here until I saw what was available.

Now that I have seen the Museum, there are three opportunities I am interested in taking up while I am here: printing big, learning the Ludlow and using Hebrew typefaces. Over the next month or so, I'll be trying to do as much with these three opportunities as I can, and of course, documenting the highs and lows of the experience here.

The three presses they have working and available are all proofing presses, with very large flat beds. After the limitations of the Arab's tiny platen, I am keen to print BIG, so I have started my first project on the largest press, making a poster. The first stage of my design involves a setting patterned background, using some of the museum's large collection of typefaces as shapes (rather than meaningful text).

A small section of the pattern I am laying out in wooden and lead typefaces, on the bed of the big Western proofing press.

I intend to overprint a poem onto the background pattern in a bold black typeface which I will create using the Ludlow Typograph. I'm keen to learn how to use this machine, as there is one in Mareeba which I might be able to use when I go back to Queensland. It produces a similar outcome to a Linotype machine (which the museum also has in working order) but requires handsetting (which I love to do) instead of keyboarding. And its a much smaller and easier machine to use for creating lines solid lines of type.

Some of the wooden Hebrew type available at the Melbourne Museum of Printing

On my second day at the museum, I made friends with a wood engraver called Jennifer who is using the old Albion press. She directed me to a couple of trays of wooden Hebrew type. She had no idea how significant this would be for me, as I spent a lot of time last year wishing I could find some Hebrew type to use in my Do the Dishes book. There are three incomplete sets of large type, but enough to use a Hebrew word or two here and there. Now that I know the type is available, I'm thinking about how I can make the most of it.

The Hebrew letter shin- isn't it a beautiful shape, like three candles in flame.

*The other is to spend time near my beautiful daughter, Louise.

Te Kowhai Print Trust Rocks!

I was asked to write a letter of support for Te Kowhai Print Trust, and writing it has made me horribly nostalgic for my darling Arab press and the wonderful workspace at TKPT and my dear little studio and working with paper and ink in general. Not quite homesick enough to go back to Whangarei and freeze my butt off when I can go swimming in the sea anytime I like (and indeed must swim often, as it is just so hot here- when Far North Queenlsland does spring it feels like NZ midsummer!).
Here's what I wrote, everyword of it heartfelt truth:

My involvement with Te Kowhai Print Trust (TKPT) began in January 2007 when I found out that their facilities included letterpress equipment. I had been trying to access letterpress printing for four years. TKPT was the only community-based organization I found in New Zealand with a complete letterpress workshop easily accessible to a novice printer like myself.

The letterpress equipment at TKPT includes a 100 year old Arab platen jobber press which is a delight to use. There is also a table top proofing press, a composing stone, and approximately 70 drawers of lead and wooden moveable type as well as a superb guillotine and almost all the other tools required to compose, set, proof and print text. The extent and quality of the letterpress plant is outstanding for New Zealand and Australia, and as far as I know, is unique in New Zealand in its accessibility (Melbourne boasts Australia’s only community-access letterpress facility that I am aware of).

It is particularly valuable to have all this available in the context of TKPT and the Quarry Arts Centre. The TKPT buildings are spacious, well-lit, and well supplied with work surfaces, as well as all the other things that make a studio functional including kitchen and bathroom facilities.

It is appropriate for letterpress activities to be undertaken in the context of other graphic printing at TKPT and other art forms happening around the Quarry, as letterpress is increasingly being adopted as an art practice. Internationally, letterpress is undergoing a revival in reaction to the facile ease and glib perfection available to anyone with a laser printer or photocopier.

The second half of the twentieth century saw a tragic loss of most of the letterpress equipment in New Zealand as a succession of new technologies overtook the printing industry. Tonnes of lead type and cast-iron printing presses were melted down as scrap or dumped as landfill. Thus, the letterpress workshop set up at TKPT is extremely rare and irreplaceable. I consider TKPT’s letterpress workshop to be a national treasure for New Zealand and a valuable resource for Australasia.

Birth of the Wooroi Press

After a few busy days in Brisbane I travelled north to the Sunshine Coast, first stop Tewantin. Here I’ve been helping the Wooroi* Press get started. A group of book artists on the Coast had responded a few weeks ago to my search for papermaking opportunities by offering to trade papermaking expertise for my assistance getting their letterpress up and running.

I arrived at the Stagg’s art-filled home on the edge of Wooroi Forest after dark on Sunday night following an arduous journey from Brisbane on public transport (Noosa seems determined to keep its posh resort status by making it as difficult as possible to get here). The next morning I went straight into the print shed and after a quick glance at the unbelievably tidy and well-organised print set up I dived straight into showing a small but enthusiastic group of letterpress novices how to compose. That part was easy with a cabinet of lead type including plenty of useful sizes of Gill (my most favourite font, and yet not available at Te Kowhai), a few leads and reglets and plenty of wooden furniture, quoins and composing sticks.

Reglets in cabinet with planer and mallet

Di Tait had arrived with a beautiful little book which she wanted to print a title page for so we used her two word title as the demonstration. Once that was locked up in the chase we turned our attention to the presses: a Chandler Price New Style, a funny little Chinese table press and an even smaller Remington proofing press. The Remington’s bed was only big enough for a small galley and the Chandler Price has such a huge platen that the two word title would have been swamped, so we inked up the table press.

The table press had been cleaned up from the dreadful state in which it had come into Maryke Stagg’s possession, but it still needed plenty of work, so taking a half decent print took most of the afternoon (and it really was only half decent). Meanwhile Helga began composing another block of text to try on the Chandler Price.

Maryke at the barbeque cleaning station, working on the fashion plates with kerosene (Wooroi Forest in background)

The Chandler Price has a huge platen, easily big enough to print an A3 sheet or greater, and of course a correspondingly large chase. Unfortunately, the next day when we started inking up, the rollers turned out to be too small: sitting lower than their trucks and obviously worn out in the middle where two of the three remained stubbornly red despite running repeatedly over the ink disk. Sure enough when we heaved the heavy chase into place, the rollers didn’t touch the type, not even the one roller which appeared fully inked. They are either the wrong rollers for the press or have shrunk dramatically since they were last used! With that disappointment, the workshop split into two hives of activity: one group started on the Remington, pulling prints from the collection of fashion plates of the 1920s, and John and I got stuck into fixing up the table press.

After hours of happy fiddling with the platen, the frisket bar, the lays and the roller arms (oh how I do love to problem solve on printing presses, especially in the company of a bloke with excellent tool skills) the funny little Chinese table press was reborn to take effortless, near perfect prints. After a couple of satisfactory proofs in which we discovered Helga’s paper printed much better damp than dry, she swung into full editioning mode and started churning out dozens of cards with her Martin Luther King Jr quote. It was delightful to watch another person fall in love with letterpress and its inherent gift for multiples.

Meanwhile Di had been busy on the proofing press and finding out all the ways in which it still needed to be worked on. John applied his magic touch with tools and oil can and soon that corner of the print shop was producing satisfactory results as well. Our two days of learning, repairing and persisting through numerous frustrations was suddenly exhilaratingly successful and the Wooroi Press was born (and documented with some group photos).

Wooroi Press Gang, 15 April 2008, Meliors, Di, John, Desley, Maryke and Helga with Chinese table press

We hung samples of our first prints on the notice board and the flurry of activity continued: Maryke and Di rearranging some of the equipment for better work flow, Helga printing more and more of her cards, John setting and proofing ‘Wooroi Press’, Desley experimenting with embossing, and me sitting back and enjoying the sight of letterpress passion spreading like a virus.

The scariest thing about leaving Whangarei was the risk of loosing my access to letterpress for months or longer. Instead, I was immersed in letterpress within days of arriving in Australia. I have found another print home in the Wooroi Press, and though I may travel far and wide over the next few months, I know I will return here to print again. The lure of Gill type, the huge CP platen (once the rollers are working) and most of all the good company of the Wooroi Press gang will be impossible to resist for long.

The counter on the Chandler Price New Style press

*Wooroi means place of kangaroos- and today I saw several of these most beautiful and graceful creatures on the golf course across the road.

Vandercook At Last

I spent my last afternoon in New Zealand at Green Bay Press in West Auckland, playing with a beautiful Vandercook press.

About six weeks ago I met Beth Serjeant completely by chance when my family wandered into a workshop Beth was teaching at the Ponsonby Art Station. Beth and I discovered we shared a passion for letterpress and had one of those urgent, intense conversations that MUST be continued in a more appropriate time and place. I rang her up a few days later and asked if I could come and meet her Vandercook press before I left the country and she graciously agreed.

Beth welcomed me into her garage turned print shop which is dominated by the big flatbed press from the 1950s but looking very modern to my eyes, accustomed as they are to century-plus old platens. I've been desperately keen for ages to have a go with a Vandercook- they are the favourite of many of the letterpress printers whose work I admire on the internet, especially in the United States where they seem much more common than in the Antipodes. The attraction for me is the big flat bed which can print any size paper, up to huge posters.

Beth let me pull a few prints of some type she had already set up in the press, so now I have some idea of the basics. The rollers turn on an electric motor, but each paper is pulled through manually with a satisfying full-body motion of the handle. I do like the physicality of printing. Beth says that when she first acquired the Vandercook it was like an arranged marriage and she thought it might make a good bench for her workshop. Fortunately a visit from Claire van Vliet who fiddled about with the press and got it up and running turned the arranged marriage into a love affair.

The text I printed was a Karakia mo te harakeke (Maori prayer for harvesting flax) printed onto flax paper. This seemed like a blessing on my journey, as in the next few days I will begin learning to make handmade paper with Australian native plants. Other blessings from Beth included the gift of an excellent printer's apron and sharing chocolates sent by Claire, with the surprise fortunes: 'Live your dreams' (me) and 'Be nice to a stranger' (Beth). I feel like I have found two life-long (or long-lost) friends in Beth and the Vandercook.
After we finished printing and cleaned the press we had a show and tell of some of our own work and some of Claire's that Beth has in her collection. I had seen a page of Beth's book Visionary earlier in the exhibition at the Auckland City Library- now I got to leaf through the whole big work, reading the poems by various New Zealand poets illustrated with Beth's colourful lithographs. It was a luxurious afternoon of book arts indulgence, pleasantly serenaded by Beth's son, Andrew, playing guitar in a nearby room.

I was exhausted and overwhelmed from my intense preparations for the huge journey beginning the following morning, so we spent our last half hour together quietly drinking tea and listening to a tape of Claire being interviewed by Sharon Crosbie when she visited NZ for a symposium in 1993 (the fateful trip that awoke Beth's Vandercook). Two descriptions from Claire leapt out for me, articulating my own feelings about artist's books in a way that I haven't been able to before: "the book as a stage setting for the content" and "the book as a physical facilitator of the meaning of the text".

Throw off Friend

I taught my first letterpress class today. Given that a year ago I was a complete novice, stumbling without guidance up a trial and error learning curve so steep that I should have had crampons and a rope, offering to teach might seem arrogant. But I am going to be leaving Te Kowhai (and Whangarei, and New Zealand) soon, and we want to make sure that my hard won knowledge does not all leave with me.

I had two keen student, both passionate printer-artists with a genuine interest in letterpress. I did no planning or preparation for the class other than decide to lead them through the whole process of composing a few words, locking in, proofing, printing and cleaning up. We managed to complete all this, with a cup of tea as well, in under three (pleasantly exhausting) hours.

Because I was self taught for nearly six months before Jim and the other printing posse adopted me, I knew what bare essentials to focus on for achieving a half-decent print without endangering themselves or the equipment. Some of the things I glossed over (like make-ready) will no doubt come back to haunt my students, but they are experienced enough at relief printing on other kinds of presses to figure it out (I hope). And I will always be email-able.

Among the things I did emphasise was the importance of the throw off lever. The 'throw off lever is your friend' I said, demonstrating its wonderful ability to make or withhold contact between the platen and the type. In the storm of printing jargon I was throwing at them, and with the need to co-ordinate three limbs in different movements and rhythms while balancing on the fourth, they both forgot the name of the lever and took to calling it 'friend'.

I feel sure that Ruth and Jeanine will keep letterpress alive at the Quarry after I am gone. They caught the exhilarating buzz of simultaneously pumping the treadle, sliding the papers, throwing their friend on and off, laughing, talking and admiring their text. Printing on a platen jobber is an exciting addictive activity. They can look forward to fumbling their way to making fine prints, hopefully without all the mistakes I made on my way. I feel relieved to know that my beloved Arab press and the cabinets of type will be used, maintained and appreciated.

I also feel a delicious melancholy to be leaving my friend the Arab. I have never bonded so closely with a machine, never felt such strong sentiments towards an inanimate object, never anthropomorphised a chunk of metal, the way I have my sweet Arab. He has sometimes infuriated, often frustrated, mostly pleased and regularly thrilled me. He has engaged my body, my mind and my soul in a collaborative, creative process. He has inspired new directions for my work and my life that were unimaginable until I stood in front of the feed board, placed my foot on the treadle and spun the fly wheel. The Arab has given me a bigger life than I knew and now I am throwing him off to go live it. All I can leave the Arab is some new friends to engage with, and I have found him two with enough passion and enthusiasm to keep his wheels spinning.

Merit Badges

The two talented women of Pod Post make embroidered merit badges for letterpress and bookbinding. I recently estimated my letterpress experience as 300-400 hours which I felt earned me some merit badges for my efforts. I reckon I can probably justify my book binding merit badges after four years making books.

I never accumulated any merit badges during my brief and ignoble stint as a Brownie so I have no sash to sew my self-awarded badges onto. Besides I want to display the geeky evidence of my obscure skills as publicly as possible. So I stitched the badges onto the day pack that I take pretty much everywhere with me. This way, should I ever have the good fortune to be followed down the road by another print/book geek, they will recognise me as a kindred spirit and strike up a conversation about friskets or sewing frames.

As an added bonus, the badges arrived from the USA (swiftly and) in a groovy mail art envelope.

Hot Foil Hands

I've been printing bookmarks again. These bookmarks are for the Centre for Fine Print (University of West England Bristol)'s Bookmarks VI. I narrowly missed out on contributing to Bookmarks V last year, so I'm getting in early this year! The requirement is to produce an edition of 100 signed and numbered bookmarks which will be distributed internationally through art galleries. I am using it as an opportunity to try a new fount, a new machine and some paper I haven't printed on before.

The paper I'm using is old nautical charts which I picked up in an op shop a few years ago. The charts are fascimiles of mostly nineteenth, some early twentieth century, etchings which were offset printed a few decades ago on gorgeous, heavy, smooth paper. I assume they've been made redundant by GIS and other electronic navigational technology. I chose the charts with the thickest paper to cut up into bookmarks (now, don't get all precious on me about cutting up old charts, they are common as muck in this yachties' town). The charts started out as approaches to harbours in Newfoundland, Cote du Norde, Scotland and New York but now as 19x6cm strips most of the bookmarks are anonymous in isolation.

The fount I'm using is Rockwell, which is a bit of a gothic style type, slightly Old Western (as in cowboys) looking, but relatively fine in its serifs. It's old-fashioned looking, yet quite clean and sharp. Te Kowhai has Rockwell in 3 or 4 sizes, most of which appear to have been hardly used- if the pristine shiny state of the type is anything to go by. I'm using the 24pt which is bold enough to be legible when overprinted on even the busiest slip of chart. The text on the plain white back is in 18pt Rockwell with my favourite ornament, the pointing hand.

The new machine is Jim's hot foil press, which is the tiniest printing press I have ever used. It looks like a cross between a sewing machine and a microscope. We spent hours playing with it on Friday afternoon, trying a dozen types of printing surfaces (paper, vinyl, leather) at different temperatures to see what it could do. What it does best is print a brilliant gold foil with a mirror surface and intricate detail onto glossy smooth surface. In comparison, any matt or textured material takes only a dull and patchy print like unpolished brass. Sadly my beautiful charts are not glossy enough to do the gold foil justice, but happily my clear vinyl bumper stickers work a treat. So today I printed a hundred tiny golden hands onto sticker paper, which I will cut out individually and and stick on the front of the bookmarks, thus satisfying my persistent desire to make things as fiddly and complicated as possible.

Samples of hot foil on different materials.

Creative Composing

Composing is the term letterpress printers use for selecting and placing the moveable type in order to print some text. I like the way it distinguishes that unique activity from the typesetting that is done with a keyboard. I like the pun with composing music. I have posted before about the pleasure I take in the pace and physicality of choosing each lead letter and jigsawing together the white space between the text.

Lately I have been composing with type the way I will use a keyboard or pen and paper to compose new thoughts. I don't know quite what I'm going to say before I start pulling letters from their compartments. Last week I spent a whole afternoon composing and recomposing four phrases that I was making up as I went along. I finally took some proofs (some on paper bags, thanks to E's South Island foraging) to see how it all looked and then got distracted by the quality of the print. Letting the proofs lie scattered on a much used tabletop all week I have come to believe I must start again almost from scratch and change the words, the type size and the layout. This is not a disappointing thing to anticipate and I am looking forward to it with pleasure.

This is, of course, a terribly inefficient way to work, but then I am not terribly interested in efficiency when I am nurturing new inspiration. Efficiency is desirable when one is creating an edition, pursuing a deadline, or trying to make money. But my goal at the moment is coax the tiny sparks of creative thought into flickering flames, to allow the space and time for ideas to become fully themselves without being shaped by market forces. Having attempted that nurturing with keyboard and pen, I am now seeing what emerges when I dip these nascent ideas straight in the founts.

Such luxury! Such indulgence! I feel extraordinarily lucky that I have the freedom for such pleasurable play. There are other projects and circumstances on my horizon which will require efficient composing and printing and I will enjoy working within those constraints when the time comes. But right now I am loitering with delight in a backwater of creative composition.

A New Shroud for King Tutankhamun

King Tutankhamun's new shroud is all finished and almost ready to send. The shroud is 120cmx100cm and looks like the sea, like mermaid scales, like armour, like magic. In the end I decided that adding hieroglyphics or the John Donne quote would be superfluous. It is full and complete just as it is. Ironically for a shroud, it is full of life and energy.

I came home from packaging it up for the journey to Auckland and was reading Synchro Destiny by Deepak Chopra. He used an analogy of the sea to explain the soul. Each wave is a unique entity, yet inseparable from the whole of the sea. Oh, I thought, that is like my shroud, each little circle unique: its own subtle shade and pattern, its own curious little face and yet all part of the whole piece, a little wavelet of the ocean.

Sea Circles

I thought you might like to see what I'm doing with all the circles being die cut on the C&P press. They are watercoloured in shades of blue and green and then sewn together with tiny beads. It will eventually be a square metre or bigger (depending on how many circles are usable in the end), with a lovely drape to it. So far I've sewn about 100 circles, only 700 or so to go...

The piece is called New Shroud for King Tutankhamen and will involve hieroglyphics and a John Donne quote.

Thanks Louise for cutting most of these for me, you're a letterpress natural!

Two Presses

I've printed my first wedding invitations, as a gift for Jo and Cam who will marry in March. They are pretty austere invites by today's fashions, just text (Outline Shadow and Verona faces) printed in blue ink on some old creamy embossed cards that I was given a while ago. The only reason I know anything about fashion in wedding invitations is because when one is looking for letterpress links on the internet, inevitably wedding invitations come to light as the bread and butter of many (most?) printers trying to make a living from letterpress. I don't get invited to many weddings myself, and the few I've been to lately have used homemade laser printed invitations. But out there in the world of aspirational wedding fashion deep impression letterpress invites are apparently the thing to have.

One of the entertaining letterpress blogs* I've discovered recently is Poppy Letterpress, in which a young Canberra graphic designer gets engaged, decided to make her own wedding invitations and takes up letterpress printing with great gusto. She has also very recently bought a Chandler and Price Old Style press, which from the photos, is very much like mine. I hope she is enjoying her C&P more than I am my one, I suspect so since until now she has been working on an Adana table press with much frustration.

Unfortunately the more I work with the C&P the more I appreciate the Arab. Yesterday I was die cutting circles on the C&P and printing invitations on the Arab and the opportunity for comparison did no favours to the new press. The C&P is so big and heavy that it is difficult to maintain momentum at the slow pace I like to print. In contrast, the Arab is little and lithe, and I know it so well that I can be very agile with it. I now realise how lucky I was to get my start in letterpress on this sweet beauty.

I don't regret buying the C&P but I'm not sure I want to keep it either. If someone made me an offer for it (and it would be a perfect press for a taller, stronger, faster printer) I could probably say goodbye without tears. Parting from the Arab, on the other hand, would break my heart.

*I finally got round to updating my links section down on the right there, scroll down and you'll find it. As well as old favourites you'll find lots of lovely letterpress websites and blogs. Enjoy!

Dirty work but someone's got to do it

I spent many happy hours with my new Chandler and Price (C&P) press this weekend. I managed to remove the electric motor and belt arrangement, all but two stubborn brackets with phillips screws that won't budge- someone stronger than me will have to extract those.

As I anticipated, the C&P is much more sleek and handsome without all those cumbersome, ugly, accouterments of the mid twentieth century. It was a simple matter to hook the treadle back into place and start the clickety clack of its manual operation.

Beginning to remove the decades of accumulated filth was my next task, and lubricating its joints, which I suspect had been overpowered by electricity rather than regularly oiled. The cleaning job will take a few more sessions of transferring thick layers of greasy dust (or is that dusty grease?) from machine parts to a new permanent residence under my fingernails, but already the C&P is taking on a proud sheen.

I will have to have a part machined before I can reattach the rollers and print ink, but fortuitously I have a forthcoming project involving screeds of die cutting, which the C&P is already in good shape for. I put a fresh tympan on, locked a die form into the chase and fiddled about with make ready until I could cut little circles with ease. I remember from my last die cutting adventure with Jim, that the make ready succumbs to pressure more quickly from die cutting than from printing and seems to need regular reinforcement in order to keep cutting well.

Now I have a little stack of perfect 5.5cm circles in cream card with which to experiment. Very satisfactory.

Making Lanterns

Pretty much everything is as ready as it can be for installing the exhibition at the end of the week.
The main task to be achieved between now and then is finishing my Lantern Book. Sunday was spent reprinting the most sloppily printed pages to look a bit nicer. And now I have to fold them all.

This is such a repetitive, dare I say, tedious task that I thought I would share the endless cycle with you, dear reader.

On Sunday, when the typesetting and printing was going smoothly, I reckoned it was taking a minimum of 8 minutes to set the type, lock it, proof it, print it and dis(tribute) it back into the drawer. When I am on a roll with folding, I can make a lantern in about 4 minutes.

My lanterns are a well-loved origami structure which many people recognise as the water bombs they used to make at school to torment teachers and nerdy kids like me. I learned it from my dear friends on Dancing Vege Farm in upstate New York.


Expanding the tightly folded structure into a little cube filled with air is the trickiest part. After about 70 or so lanterns I have finally perfected my cotton bud expansion technique. Only another 90 to go...

It's all very monotonous and wearisome for my young 'helper' and Bella is quite tuckered out from trying to hunt down the lanterns (the belt is an effective distraction when slithered about from on high, though not necessarily as enticing as the abundance electrical cords snaking around the room) .

39 weeks

A week out from the opening and it's feeling a lot like the end of a pregnancy: emotional, exhausted, irrational, scared, excited, inevitable, on the brink... If I pulled a tarot card right now it would probably be the Tower. I feel like my judgment is unreliable, yet I have been impulsively making some major decisions.

For example, I bought a printing press this week. Since I don't have anywhere of my own to put a ton of dirty old cast iron, Neil said I could move it into Te Kowhai Print Trust. I didn't have time to check with anyone else, so I'm hoping no-one gets cross with me. A couple of members came by today to see for themselves the rumoured new press, and seemed to agree that my impulsive rescue from the scrappers fate was a good idea.


Here it is coming off the truck shrouded in baby blue. Shifting it a dozen blocks across town was a major logistical exercise involving joists and hoists and a big truck and a hand truck and the fork lift pictured above. The man on the left was the amazingly good humoured truck driver who responded to each new challenge with equanimity. The fork lift driver never cracked a smile.



The Chandler and Price Old Style (C&P) is fitted with an relatively recent electric motor which is surplus to my requirements (I like letterpress because it is slow). The C&P makes the Arab look very small and clean in comparison, but once the belt and motor attachments (visible as the white hose and the wheel on the far right, above, and the small wheel at the back, below) are removed, it should be much more sleek and balanced looking. Machines in those days were designed to be elegant as well as indestructible.



Don't worry, I won't be abandoning my beloved Arab for the new big boy in my life, even if he does have a brake (the Arab requires skill, strength and sheer nerve to try and stop mid flow). As the C&P has been used exclusively for die cutting for at least 13 years, I will probably stick to cutting on the C&P and keep printing on the Arab, at least for a while. But eventually I will put the rollers back on and let the C&P have a print run and see how it goes

Meantime I look forward to researching its provenance (Murray thinks it was part of the Northern Advocate plant -our local daily paper- and apparently they have very good archives) . I haven't managed to exactly date this model yet but the Old Style was made 1884-1912 (after that C&P made New Style recognisable by their straight spokes instead of the curvacious ones like mine has).