Frisket-Carrier Sheet

If you look closely at my previous post you will see that the word daffydowndilly aligns with the crossbar of the ff ligature. This alignment was accomplished by use of a frisket-carrier sheet, shown above.

The crossbar of the ligature served as a baseline (shown on the illustration as a horizontal line with two vertical tick marks) for the word daffydowndilly. A light-table made for quick alignment. When the second sheet of mylar with the window was laid down over the first, the handmade paper was sandwiched between and held firmly in place. This became the “key block” for subsequent runs.

Obviously a design of this sort does not require hairline registration, but one would like to find an optimal position and attempt to hold to it.

(As is often the case, one must exercise more control over the random than one would have imagined. Wait! I didn’t say that, did I?)

The frisket-carrier sheet simply went into the guides of the press. Use of this method allows you to print very irregular sheets on a cylinder press, while at the same time allowing you to “eyeball” centering up-and-down and left-and-right.

This same technique was used in the printing of some of the pages of Synesthesia (Granary Books: Terence McKenna and Timothy Ely, 1992). Only in that case, I printed the text type on the bottom mylar sheet; then aligned the painted image to the position where I wanted the type to print.

This technique was necessary as Timothy Ely had painted 30x44 inch sheets of Rives BFK, from which the individual pages were then cut. By use of a template Ely was able to duplicate image and placement with some accuracy, but not enough for me to ensure registration from sheet to sheet.

One of the printed pages is shown below.

Defect in the Eye of the Beholder

Not only should you inspect the sheet immediately after having printed it, but you should inspect the sheet itself before printing it. If you don’t, long after the sheet has been printed, you may find a paper defect that makes it unusable.

The following is my rule of thumb, or should I say, disclaimer:

A defect that is sufficient to reject a sheet outright is a defect within the printed area or in such close proximity to the printed area that the defect in the paper may be mistaken as a defect in the printing.

All this appertains even more so when printing handmades, as you need to inspect the sheet both for inconsistency in weight from sheet to sheet, but for inconsistency within the sheet itself.

Pictured above is a handmade I commissioned for a visual poem. The inclusions in the paper are from daffodils. You know, real daffodils in real paper. The idea simply to take advantage of a chaotic field.

Before printing the sheets I separated them into three batches according to weight. I then went through the sheets and used as setup sheets those which I felt “inferior.” Some of these inferior sheets were caused by my having made the very large watermark ff ligature from too heavy a wire, a fault that should not be attributed to the papermaker.

The run was approximately 125, and involved several colors. By the end of the job I was hard pressed to maintain the standards with which I had begun. That is, even sheets that were “too thin” or “too heavy”; or sheets where the deckles were raggedly uneven, or worse, the watermark area too thin, exhibited merits exceeding the concept of the original run.

This is beginning to sound an awful lot like an argument for “the process is important as the work itself,” a position I do not adhere to. So perhaps it was the subject matter—the variant spellings of daffodil—which led to an acceptance of these “defects” as the natural order of things, and which led ultimately to my keeping sheets that ordinarily I would have discarded.

Hence my keeping the print shown above—in spite of the obvious flaw in the lower left corner and the weakness at the upper right.

For further thoughts along these lines I direct you to Nathaniel Hawthorne, who addresses the limitations of perfection quite elegantly in “The Artist of the Beautiful”; and especially for those who have ever tried to salvage a spoiled sheet, I recommend “The Birthmark.”

Art of the Silent Correction

If you’ve ever changed copy in a colophon to go full measure or to lead gracefully into a decorative tailpiece, then you’re not that far removed from the copywriter who works directly with an art director and revises copy on the fly to fit available space.

Years ago, while reviewing page proofs for a book of my poems I was surprised to find a couple of errors that could not really be called typos. Instead they were word changes.

When I asked the printer—in this case the eminent private printer Harry Duncan—about them he said, “Yes,” in that wry tone one uses to acknowledge the self-evident.

Gently admonished by what is known in the trade as a “silent correction,” I had sense enough to let several stand.

And that, by the way, is exactly what stet., as used by proofreaders means: Let Stand. Literally that type has feet on which it stands, and that the form should remain intact.


Pictured Above: PLANTIN’S PROOF-READERS AT WORK. (FROM A PAINTING BY PIERRE VAN DER OUDERA, NOW IN POSSESSION OF FELIX GRISAR, ANTWERP.) As cited in A Printer’s Paradise, T. L. De Vinne. Click on the title bar of this post to read the original essay.

And my thanks to Patricia Kolsteeg, Registrar–Loans–Photo-orders, of the Plantin-Moretus Museum, whose kind search indicated that I was incorrect in thinking that the painting was in the collection of the Plantin-Moretus Museum.

Happy Hour

So here you are standing at the bar, or else, chatting somebody up at a party and you—letterpress printer/book artist, aka social butterfly—are handing out your three-color on a handmade, LetterPress’t card, when OMG the target of opportunity says, “These are nice. Can you run off a few for me? Like maybe a hundred. I’m thinking of starting a business. But I don’t know what and I don’t want to spend a lot of money right away.”

Well, pictured above is my solution to the short-run, multi-color business card printed on a fine arts paper.

Take one sheet of 22x30-inch cold pressed 140 or 300 gsm watercolor paper.

1. Cut the sheet in half (15x22-inch); trim excess deckles;
2. Cut 3.5-inch strips along the 22-inch side, yielding six strips 3.5x15-inches;
3. Repeat with other half sheet;
4. Print 3-up* on a work and turn (see photo), yielding six cards from each strip;
5. Yield: 72 cards per 22x30-inch sheet;
6. Add sheets as necessary.

This “recipe” works exceedingly well on the smaller Vandercooks. Note how the strip is just wide enough to fit under two grippers. Also, if the strips are cut accurately, you will be able to center the copy precisely on the sheet and have one less cut to worry about.

I have found that it is helpful to add extra space between cards, rather than make cuts between cards common cuts. That way, if there is inaccuracy in the chopping out of the cards, you can easily compensate by back-cutting on the remaining cards.

As there’s nothing worse than spoiling a job in the cutter—and that's one of the benefits of this method—keep the lifts small (ten or twelve strips) and the cards will have less tendency to creep. Of course, if you have a Polar or Wohlenberg programmable cutter, none of this may pertain in the first place.

*The assumption here is that we are printing 3-up from a polymer plate.

Squaring the Deckle

Preserving deckle edges and holding register is a common enough problem to warrant my suggesting the following method. Recently I was printing some invitations on a handmade from Cave Paper. By use of a steel perforating* rule I did some additional tearing in an attempt to square up one side of the sheet, as the two-color job I had in mind would present registration problems. To make sure the invitations fit the envelopes I decided to fold the sheets ahead of time. It then occurred to me that the fold presented a natural “horizon line.”

Pictured above is the setup I used to guide the sheets parallel to the fold.** I first lined the type up to a square setup sheet; then I lay parallel to the edge of the setup sheet (while in the guides) a piece of 72-point giant metal furniture.

I then used a triangle to create a guide-edge perpendicular to the side guide. By first bringing the folded sheet into the uppermost guide on the cylinder and then bringing the folded sheet back and flush to the long edge of the triangle I was able to get the type parallel to the fold. This was easily accomplished as the triangle was free floating, and I could easily slide it backwards and forwards along the piece of giant furniture. Then it was a simple matter of opening the sheet up and running it through the press. I found this quicker, easier (and more accurate) than lining up to a frisket overlay on a light-table.

To the right of the press in the composite photo is the completed invitation. Admittedly for all my talk of registration this is not very tight registration. Nevertheless, the two type blocks are parallel to each other, and the entire text block is imposed parallel to the fold so that it does not “slide” off the sheet.

I should think this technique could prove useful in bookwork, where one would want to preserve all the deckles. Certainly it would facilitate in ensuring that the text block remain perpendicular to the gutter.

A note on the type: the display type is Alladin (a digital incarnation of F. H. E. Schneidler’s Legende), a typeface commonly used in the past for “things Oriental.” The sans serif is FF Meta, a favorite of mine for its well balanced caps and small caps, and the ease with which oldstyle figures can be accessed through the Roman font. As they say on eBay: “Highly Recommend.” “Would Use Again.”

*In place of a tear bar I have found that a perforating rule can make an effective substitute. It is very sharp and can make a clean serrated edge; or by making small tears at a time, a wide, false deckle can be achieved. You have to be careful of the indentation that the rule may make, if you are too hasty. If this happens, slight dampening and use of a bone folder can be used to lessen it.

**You will note that the sheet is not under the grippers. This to show better the irregular fore-edge.

Anecdote of the Craft

Harry Duncan was fond of quoting the adage: “It’s a poor workman blames his tools.” Corollary to this is the concept of “the work-around,” whereby you sidestep the limitations of a computer program, and by application of Yankee-ingenuity, get done what needs to be done. Thereby demonstrating that limitation is not necessarily a constraint. I’m sure Robert Frost could weigh in on this.

In a similar vein is the notion that the skill of a workman may be judged not so much by the number of his tools, but by the condition of his tools. Barton Sutter, addresses this in his poem, “Tools”:

“Let’s have a look at your tools,”
The foreman said. He had to choose.
Grandpa’s were filed, slick with oil,
Obviously used.

The implication clear: Grandpa gets the job, based on an impeccable resume, the well-cared-for condition of his tools.

A printer friend of mine had a sign on his shop door—and I do mean shop, not studio—that read: Fine Craft Printing. As adroit a way as any for suggesting “fine press,” without coming right out and saying it. And this during the heyday of the journal, Fine Print.

Seeing as I have opened the door to equivocation, I may as well hang myself out to dry. I have several poems which attempt to mediate the vagaries of craft. Here is one of them.

The Arrivistes

To say that we have no standards or that our standards vary is to evade the issue. Everything we do is our best. More to the point is that some occasions allow a better best. Anyone who understands contingency understands this.

Furthermore some things need only be good enough and on which perfection is wasted. Corollary to this is that in terms of the job although good enough may not be perfect it may be acceptable.

The secret to this is procedure: it allows us to mediate and be fairly arbitrary about it. We call this rapprochement which is French for “getting close.”

For example this example.

©2009 — Philip Gallo

Want more? Go to Cloud Cuckoo Land for “Imagine You Are A Craftsman.”

Apollinaire Redux

Were a literary critic writing copy for Advertising Age, you might find the following headline: Celebrex® TV Spot Reclaims Ground Expropriated By Visual Poetry.

Pictured above is a montage of three screen shots taken from the 2009 tv commercial for the controversial arthritis drug, Celebrex. I have pieced them together to show the movement toward the viewer of the snowflake copy. The commercial itself can be found on YouTube.

The entire voice-over of the commercial is handled graphically as pictograms. A dog. Two bicyclists. A leaf. A kite. Snowflakes.

They call to mind the calligrammes of Apollinaire. But the commercial goes further: the pictograms support a narrative. Rather than subvert the commercial as some have done on YouTube, I suggest take advantage of this narrative technique and put it to another use.

One need only look at the advertisements for Absolut® Vodka, where famous writers were employed to write “stories” around (both literally and figuratively) the Absolut bottle, to see the insidious, if not pernicious, effect of advertising.

To my mind one of the best instances of expropriation of a product is the coca cola field, done by the Brazilian concretist, Décio Pignatari. By a series of substitutions he transposes

beba coca cola (drink coca cola)
to cloaca (cesspool)

all on a field of red, very near the PMS red of Coca-Cola®.

If I may be self-referential, the intent of my post entitled, “Seizing the Tools of Art,” was exactly that: expropriation. Art is not the exclusive province of “artists.”