Frisket-Carrier Sheet Revise

Several people have had questions about the sketch I posted on 8 January 2010, entitled Frisket-Carrier Sheet.

When I drew the sketch I should have shown that the two sheets are taped together to function as a unit.

Pictured is a replica of the one that I originally used to print the visual poem, daffydowndilly.

Note the inked line on the carrier sheet for registration of the word daffydowndilly to align with the crossbar of the ff ligature of the watermark.

Copy Out The Window

I remember a client whose stationery bore the headline DON’T CHANGE A WORD, printed in red, all caps in 96-point Franklin Gothic Bold Condensed.

For that client it was “Copy out the window.”

However as a veteran typographer I have often had to take many liberties with copy; and in some instances I was granted permission ahead of time to do so.

So I would offer an alternate setting. It might simply be an abbreviation or deletion of a superfluous word. Or the breaking out of a new paragraph from a long paragraph. Or the running together of two short paragraphs into one.

For the printer/bookartist this is especially important in the writing of a prospectus or colophon—and especially, artist statement—where one is trying to arrive at both a succinct statement and one that is typographically elegant. Nothing worse than a poorly set artist statement with a lonely widow at the end of the graph.

This may seem like a cynical approach to writing, but you might already have taken the first step down that road in having agreed to write an “artist statement” in the first place.

That last comment notwithstanding here is a little How-To.

Let us say you want a justified copy block with the last line going full measure. Experienced typographers work backwards. That is, they rework the last line of the paragraph first, then work towards the front. By working in this fashion should there be a difficult line you can sometimes “bury” it in the center of the graph.

Also this allows you more liberty in revising copy. And especially so, if the last line of the paragraph is a killer line that must be maintained.

Or you may simply want to create a triangular shaped ending to drop in a tailpiece as the early printers were inclined to do.

You may not be Edgar Allan Poe but there is no harm in knowing how to achieve an effect. That way when you want to show your stuff you will actually be able to do it. Like a triple Lutz, for instance.

Close to the Edge

Over the holidays I received a handmade card that had a double-colored hand-torn deckle edge. I liked the presentation of the colored deckle, and it suggested a typographic approach for a visual poem. (Now printed and shown above.)

I had some offcuts of Rives BFK which, as the deckle edge is relatively uniform, was the ideal paper for the job at hand. Unfortunately I didn’t have enough offcuts for the entire job, so I had to tear down some sheets by hand; but even those loaned themselves to the desired effect.

Part of the effect I was looking for was degrading of letterform as the type prints on the deckle. Encouraging me to do this is the fact that legibility studies have shown that the upper part of a letter is the most important in character recognition. As it turned out, however, degraded letterform did not come into play as much as I had anticipated.

For the baseline I used 8-Didot Inserat Grotesk—as it fit the deckle perfectly—and 12-Didot Permanent Headline for display, both original foundry faces from Haas and Ludwig & Mayer.

Appropos of these comments I offer this poem from A Printer’s Dozen.


The Truth About Margins

In the 20th Century we trim
To bleed. How unlike the ancients,
Who gravitated toward
The center of things. Now,
How close to the edge?
In this houseful of objects
Other men have made,
I recall Fairbank’s love of letters:
“Because he lacked facility
to draw.”
The generosity of genius,
And the anonymity of type—
Where to stop with other men’s ideas?


reprinted from A Printer's Dozen
Courtesy of The Bieler Press, Los Angeles.

©1992 — Philip Gallo

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.