Things typographical and printerly

To St Brides Foundation to see a lovely film about Jim Rimmer, five decades a typographer, designing and casting a font in his workshop at the bottom of his garden in New Westminster, BC. See a trailer here. The showing was introduced by the project's instigator, Richard Kegler.

Demonstrations included lettering artist and illustrator Ruth Rowland and Fenner Paper. Downstairs in the workshop, lots of presses -

I was drawn to the tool roll of Peter S Smith, and seduced by the woodcutting tools. Having made a few marks on the trial block, I'm very tempted to do one of his courses (there are letterpress courses too) -

In the 80s, he said, box wood was in short supply, so wood engravers started experimenting with plastics, and found that the best one was the sort used in police riot shields.

"Shadow Curtain" by Peter S Smith (via)

Found art Friday

What was glued on has peeled off. Seen on or near Whitechapel High Street.

Found art Friday

Typography and calligraphy at Prittlewell train station, Essex.

To serif or not to serif?

The tiny skirmish with the delights of letterpress and typography has whetted my appetite to do more - but left me none the wiser about what font is suitable for what text. In my working life, fonts were already decided as a matter of house style, but for making individual books, the choice of font can cause all sorts of problems ... for instance, for the book of sonnets that I  rewrote as part of memorising them. Here are two possibilities - "modern" versus "ancient" -

Someone who looks at this rather incomprehensible book is owed an explanation of what's going on. The title page seems to be a good place for that - and given the sonnet's popularity "long ago", a title page that reflects the title pages of that era seems appropriate - hence the old-fashioned looking type. And yet - two of the ten poems were written in the 20th century, and my book was written in the 21st, so why not use a sans-serif font, which I understand is the modern way of doing titles ("display matter") even if text is in a serif font.

As it turns out the serif font I blindly chose from the drop-down list is Perpetua, which I now discover was designed in 1925. It's classified as a transitional type (it has high stroke contrast and bracketed serifs) so might be entirely approriate. But I'm still thinking about it....

Book du jour - editioning "Seepage"

After laying out and collating the pages of Seepage, I found they made 10 copies of 9 pages each, and hung them up so the ink could get really dry -

The spare pages are of varying quality - indeed, some of the pages in the books are less good than I would have liked. Perhaps the edition will end up smaller than 10. Perhaps I'll be sloppy and leave those pages in - you know how it is when you're fed up with a project, you just want it done -

So far, I've learnt a lot in producing this book - about systematic tidiness (so the ink doesn't transfer to somewhere it's not wanted); about inking up (to get nice dark prints); about proofing till it's perfect; about getting lines of type to behave (not always possible if you're printing their underneath); about being careful and patient and letting the ink dry (too many pages had the interleaved newsprint stuck to them because they were forgotten overnight, squished in my bag). Primarily, I've learnt not to use tracing paper again!

Next steps, next week (after reconsidering edition size):  stack the pages, carefully aligned;  trim;  stitch (a line of machine stitch on the left).

And then - make the sleeve. It will need some further typesetting and printing. Ideally it will be tracing paper - beautifully printed! - but there is the problem that glue will make the paper buckle, and tape will be visible -- and I don't want to use stitch on the sleeve.  Or ...? Whether to use stitch might be worth reconsidering ...

Spacing in text

While finding out whether Virginia Woolf actually had bookbinding skills (she did), I came across an article that tells of her development as a typesetter (and how this influenced her writing), in which this passage about the use of space seemed worth flagging up:

" Identifying space as verbal art is a technique used by Woolf; in novels like Jacob’s Room or The Waves, Woolf was in constant dialogue with the printer, ensuring that the spaces between scenes were of a precise thickness. The absence of words, or the space in between scenes, becomes another source of meaning; space becomes verbal art in the same way in which Woolf practiced a linguistic art."


The absence of words as a source of meaning .... "nothing is something". The words are a thing, and the space they occupy - or leave empty - is also to be "read" as a thing.

More than meets the eye.

Again, one thing leads to another, and in trying to find a picture to break up the run of words, I came across this:

Spacing imposed by the publishers of an e-book (boxes added). Segue to an opportunity for a rant on stupid hyphenation, but I'll spare you that. Nonetheless, it's a reminder of why carefully-printed (or re-printed) books are SO much more pleasant to read than the "flexible" electronic format - and gives me a chance to quote another bit from that original article about the Hogarth Press -

" Woolf’s use of spacing, variant punctuation, and emphasis on words as single, constitutive units, exposes the printed rectangle of text on the page as a form of meaning, one as important as the narrative itself. For example, Woolf breaks up the shapes of words in order to replicate spoken language—how stress is placed on single syllables. When Archer calls Jacob, he shouts: “Ja—cob! Ja—cob!” and when Mrs. Flanders summons the two boys, she calls, “Ar—cher! Ja—cob!” Woolf’s separation of their names in this manner renders it difficult for the reader to avoid the physical shape of words. Yet Woolf exposes the paginal skeleton even further: two lines of space separate these initial shouts, secluding these broken syllables from the rest of the textual body. Indeed, throughout Jacob’s Room, Woolf experiments with spacing; four lines of white space separate some paragraphs, while other paragraph separations are thinner. Woolf, therefore, in structuring the book according to the spaces between scenes, not only considers the visual composition of the page but also how the absence of words—as indicated with blank space—becomes another origin of meaning. "

Book du jour - letterpress erasure

The text is seeping back in - word by word, the type is being turned over and the hidden words are emerging. There's a system for figuring out what comes next, trying to keep some sense (and some suspense) in the text -

A sheet comes off the proofing press -

The italic words are one of those "accidents", and not an entirely happy one. At the end of the setting, 9 Es and 5 As were needed, and no chunks of unreturned Times 18pt could be found, so the options were to use a different typeface - for the end bit, or here and there throughout - or to use italic for some words. I think I made the wrong choice! After decades of editing in a house style where italic was NOT permitted for emphasis, I'm very suspicious of using italic at all. (btw, that house style also frowned on the use of "very" - and it's true, "very" is very seldom needed.)

Next, I'll make the book, and then consider whether the text can be used in a different way, or is worth resetting and reprinting.

Book du jour - letterpress progress

The plan was to have the text appearing, like a spreading stain or a puddle - but from where, the middle or the top or...? On re-reading the text I found the word "seeped" right near the end so that solved the problem. 

Working it out roughly on the computer, totally disregarding the line breaks in the typeset version -

Getting to grips with it on galley -

I printed onto tracing paper, so that when the pages were turned the back of the page would look like the way the type had been set - the letter on the bottom with the "top" as a shadow on the previous page -

 At the last session I discovered the lack of As and Es -- and indeed no more in Times 18pt could be found, even in the repository of undistributed type, left by students as far back as 2009. It was "an education" to try to find "my" letters among the many trays of abandonned projects. I needed 10 Es and 5 As, and to get round this shortfall am using italic, which means entire words, higher up in the text, have been made italic. I think it will look horrible and it's not what I wanted with the text, but hey, this is the learning phase! I shall persevere and see what comes of it, and what emerges in terms of doing it better next time.

What, though, happened when I set the second line ... what rogue word slipped in (or got left out of the text I worked with on screen, copied from the electronic file of Mary Ruefle's text)? Next letterpress session is Thursday, but I might have to drop in earlier and have a look.

Another technical problem - I managed to get the lines packed out so they stay (quite) tight - it really shows with the flat surfaces of the "words" - but the bottom lines are looking very uneven. When you start learning something, there's SO much to pay attention to!

The text is about erasure, but for the transparent pages to work, the opposite process is happening - instead of disappearing, the words are appearing. Could this be called "de-erasure" ... hmm, derasure (d-erasure? d'erasure?) - interestingly, deradere is the Latin for to smooth, to rub off, wipe - we are going in circles...

More letterpress

The paragraph of text is now all set - with a small problem, running out of As and Es - for the moment I've used italic -

That proof will help me find them to replace them, as they are now upside down -

I'm having difficulty keeping the lines in place ... in future I shall be paying more attention to getting it right in the composing stick, before transferring it to the galley. With one print, the paper had too much packing and the force needed to print actually dislodged the (powerful!) magnets holding the type in place -

Great effect - barcodes having a party?? - but not something you actually want to repeat - putting the lines of type back together took a surpisingly long time.

Why show the "I"? That just kinda happened with the first few lines of type - I was finding the punctuation and spaces weren't interesting enough, and knew that more Is would appear in the rest of the text. In speech, "I" is much used and little heard, so foregrounding it seemed a reasonable thing to do. However, next time I'll turn the Is upside down and see how that works ... it will change the look/importance of the row of dots through the black ... after all, rows of dots ... are so appealing ... and so useful ...

Eventually, and gradually, the black squares will be replaced by the text - simply a matter of turning each letter over.

I was hoping the punctuation would be more visible ...  this was the most punctuation-rich bit of text I had available at the moment it was needed, but the next phase of this project could be to use another bit of text with commas, quote marks, etc all over the place. And ampersands. Such variety in ampersands.....

Letterpress project

My first idea for a project involving letterpress was to set one of my poems but by the time it came to starting I wanted to do "something with punctuation" - taking out the words and leaving just the commas, dashes, quote marks - and the spaces, for spaces are as important in the flow of words as the pauses signalled by stops, semi-colons, etc. When I ran the idea past James, the letterpress guru, he suggested turning the type upside down and printing with the bottom of the slug - brilliant!

The text is a paragraph from an article on erasure by Mary Ruefle that happened to be in my handbag. I decided to leave the first person pronoun, as I occurs several times in the text. Here's the first proof of the first three lines -

I really enjoyed getting to know where the letters can be found in the type case (this is Times 18 point) and seeing the lines fill up. It's slow going, though - imagine setting an entire book!

At the end of the (short) day there was more type and a proper proof -

That's about half the paragraph. The "mistake" of the T being right way up has me thinking about how, by turning the type over, letters and words could appear along the lines, gradually revealing the text.

Ampersand, etc

Found here (the blog also has pastry ampersands -- mmm, edible typography!). This ampersand looks particularly chirpy ... what is it about it??

In case you're wondering (as I was...) where the word comes from, I'll save you the trouble of looking it up and quote the derivation from Wikipedia:

'The word ampersand is a conflation of the phrase "and per se and", meaning "and [the symbol which] by itself [is] and".[1] The Scots and Scottish English name for "&" is epershand, derived from "et per se and", with the same meaning.
'Traditionally, in English-speaking schools when reciting the alphabet, any letter that could also be used as a word in itself ("A", "I", and, at one point, "O") was preceded by the Latin expression per se (Latin for "by itself"). Also, it was common practice to add at the end of the alphabet the "&" sign as the 27th letter, pronounced and. Thus, the recitation of the alphabet would end in: "X, Y, Z and per se and". This last phrase was routinely slurred to "ampersand" and the term crept into common English usage by around 1837.[2][3]
'Through popular etymology, it has been claimed that André-Marie Ampère used the symbol in his widely read publications, and that people began calling the new shape "Ampère's and".'

One thing leads to another, and the Wikipedia entry led to another - Tironian notes - a system of shorthand dating back to Roman times. The original system of 4,000 signs was extended to about 13,000 used by medieval scribes.

The pic is Vindolanda Tablet 122, about 90-130 AD (from here).

Digressing again, the entry on etc. goes into the niceties of grammatical usage of the word, inter alia:

'Some publishing house styles[who?] (particularly in Britain) no longer require either the preceding comma or the following stop.[citation needed] In general, writers are advised to use the traditional style unless circumstances dictate otherwise.
'Some pickier editors consider that “and the rest” implies a finite list thus distinguishing “etc.” from “and the like”, “and so forth” and so on. “Apples, bananas, oranges and so on” would be preferred to “apples, bananas, oranges, etc." unless the greengrocer supplies a list of available fruit.'

And that's entirely enough digression for now.

Found poem, found graphic

Digital literature

Food for thought - the quote of the day comes from the diapsalmata blog:

"When language dons the dress of design, as it must online, its visual component starts to signify, to make meaning. Of course, written language always has a livery -- we just don't tend to notice it much when it's the utilitarian sweatsuit of Times New Roman text on an 8.5"x11" page. On the web, though, the decoration of links is necessary for navigation. "

And once you decorate the links ... there's no knowing what will happen next ...

What font are you reading (or writing) in?