Bucket O' Brains

Isn't that amazingly gross looking? Apparently no one has used this ink in a while. The crust on top was more than half an inch thick. Gross! There's another tub of red ink, but it's a little darker than what I wanted. This is the title page with the darker red:
And here's my arrangement, both the black and two-colored version.
I'm quite pleased with how it came out. The quote at the bottom seems kind of hard to read in the first picture. This is what it says:

There is no nonsense so gross that society will not,
at some time, make a doctrine of it and defend it
with every weapon of community stupidity.

Robertson Davies

Cynical, yes, but think about all the things people refuse to believe in: global warming, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, etc. etc.

New addition to the bookshelf

As soon as the library withdraws some books I'm going to make these bookends permanent-style. I'm going to try cutting a stack of books in half so they take up less room, but this is a good make-shift way to keep everything upright. Oh, what's that I see tucked in the middle?
I'm in love with this paper. The Guild only had two sheets of it, which was enough to bind 8 out of the 12 copies, but I have other paper at home that I can use for the rest. It was really annoying when I discovered that the second sheet had a tear in it that I couldn't possibly avoid, but at least I was able to hide it in the back. Even if I'd noticed in the store I probably would have bought them, because nothing else struck me in quite the same way (i.e., enough to rationalize paying for it).
In addition to binding these, I printed my two color piece today. As always, I wasn't expecting it to take quite as long as it did, but I'm completely done working in the studio for the semester.
Coming soon: Bucket O' Brains!

A repreive.

Today has been one big, long sigh of relief. All of my assignments for today were finished on time. My Stats group assembled our poster without a hitch (it's gorgeous, I tell you, gorgeous. You have never seen so many beautiful right angles). Our personal projects in my typography class are no longer due the last day of class, and instead they are due at the end of reading period. And we are no longer on a deadline to finish the book.


We'll still be finishing the project, or at least, everyone who is continuing for the second semester will keep working on the project. I'm glad that the day of reckoning arrived; we were starting to make a lot of errors because we were rushing. My personal mistake happened just yesterday, when I told Barry that everything was set to go before I actually checked to see if it lined up in the middle. He printed 18 pages before he noticed and fixed the problem. That was really embarrassing to find out this morning.

Presents!

Look what came in the mail! Mo was a sweetie and got these earrings from sulu design. They're just the right length for me. I liked these beads since Susan first posted about them (aren't those pictures luscious?), but the first pair using these beads seemed a little too long for my face. I was so glad when these popped up on etsy!

Notice something strange about this picture? That's right, I'm wearing my hair down.


I spent some time in the studio this morning getting a page ready for printing. I didn't expect it to take as long as it did (when do I ever?), but there were quite a few mistakes that needed to be corrected and a few lines needed to be rejustified.

When we were initially setting the story we tried to use machine cast spacing as much as possible, but we cut our own half point spacing from long strips of copper. In my first few proofs this morning, the lines of type didn't sit straight on the page. Sections of letters would tilt off at funny angles. It took me a while to figure out what was going on. It turns out that the coppers had been cut too tall, so they pushed outwards on the leading above and below, which gave the letters room to wiggle.

This morning Barry found a major typo-in a page that's already been printed. The time pressure has me worried. I think that as of this morning we had 6 pages printed. We're supposed to hand in our bound books a week from today. This could be interesting.

Paper cuts

It's amazing how long it takes to cut paper.

I went to the studio on Wednesday intending to finish printing my setting of Wislawa Szymborska's poem "First Love". Because the poem is a little longer than the assignment specified, I have to make a fairly large French fold*. This means that each piece of Zerkall paper will only give me two French folds, but they each end up being gigantic. In most cases Barry advocates using as much paper as possible but he agreed that the text would be completely dwarfed by the margins. As he put it, they would be "overly generous."

So instead of zippity quick cutting my paper, I had to enter into decision making mode. Decision making mode entails creating physical mock ups of all the options. Somehow it took an entire hour and a half to finish all the cuts I had to make, and I even was late to class. At least I'll be able to start printing right away the next time I go in.


*A French fold is the same thing you make when you print out a card from the computer and fold it twice.

First pages printed

I love terse, handwritten messages. During high school my choir director wrote a sign that said:

Piano movers,
Leave piano in office.
(arrow to the right)
Leave bill on desk.

Patrick T____

A few days later I asked if the piano had been delivered. He inquired as to how I knew there was a piano coming (apparently he forgot about leaving a sign out). It hadn't come yet, but once it did arrive I got to keep the note. It's on my wall at home and I think it's the funniest thing I own. Part of the reason I like it so much is that it never occurred to me that a job existed which was entirely devoted to moving pianos. Don't you think that's great? I should ask Barry about keeping this sign once the term is over.

Barry finished dividing the type into pages before class, so today we started printing. About time! We have two identical machines that we're using for this project. When I pulled the proof on Tuesday it was on the small hand-cranked machine,

but now we're using monsters!

The first machine had furniture set up the other day, so David started right in correcting all the missing letters.

Arielle was my printing buddy today, and he made a diagram so we could duplicate the furniture exactly. Arielle has awesome handwriting, by the way. It's neat but it has character. It reminds me of Danny Gregory's handwriting, although that could just be because they both label everything. I love drawings with labels and notes.

We spent about two and a half hours in preparation, and then in the last thirty minutes of class we printed out our stack of pages. We printed pages 16 and 17, which will be in the exact middle of the book. I took a short video on Mo's camera while we were printing, so I'll be exploring the best way to get that online. This picture looks grainy (at least on my screen) but if you click on it you can see the type clearly and read part of the story.

After we finished we put our completed pages in the drawer for the project. I'm terrified that a pair will come in to print and they won't realize that they should start with paper that's already been printed on one side. As we finish printing each set of pages we're marking the dummy, but it would be easy for a group to forget about checking the opposite side.

Setting justified type

Every year the chapel has a Vespers service the first weekend of Advent. They have two services because so many people from the community come to the services that they can't all fit in the space at once. There's something really amazing about singing Christmas carols for (and with) a thousand people. It's also easy to blow out your voice; towards the end I'm always feeling a bit raspy.

Somehow in all the craziness of this weekend I managed to get to the typography studio and completely finish setting my section of the story. Here's a quick tour through setting type.

The first step is to fit as many words in the line as possible (or necessary) without any space between them. This line is the end of a paragraph, so I don't have to figure out how to distribute the leftover space. You can see I've put two points of space between each word and then driven the line out-filled it up so all of the letters are tightly packed in.


If the line had been in the middle of a paragraph, after putting even spacing between each word I would still have a little bit of wiggle room. I'd start by putting little slivers of space between combinations of straight letters, for example -d b-, -d h-, or on both sides of an I. After filling those spaces I would move to straight-curved combinations (such as -d e-) and then to all the remaining combinations of curved letters.

You can see above that the composing stick isn't long enough to set long sections of text at one go. This is a good thing; the lead starts getting heavy very quickly towards the end of a 3 hour long class. Once the composing stick is full, we tie the forme off (Old English, not a misspelling) with twine to keep letters from falling over. The next time I have a photographic assistant with me I'll get some pictures of the process. For now I can show you a finished product.


After I finished setting my section, I made a first proof with the type still tied off in smaller chunks. I've made my corrections as I've untied each section, and now I'm ready to do a second proof.



You can see at the bottom where we ran out of letters. The black rectangles are the bottoms of pieces of type; we replaced missing t's with r's, and missing e's with c's, since they are about the same width.


Can you find the line where I got lucky? One day when I came in a few t's had appeared in the case I was working on, but it clearly wasn't enough. The foundry did send us letters we were short on, but that wasn't enough either. The sections at the beginning and the end all have the right letters, but since I'm right in the middle I'll have to wait until they've finished printing and can start distributing type.

Tomorrow (if everyone is finished) we'll start laying out pages. So far I've been too self conscious to take pictures during class, but tomorrow should be very different from anything we've done before. I may just have to risk it.

Disaster strikes again!

In the past few days the typography studio has run into some trouble. The t's were the firs o go, and the e's wr clos bhind. The fw h's and o's won' las for long. W ar running ou of lowrcas lrs. Yiks.

So far we have dealt with the problem by substituting letters. A lowercase r, for example, is about the same width as a lowercase t. We've been setting the r's upside down, with the bottom facing up, so we can find them later. It would have been easier to deal with the problem if one person were setting the entire story, start to finish, or if everyone were done (or nearly done) with their section. At this point, however, there are huge sections of the story for which the line breaks haven't been determined. We don't even know how many pages long the story will be. If we knew any of this information, we'd be able to figure out which pages will be printed from the same sheet, print those pages, and then redistribute the type.

As Barry said, we gambled and lost. Or rahr, gambld and ls.

At first Barry didn't notice that the letters were running out. He was sitting at his desk when I told him, and he clutched at his chest suddenly. That's never a good sign. Then this morning he came into the studio with a brand new, half empty box of Tums.

Fortunately for our project (and Barry's health), the typecaster is overnighting us enough letters to finish the story. I think Barry was reluctant to ask for favors, but there really was no other way we could deal with the problem.

We'll still be working against the clock: the semester ends December 14th, and nobody wants to spend finals period in the studio. In the next few days I'll try to take a few pictures of setting type, but I can't make any promises.

Disaster averted

This is the case of type before:

This sheet acts as a helpful reminder about where everything actually belongs.

And four hours later, with everything in its place:

On the upside, I will never need to use that sheet again. Ever.