Intro to Letterpress, Single-Sheet Elegance

One sheet of paper, one little letterpress book

It’s not magical: It’s just elegant. The single sheet book form is old-school simplicity. One sheet of paper printed on one side, cut and folded to make a little 8-page booklet with no glue or stitching.

It’s a great form to photocopy, or to make a PDF so that anyone anywhere can print it out and make their own, as the folks at Printeresting are doing with their Rum Riot Press exhibit. 

But all that elegance is made richer if you make the book with a letterpress machine.

And as it happens,  next month I’m teaching an introductory letterpress class at Zygote which will show you not only the basics of movable type and printing on the Vandercook Proofing Press, but also how to make these little books.

Vandercookin’

If you’re curious about letterpress, you should take this class. If you know a bit about letterpress and would like to see some innovation re: laying out forms in the press bed, you should take this class. You can sign up here.

We’ll use a custom chase, which simplifies what could be a complicated layout by giving you little windows in which to organize your words and pictures.

As you can imagine, this little booklet is a beautiful way to lay out a sentence you love, or a few lines of poetry, or a short comic, or whatever you can fit into 8 small pages. My plan for my class project this time is to lay out simple statement that gives this blog its name: A bicycle . . . is a gyroscope . . . that takes you places. Hope to see you at Zygote Press!

 

 

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I’m Down With OPB

Yeah, I’m down with OPB. Other People’s Blogs, that is.

I’m generally wary of compliments from people I don’t know, especially in the blog-o-sphere. So much of what so many bloggers have to say to each other feels more about self promotion than sincerity. But after a bit of clicking around, I’m proud to have been tapped by Portland print maker and blogger Drew Kail for the “One Lovely Blog” award.

There are two reasons: One is that Drew’s relief prints are teriffic, especially in the way they play with the transition of positive and negative, each taking turns carrying the information of an image. That’s the stuff of print-making. My own work is significantly dependent on color, and I truly admire folks like Dru (and like my friend Claudio Orso) who do it all in black and white. So thanks Drew: even though we’ve never met, and I hadn’t run across your work before, it means something to me to hear from someone with your skill.

The other reason: I clicked through the list of fifteen blogs Dru follows–the listing of which is part of passing on the word of “one lovely blog”–, and they are generally teriffic–relevant to art and fine writing. He clearly had found stuff that makes sense, and which coheres.

As that particular requirement to forward a list of blogs might lead you to believe, the “One Lovely Blog”  award is indeed built for promotion. The rules:

1. Thank the blogger who nominated you and provide a link.

2. Name 7 random things about yourself.

3. Pass the recognition to 15 blogs you enjoy and let them know.

I’ve already taken care of that first rule, and I hope the mandate doesn’t undercut the sincerity of my gratitude. It’s not just checking off an item on a to-do list to say “thanks” in this case.

As for that second rule:

1) I’ve just returned from a long weekend of bicycle camping on Kelly’s Island with my lovely wife and two kids.

2) I’m searching for a good set of Maillard 700 high flange hubs and a few other select parts to help me complete the restoration of my old Peugeot racing bike, which I sold more than 25 years ago and recently (at least two owners down the line) bought back

3) I’ve been about 2/3 finished tuck pointing the front of my 102 year-old house for about 10 years.

4) The first fish I ever caught was a 10″ small mouth bass. I caught it with a line tied to a clothespin, sitting in a rowboat with my uncle and grandfather.

5) I never had pets as a kid.

6) I’m constantly trying to figure out what to do next.

7) I invented the Water Moose Portable Sprinkler Park, which converts a fire hydrant into a water wonderland. Behold:

That final requirement of the Lovely Blog Award–posting links to fifteen blogs a person follows and admires– is no small thing. You’ve got to work to be able to comply with this rules. You can’t be one of those bloggers who’s all about “me.” You’ve got to follow other people who have something to say. Following 15 blogs isn’t as time consuming as following 15 newspapers, but it does take a bit of prowling.

Fortunately, we only go back to the blogs we like. The blogs that I pay attention to generally fall into three categories: They have to do with bicycles, art (especially printmaking), and urban-ism, especially in Cleveland. So  Here’s my list.

BIKES

Old Ten Speed Gallery is exactly that, a portrait gallery of old bikes from the era when they used to call them “ten-speeds.”

The blog at Momentum (a cycling magazine). Momentum is an asset when you ride a bike. When we ride bikes, we guard our momentum like diamonds. That’s why so many of us run red lights.

Bikesnobnyc:  How he maintains his daily pace of snobbery is a marvel.

Urbanvelo. Years ago, when I fell in love with bikes, it was a sporting, recreational thing. These days, people ride bikes in the city, and it’s largely about transportation, style, and culture. The blog at Urban Velo steadily grazes on cycling news around the internet and comes up with plenty of images, video, and cultural notes, in addition to the product reviews which do not interest me at all. They picked up the story of my old French bike once.

PRINTMAKING AND ART

Some bloggers are good at simply showing you what they’ve been up to. It’s a kind of conversational fluency that Hooksmith has in abundance. Plus, it’s great to find other people worldwide who deal with the peculiarities of obsolete printing equipment, such as Vandercook presses.

Speaking of Vandercook presses, the Vanderblog has great information about maintaining them, troubleshooting, presses for sale, etc.

Printmaker Alex Gillies keeps a diary of his wood block adventures in a blog called Against The Wood Grain. He’s got a great style, and he’s happy to take on projects with unconventional printing surfaces, such as a solid body guitar, or a skate deck.

Letterpress printer Larry Thompson blogs about the the kind of thing letterpress printers deal with as they use and restore old equipment. His Greyweathers Press seems to have produced several beautiful books, setting –among other things–great examples of English poetry in editions worthy of the words. Take for example this edition of William Wordsworth’s Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey. 

Woodblock printer Matt Brown tracks his adventures on the Ooloo Press blog. He does color wood block prints, as I do, with different blocks for each color, but his are a bit more nuanced, and he practices Japanese Hanga tradition, instead of using a letterpress.

Karen Sandstrom’s blog Pen In Hand is about drawing, and much more than that. It’s about going into a second career, becoming an artist. After a first career writing about the arts at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, she went back to school–to art school, no less–and launched a second career as an illustrator. So you know, if you’ve worked at newspapers all your life and are wondering what to do next now that the industry is in the tank, this is frequently inspiring. And nice to look at, too.

It’s almost like cheating to plug printeresting under circumstances like this: It’s a steadily robust gush of great print material related to printed matter of all kinds. Broadly read. Fueled by half a dozen regular contributors.  And they’ve got this great how-to zine project going on–for Printeresting’s Rum Riot Press exhibit, they’ve asked a dozen artists to make simple how-to zines in that cool, single sheet book format. Check it out!

Heavy Metal Press Co.’s blog is essentially promotion for that shop, but the photo documentation of the jobs they take on shows they are truly ambitious and have serious capacity to register, deeply emboss, and other feats that make letterpress printing look luxurious, and they are not afraid of a complex job.

 

CITIES AND URBAN NEIGHBORHOODS, PARTICULARLY CLEVELAND

The blog 100 days in Cleveland ended with the publication of a calendar (which has the same name as the blog) and a book (called New To Cleveland: A Guide to (re)Discovering the City) with writer Justin Glanville. Even though the hundred days are up, it’s still worth a look back at illustrator Julia Kuo’s affectionate renderings of the everyday details of the city.

Rustwire.com is Angie Schmidt’s blog about rust belt cities admires the innovation and pans the stagnation that’s common in old industrial cities like Cleveland.  In this post, Cleveland City Hall’s Poverty of Ambition, she takes on Cleveland’s response to bicycle advocates who wish the city were moving faster to accommodate the more energy efficient mode of transport.

I met Erin O’Brien through an old newspaper job, where her column “Rainy Day Woman” held forth on subjects diverse as internet porn and a family recipe for a Hungarian cucumber salad.  Her Blog, The Erin O’Brien Owner’s Manual for Human Beings, is at least as diverse as that–a constant supply of domestic bliss and deep Cleveland culture, from the food to the way people talk.

If you care very much about cities, odds are you’ve run across James Howard Kunstler’s high energy sarcasm, either in his books or in his blog “clusterfuck nation.”  My first encounter with Kunstler was his book The Geography of Nowhere, which makes its way through the history and illogic of urban and suburban development in the US. It’s nowhere near as nice or hopeful as Jane Jacobs, even if he did follow up with a book called “Home from Nowhere.” But Kunstler is just plain fun to read, and the vast majority of the time, even if he’s not offering solutions, I find myself cheering him on. In addition to his main blog, you’ll also find his “eyesore of the month” there–a photographic celebration of just about all the crappy things we Americans have done to the American landscape.

 

Well there you have it.

What are you reading these days?

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And So It Begins

I got a great deal on some particle board the other day.

A few months had gone by since I finished my last binge of a letterpress project, so I figured it was time to start working on a new one: another children’s book, printed with wood blocks and movable type.

Jacob and the Djembe Rocket is a classic odyssey, a trip to the stars and back. It’s the story of a boy at a drum circle who is surprised when, by the force of rhythm blasting out the back of his djembe rocket – he takes off into the sky and finds himself soaring above his town, eventually touring the constellations. Then, when he comes back and tells the drum circle beaters where he’s been, no one believes him—even though they saw it with their own eyes.

The print and the plate

“One day Jacob was at the drum circle, pounding along with the big kids. The bonfire burned, and the air shook with sound, and except for the moon and stars, the sky was just about as dark as it gets.

Jacob had a new djembe. Just got it the other day. And so he came to play.” 

Along the way there are references to principles of physics, and to the classic children’s story Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel. It’s mostly un-metered, but it falls into 12/8 time for a refrain of vocalized rhythm that ought to be fun to read with kids:

With four of eight blocks printed

Ba dukka ba dukka ba dukka ba TAH

Ba dukka ba dukka ba dukka ba TEK 

As this description makes clear, the story is already written, and in fact it has been complete except for tweaking a word here and there, for a couple of years. What I mean by ‘start working” on Jacob and the Djembe Rocket is to start making of the wood block pictures, and printing them. Which for me are one in the same process. The pictures don’t exist in any form until the blocks are carved and printed together.

The particle board isn’t for carving the pictures, but as a base for the carved block. They have to be the same height as Foundry type, which is a very precise nine hundred eighteen thousandths of an inch high. Most of my letterpressing friends probably know already that if if you glue some quarter-inch Shina to some five-eighths particle board, and add a couple sheets of paper beneath it on the press bed, that gets you pretty close. The Home Depot doesn’t carry five-eighths particle board, but Loews does.

“He knelt over the top of it, like on horseback, and he continued to pound out beats.”

It takes eight blocks to make this picture. I’m telling myself right now that most of these pictures will not be that complicated. Most will not have both glowing fires and moons. Still, this book will certainly take well over 100 blocks to make the pictures. I’m printing them one by one. Before I finish this post, I will have one picture complete, and a story ready to go, and this big stack of particle board and Shina plywood waiting for me to draw the rest. I’ll be at this for years.

And so it begins.

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Simple Letterpress Book Class

William Busta’s gallery was on Murray Hill Road in Cleveland’s Little Italy, so I know it was way back in the nineties when I walked in one day to check out his book show. It was there that I learned how to make this simple book out of a single sheet of paper. You print or photocopy on one side of a single sheet, then fold and cut just so until you get a little book.

That form has been a favorite of mine for years, mostly because of its simplicity. But I also like the economy of it, and how gracefully the modest format presents a simple idea: a short poem, or even a single sentence broken into phrases.

So when I learned to set type and started printing on the Vandercooks at Zygote Press, it wasn’t long before I went back to the little, single sheet structure to make little books.

Vandercooking

I’ve refined the process quite a bit, and in June I’m offering a two-day class at the Morgan Art of Papermaking Conservatory and Education Foundation. Over the course of two days, each member of the class will work hands-on with type and printing blocks to make an edition of his or her own little book.

If you’ve used a letterpress machine before, you know that setting up type for a project like this would be a significant challenge, probably involving lots of trial and error. Each block of text has to be aligned to print in the right place on your sheet, so that once it’s folded and cut, everything is positioned properly on your pages.

I’ve created a “chase” to make this process a snap, and that idea is the central feature of this class: making your book project easy.

A “chase” is a metal frame used to lock type or printing blocks in place on a press. I’ve made a couple of these out of wood. They look like divided windows, and the spaces are measured precisely to lay out your words and pictures so that they print exactly in the right place to make one of these little books.

Do you have a favorite poem? A beautiful sentence you’d like to pass on to your friends? This is an elegant way to package a simple thought that anyone can carry in their pocket. The next little book I make in this format is going to echo the sentiment of this blog: A bicycle . . .  is a gyroscope . . . . that takes you places.

The class is from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, June 9 and 10 at the Morgan Art of Papermaking Conservatory & Educational Foundation, 1754 E. 47th Street, Cleveland, OH 44103. For information, call them at 216-361-9255. Or just sign up online by going to their website. I hope to see you!

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A Typewriter Got Married to a Casting Plant

Beneath the nameplate, dies for each letter line up to cast lead type.

This is not the first line of an industrial joke. Among the countless mechanical miracles that came between the invention of moveable type and electronic publishing software like WordPress, there came something called the Linotype machine.

A linotype machine is the marriage of a typewriter keyboard with a metal casting plant: the operator would sit in front of the keys and type out lines, and the machine would cast them in hot lead for printing. A printer would take each line of freshly cast lead type from the machine, put it in a galley with more lines of cast words to be rolled with ink and printed on paper. Newspapers and all manner of publications once got into print this way.

The marriage of a typewriter with a casting plant.

Entire lines of text composed by a keyboard and cast as a single block of lead were a big step up from foundry type–which required the type setter to pick up individual letters one by one out of their compartments in a drawer  to spell out words. With a Linotype machine, the operator could essentially type out the entire lead plate.

To simply say what the machine does–casting words in lead as the operator types them–doesn’t begin to capture the mechanics contained therein. Zygote Press director Liz Maugans and I saw one in action while touring Madison Press, where Cleveland letterpress guru Frank and his partner continue to run a collection of machines dating to the early twentieth century.

Precisely cut teeth, like the ones that make the right key work in the right lock, help each type die find its proper place in the magazine.

Their shop is not a museum but a living repository of marvelous obsolescence–a couple of modest rooms in Lakewood, packed tight with printing presses, type, and collateral contraptions all as precise as they are old. They keep them in operating condition and use them for printing jobs still best done the old fashioned way: die cuts, folding, perforating, some sequential numbering.

But even in those rooms the Linotype machine is something special. In order to do its job it has to not only melt lead into a mold known as a die, but it has to be able to change the dies in real time, according to whatever words the operator types.

For this to be useful at a newspaper, the machine needs incredible capacity, all managed mechanically, without any help from a computer: It needs to manage not just the 26 letters of the alphabet, plus numbers and punctuation, but also italics, different sizes of headline type, and more.  Each individual letter is a separate die for casting lead. They need not only to line up in the proper order,

Drawers full of letter dies are tilted diagonally to help keep them in order.

but after casting a line, they need to return to their storage places in the “magazine” so that the next time the letters are typed, they are ready to fall in line again–in an order as infinitely variable as language itself.

To understand how this happens, it helps to think of those machines that sort coins: Kids have them as piggy banks. You drop a handful of mixed coins into the hopper, and the machine sorts all the pennies, nickles, dimes, and quarters in to their proper tubes. Of course  with coins, this can be done simply by size. With 26 lower case letters, 26 upper case letters, plus numbers and punctuation, it’s a bit more complicated.

The Linotype machine handles this massive sorting job a little bit like locks recognize their keys. To open a lock, it takes a key with teeth and grooves cut precisely in the right pattern to move the lock’s tumblers.

Type dies lined up for casting words.

The letter  dies in a linotype machine each have a set of teeth precisely cut into them, so that when they drop back  into the top of a magazine, they are gravity sorted into the right slot–the one that precisely lines up with their subtle patterns of teeth.

These are primitive processes compared to what goes on when we brush fingers across a touch-screen to move pictures or words, or go from one computerized function to another. But the physical reality of these mechanical machines makes them every bit as captivating as an I-pod. Plus, they sound better. It’s no little speaker rattling out that ka-chunk-a-chunk noise; it’s a massive convolution of brass and steel.

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FORCES OF AN ARTISTIC NATURE

Debra Sue Solecki and Mark Moskovitz at Cleveland West Art League in the 78th Street Studios complex Third Fridays

Forces of nature are at work in the Cleveland Art Scene this January. On the North Coast we’re accustomed to a gallery scene that hibernates after the holiday blitz, to reawaken only with the approach of Valentine’s Day. But January 2012 has been different. Already a multitude of exhibits have had us racing all over town—from John Martin’s terrific human figure monoprints at Loganberry Books, to Michael Loderstedt’s structured screen prints and photographs at William Busta Gallery, to Christopher Smith’s charcoal drawings of fauna at the Nature Center at Shaker Lakes . . . Say nothing of the Tremont Art Walk, or the release of the Collective Arts Network Journal at Tom Balbo Galleries, or the fact that CAN Journal Mama and spiritual leader Liz Maugans has a solo show this Sunday: Her UpLIFT is a collection of new work that also happens to be the the inaugural exhibition of a partnership between Dragonfly Lounge and the Maria Neil Art Project.

That already seems like a lot for a North Coastal January, and I can tell you after years of editing Cleveland arts calendars, that in fact it is. But in January 2012– I’m surprised and happy to say—that’s just the beginning.

This Friday night, the dedicated followers of Cleveland art will have to go on tour as worthwhile events open on both sides of town.

Zygote Press opens a show reaching into the flat files and household treasuries of its members for Collected Gems II. This is worth a look because artists associated with Zygote are showing prints that they have collected over the years, including a few works commissioned by the Print Club of Cleveland, among other great finds. The show itself is complemented by a panel discussion and lecture-demonstration February 4. The panel discussion features the print collecting expertise of Bill Busta, Susan Trilling, Paula Mindes, Tom Calhoun, and Jack Lissauer, in a discussion about why they collect prints and what makes a given print noteworthy. Noel Reifel moderates. That’s from 1 to 2:30 p.m. Next, master printer Karen Beckwith will talk and show what sets very fine prints above the rest, and talk about the ins and outs of print editions.

But getting back to Friday night, the second leg of the evening tour will take you over to the West side, where the forces of nature continue to rage. West 78^th Street Studios has its monthly, massive Third Friday opening, which means a dozen or so galleries and studios will open their doors and show new work.

Among them is my friend Debra Sue Solecki, who for years has been painting detailed, observant scenes and still lifes from the natural world –but in the relative isolation of her home studio. That’s because, in addition to being a parent, Solecki spent long hours in the halls of high school academe as an art teacher. Lately, though, she’s making up for lost time, with a recent show in the Beck Center for the Arts Galleries, and this one coming up in the Cleveland West Art League’s galleries at 78^th Street Studios. She’s paired with the versatile sculptor / designer / installation artist Mark Moskovitz–whose four-drawer cabinet that looks like a stack of firewood was featured last spring in the New York Times. 

Meanwhile, William G. Scheele’s Kokoon Arts Gallery greets the new year with Nature Revealed, which features varied takes on the natural landscape by a whole bunch of historically significant Northeast Ohio artists. Among them are: Cleveland School painter Paul Travis; Scheele’s father, the painter of imagined scenes from prehistoric times W.E. Scheele; sculptor William McVey; art deco painter of butterflies and their flora E.A. Seguy, and several others.

Meanwhile, also in the 78^th Street Studios complex, Legation, A Gallery presents works by sculptor and installation artist Derek Gelvin along with works of emerging artist Jim Leach.

Judith Brandon's "Storm Clouds." Image courtesy of Kenneth Paul Lesko Gallery.

And of course Judith Brandon’s storms continue to rage at Kenneth Paul Lesko Gallery. Rarely will you see a better marriage of media, technique, and content than in her portraits of weather in dye and charcoal. If you like to see how materials behave, and how that physical behavior can complement subject matter, then go see this show. 

So whatever the weather is doing outside, get thee to the Cleveland galleries. I’ll be there. Be sure to say hello.

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ART AND THE FRAGMENTS OF CLEVELAND MEDIA

Promoting art in Cleveland is a challenge. That’s the context for the launch this week of the Collective Arts Network Journal, which is at the moment a one-time, promotional publication created by Zygote Press and a collective of 28 visual arts organizations, with support from the Ohio Arts Council.

CAN Journal is their response to the fact that media coverage of the visual arts in Cleveland has dwindled significantly–even as Cuyahoga County has seen arts activity revitalize neighborhoods, and despite the fact that the voters decided it mattered enough to create a public fund to support artists. Despite all that, Cleveland artists have a devil of a time getting much press–at least in print. It’s edited by yours truly.

I wrote this observation in an essay for CAN Journal:

“Consider what the NEO arts scene has lost just in roughly the last decade: Dialog Arts Midwest, Northern Ohio Live, Angle, ARTefakt, Urban Dialect, The Free Times, and Avenues–all of which dug deep into the local arts scene–are gone. For a while, all those existed in addition to what we have now. Shows and performances—even in small galleries—got covered. Previews were written. Personalities were explored.” It’s not like that anymore.

The Plain Dealer–the biggest local fish– typically ignores Cleveland’s visual artists and small galleries. They did recently start running reviews by Douglas Max Utter once a week, and they deserve some credit for that. But it wasn’t long ago that they had an Arts section every day, with interviews, features, and plenty more reviews–especially of the visual arts. They’re now down to the Sunday arts section and the Friday magazine.  When I was promoting Common Household Rhymes for the Modern Child, I was only able to score a listing.  I do have to complement PD Friday listings editor Mark Rapp for following up with a question as he put my listing together. Thanks, Mark. Mad props.

Not everyone is so thorough. As most of the region’s visual artists know, the local so-called “alternative weekly” might run a listing of your show. Or they might skip it. In the case of my show at William Busta Gallery, they skipped it. They also skipped Barbara Polster’s video projection, which opened in the same gallery, on the same night.

Fortunately, there’s a collection of other media outlets that does what it can to pick up the slack. And on that front, Common Household Rhymes dominated Cleveland’s fragmented media landscape.  My little blitz began with a Cool Cleveland video, which I made myself:

As you can tell by my hair, making children’s books is a very serious subject.

Next, and on the same day, came a segment on Around Noon, WCPN 90.3FM’s daily, noon-hour arts magazine. Hosted by the positively musical Dee Perry, and produced by the understated Dave DeOreo, it is beyond question the last great

Dee Perry, host of WCPN's Around Noon

stronghold for Cleveland area arts coverage: almost an hour each weekday featuring guests in live interviews and performances.   That gives them enough air time to have real conversations with as many as 15 artists and performers each week–conversations long enough to actually tell a story.  Those of you who love me enough will click this link over and over, listening to this for as long as they see fit to keep me in their archives. Go to about the 19th minute. That’s where I start talking.

Of course I can’t forget the hyper local media. My friend Francis Killea –a prodigious cyclist who blogs at vagrantasacloud.blogspot.com  wrote this feature for the Lakewood Observer. It’s packed with thought and information, rolled out with great care.

Locking in type with quoins and furniture. Photo by Francis Killea.

The Observer papers, it must be said, can be a great resource for visual artists–if you use them. Jim O’Bryan’s citizen journalism empire has expanded far beyond its Lakewood birthplace and now has franchises in Cleveland Heights, Collinwood, Euclid, Bay Village, and elsewhere. If you are trying to promote your local art show and fail to submit an article to the Observer paper that serves your community you have missed a what has become a rare opportunity in Cleveland–the chance to tell your story in print.  All you have to do is meet the deadline. If you don’t have a friend like Francis to do the writing and photography for you, just do it yourself.

Back in the digital world,  reporter Cory Shaffer wrote this piece for Lakewood Patch, AOL’s venture into hyper-local, online news. Patch is delivered every morning by e-mail in several communities around Cleveland. Like Cool Cleveland, the delivery right to the audience’s  in-box is a big plus. So don’t forget to pitch your stuff to Patch.

But the biggest arts media coup in Cleveland might be scoring time on the local PBS affiliate, WVIZ’s weekly arts magazine, Applause. I’m grateful they found my story worth telling in video, especially because they did a fine job.

Applause is a very rare thing these days–a locally produced, weekly TV show that focuses not on car crashes, sex crimes, and weather, but on people making and doing things around Northeast Ohio. It’s an arts magazine exploring some of what makes this a great place to live.

Dennis Knowles, the producer for my Applause segment, invested a lot of time and care in putting together the piece. After spending about 3 hours shooting video and talking in December, he came back after Christmas to follow up. Clearly he cares about the details that will help him tell a good story.

For some reason, the “embed” function on the Applause website will not actually embed the clickable video. So we’ll just have to be content with this link.

For the moment, if you’re promoting an arts show in Northeast Ohio, that’s all there is. But things could improve. I get to go back on WCPN’s Around Noon tomorrow, along with Zygote Press director Liz Maugans and artist/critic Douglas Max Utter to talk about the launch of CAN Journal–which all of us involved hope will eventually become a quarterly platform to let people know what’s coming up on the Northeast Ohio visual art scene.  So if you’re reading this before noon on Tuesday, tune in to 90.3 FM.

And then on Thursday, when CAN Journal actually hits the streets, be sure you run right out to your favorite local gallery and pick up a copy.

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MANUFACTURING JOB

Today I printed the final impressions for my wood block and letterpress children’s book, Common Household Rhymes for the Modern Child.  I printed the first layer of the title in copper ink, then moved my type just a touch and overprinted in black, to make a shadow on the words. I cranked the Vandercook proofing press at Zygote Press today for perhaps the 12,000^th time.

I found myself slowing down as I got close to the end, to enjoy the labor toward the completion of something that’s been in the works for almost three years. Literally making a children’s book—writing the rhymes, drawing the pictures, carving the wood blocks, setting the type, printing the words and blocks on a manual letterpress machine, stitching, and binding an edition of 100 copies—has been many things: a labor of love, a learning process, a blow stricken for the Old School. It’s also been a manufacturing job.

We’ve heard this kind of language from the Community Partnership for the Arts and Culture for years: Artists and performers are the makers of our culture, laboring long and hard to make the objects and performances that make our lives worthwhile. It’s particularly true for artists who make objects. Consider Brinsley Tyrrell, firing glass on steel to make his stunning Ohio Landscapes. Or Stephen Yusko, artist in residence at Rose Iron Works. Or consider my sister, Toledo resident Kathleen Gill-Slee, whose Sherwood Inn Pottery has steadily increased production of  functional whimsy in clay to meet demand.

Olga, the grey cat

Making a children’s book from start to finish drove the point home for me personally. I’ve written about the work of artists and the way they build culture for a long time, but it is another thing to labor at a physical object for years and bring it into the world.

The people who see these prints on the walls at William Busta Gallery will see them as art objects, and they will think about them as pictures with rhymes.  That is how it began for me, too—as words and pictures in my head. But as the images began to build up on  these sheets of paper—and certainly as I began to stitch them into signatures—I began to think about making Common Household Rhymes as a manufacturing job.

Consider this cat, Olga.  She stars as the long-suffering “grey cat,” waiting, not quite asleep in her slanted patch of sun.   She’s 15 years old, and for most of that time was chased mercilessly by our other cat, the late Pablo, AKA “the black cat.” She is a much happier cat now that Pablo is gone. But let’s stick with Olga, shall we? She makes for a good demonstration of the way these pictures are built, one wooden block at a time.

Just the black, ma'am.

I drew the whole picture first, on a piece of wood that would become the black background plate. That image serves as a map for all the rest.

I printed it several times,  so I could transfer the shape of the cat, pillow, and sunlight onto other plates. Then I carved all that out of the black image to leave the empty space behind.

When it was time to print the color plates, I used the black background as a map to register the color blocks in their proper locations.

In this case, I printed the black background first. I wanted the effect of the sunlight shining across the room, the pillow laying on top of the bed, and the cat laying on top of the pillow. So that’s the order in which I piled up the patches of ink.

When I printed the light, I mixed opaque white ink in with the yellow so that it would have a little more substance: you can see through it, but there’s no question that you’re looking at yellow.

black and blue

Once each block was registered, I’d print about 115-120 of them. I printed extras because I knew there would be mistakes.

Once the printing was done–all 17 pictures, all 83 blocks, plus the words– I cut the sheets to size, stitched them into signatures with linen thread and fabric, then bound the whole package in acid free, archival boards with cloth. All of which brings me back to those labels I printed today. Attaching those is the the last bit of and hand work.

If all this sounds like a lot of work, that is part of the point.  This was an old-school,  Cleveland manufacturing job.  Sure, it’s about cats, and mice, and riding your bike, and adults staying up late. It’s also about work. Making a book this way in the 21st century is striking a blow for individual capacity and control. For kids learning to read in the early 21st century, holding a book manufactured entirely by one person using mechanical processes is an exotic

Three out of Four

experience. When my kids and yours read this, I hope they connect with the fact that one person did it, from start to finish.

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Book Lovers & Parents of Smart Kids: Join Me for Drinks?

Facebook friends and readers of this blog have peeked in the window on something I’ve been doing for almost three years.

The happy bicyclist in my avatar, and the wheels and street scenes that appear at the top of this page are part of a children’s book I started making in February, 2009.   Using wood blocks and moveable type, I’ve nearly completed Common Household Rhymes for the Modern Child, a collection of multicolor relief illustrations, and accompanying rhymes.

I’m releasing it Friday, December 2 at William Busta Gallery. I hope you’ll join me.

I wrote, illustrated, carved, typeset, printed, and bound it. There are 74 wood blocks, eight linoleum blocks, and one block cobbled together out of wood and copper wire used to make each book.  A total of 17 pictures, plus moveable type. We’re talking old school. 

I’ve hand cranked the cylinder of a half-century-old Vandercook proofing press at Zygote Press 10,000 times. I’ve adjusted registration by the width of a sharp pencil line, slipping in whisper thin strips of lead, and cranking it over again. I’ve stitched 100 bindings.  So you can imagine I am, shall we say, enthused to send this out into the world with a party.

I’m exceedingly grateful to Bill Busta for believing that to be a good idea. So I hope you will join me at his gallery to be among the first to see this collection of children’s rhymes and accompanying pictures.

"After your bed time, the moon gets up high. The grown-ups keep talking. Nobody knows why.

The rhymes play in the realm of domestic life in a decidedly Cleveland setting. There’s vernacular architecture, and a couple of nods to specific buildings. There are cats, mice, an orange fish, a bicycle ride in the depopulated city at night, and a workbench cluttered with tools. There is the true fact that adults get to stay up much later than children do.

The subjects are very familiar to kids, but the words don’t talk down to them in any sense. In fact, they aim high, calling on kids to observe, make connections to the world around them, and to other rhymes, and bits of culture. This is a book for parents of strong readers.

I’ll continually add to this story on this blog, but for now, I hope you’ll save the date and join me for my book launch. We’ll have some wine and light horsd’oeuvres. It’ll be fun.

Common Household Rhymes for the Modern Child

Book Release Party

6 to 9 p.m. Friday, December 2

William Busta Gallery,

2731 E Prospect Avenue  Cleveland

216-298-9071

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After Breakfast, They Went for a Ride on their Bikes.

Today’s cycling news includes two sad facts:

First, my friend Erika got hit by a car while riding her bicycle to a lunchtime meeting. Please join me in wishing her a speedy recovery.

Second:  a whole lot of people’s favorite bicycling comic, Yehuda Moon and the Kickstand Cyclery, officially ceased publication as of yesterday.  For the unfamiliar, the strip attracted a worldwide audience with its deep understanding of cycling culture, especially the range of different cycling communities, and how they so often disagree. The Cleveland-based creator, Rick Smith, announced a hiatus a few weeks ago, and then yesterday posted that the Kickstand was closed for good. Please join me in thanking Rick for years of insightful humor and engaging stories. Best wishes to him, as well.

For both of those reasons, I’m posting something happy. These are scenes from Clam Boy and Big Sister Kitty Begin: Or, The Forty-Ounce Puddle of Glass,  a little children’s book I made, in which a boy and his sister go for a bike ride and come upon a broken bottle in the road.

As any cyclist or other human knows, a broken bottle in the roadway is not only an insult to the eyes, but also an assault on the the tires.

But the boy and girl don’t just leave it for someone else.  By cleaning up the mess, they discover that they have super powers that can help make the world a better place.

I billed this  as “two young patriots’ coming-of-rage story.” And sometimes it feels that way when you see a mess someone else made and left behind, tarnishing your neighborhood as if that didn’t matter.  But really, it’s not a story about rage.

Really, this is about making the world a better place, and realizing that individuals–even little ones–have this in their power.

Raise your hand if you’ve had this feeling: You’ve taken responsibility for something–someone else’s mess, or some kind of communal neglect–and by taking responsibility, you felt empowered.

Riding bicycles has that effect, too:  you take responsibility for your own transportation, and it helps you realize just how capable you are.   You go where you want, when you want, without buying gas or waiting for the bus. You do something most people think is just too hard. But  your secret is that it’s fun, and it makes you feel good.

No matter your station in life or your politics, when you ride a bicycle, you get out what you put in. You work harder, you go faster. Or you take your time, and you enjoy the scenery.  You pour your energy into them, and out comes joy and transportation.

At least, until someone whacks you with a car.

But I hope Erika and all of us will remember that incidents like these are extremely rare. For most of us commuters, months go by without any hostile interactions with people who drive cars.

The empowerment we feel riding bikes helps us get back on them, too. We remember, I think, that we ride our bikes because we personally get something out of it. It’s not so much about saving the world.  We do it for the feelings of balance and speed. The invigoration of exercise. The knowledge that we will not get parking tickets. The knowledge that we can get there all by ourselves.

And if by getting around on bicycles we pollute just a little less, so much the better.

That’s what Clam Boy and Big Sister Kitty are about: knowing you have the power to go, to be, to do.  You put yourself at risk when you take responsibility for something, but the risk comes with rewards.

My kids invented Clam Boy and Big Sister Kitty as super heroes. I stole the characters and wrote their stories. This bike ride scene is from the second book–a prequel–which gives their origin: how they got their superpowers and assumed their new identities.

The first of their stories, Clam Boy and Big Sister Kitty Liberate the Tree and the Sun and the Moon and the Entire Landscape–is about how they cleaned up the scenery after one of those blue plastic grocery bags got caught in a tree (and stayed there, “tarnishing the sun, and darkening the moon, night after day, for weeks on end”).

These books are how I started printmaking. They’re both printed from hand carved linoleum blocks–separate blocks for each color–and bound by hand. You can find them –and learn the rest of the story–here. 

All of us have super powers.  It’s just a matter of using them. When was the last time you used yours?

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