ORPHEUS THE STUTTERER: A POETICS OF SILENCE

The Press at Colorado College is very excited to announce the publication of its newest title, Orpheus the stutterer: a poetics of silence, by the poet & letterpress printer Alan Loney. From the colophon:

The design and production of  large book projects distorts time in strange ways: the process seems unending, but there is never enough time; there are many steps & pieces, but the imagined & unpredictable gestalt drives the whole thing; once the long production ends the fun really begins; the book begins again & again with each new reader. You may be reading this colophon at the beginning or end of your experience with this book — either way we are grateful  for your company.

The typeface used throughout most of Orpheus is Lirico, in its Roman & Italic forms and in Normal and Light weights. Lirico was designed  by Hendrik Weber and published  by OurType in 2008. The Greek typeface is Neohellenic, produced & published  by the Greek Font Society. All of  the text was letterpress printed  from photopolymer plates on our well-loved Vandercook 219. The large sections of color on the covers and the opening and closing pages of  the book were printed from collagraph blocks made with a brush texture in acrylic gel medium. The covers were hand-painted with acrylic gesso, and the pages were painted with acrylic ink wash.

Orpheus was made in a variable edition. The text and division of  the pages is the same in each copy but how they were articulated with color changes from book to book.

Orpheus the stutterer: a poetics of silence was written by the poet & letterpress printer Alan Loney. This book was designed and printed  by Aaron Cohick at The Press at Colorado College during the end of 2012 and  beginning of 2013. Two student apprentices at The Press, Taryn “Centauryn” Wiens and John “John Baskerville” Christie, assisted in the binding and  hand-coloring. Corie Cole supported the production of this book in various ways, many of them intangible, but all of them absolutely vital. This book would not exist without the participation of our wonderful community here at Colorado College.

Forty copies were printed, thirty of which are for sale.

The images above & below show the same page spreads from three different copies of the book, in order to show how the hand-coloring varies from copy to copy.

Orpheus the stutterer: a poetics of silence
Text by Alan Loney
64 pages, Hardcover, Coptic stitch with channeled thread
8” x 13” (closed)
Letterpress printed from photopolymer plates & collagraph, hand-colored with acrylic ink wash
Edition of 40: 10 archival/artist’s proofs, 30 copies for distribution
2013
$600

If you are interested in purchasing a copy, or have any questions or comments about the book, please email Aaron Cohick, Printer of The Press at Colorado College, at aaron(DOT)cohick(AT)coloradocollege(DOT)edu.

Some production images, as well as more thoughts on & around Orpheus, can be found here, on the blog of CO Springs artist Andy Tirado. The post was written by Grace Gahagan, a student at Colorado College.

JESSY RANDALL: HOW YOU LOSE

And here’s another one! This time only dating back to the first semester of the current academic year (what can I say, we’ve been busy). How You Lose, by Jessy Randall. The colophon (printed on the back) reads:

“ ‘How You Lose’ is a found poem by Jessy Randall.
The source text is Ken Uston’s 1982 book Score! Beating the Top 16 Video Games.
This broadside was instigated by Shanon Lawson, designed by Steve Lawson, and realized by Aaron Cohick at The Press at Colorado College in September of 2012. Letterpress printed from photopolymer plates on Rives BFK, using fluorescent inks and two rad fonts downloaded from the Internet: Synchro LET and 04B_21.”

Copies are still available: $20 plus shipping. If you are interested in purchasing one, please email Aaron Cohick, Printer of The Press at CC, at aaron[dot]cohick[at]coloradocollege[dot]edu.

NOEL BLACK: WATCHMEN IN THE RYE

This broadside is from about a year ago, but now we’re finally getting it up online. The colophon (printed on the back) reads:

“This broadside was designed and printed by Aaron Cohick, with assistance from Matvei Yankelevich, at The Press at Colorado College, for the occasion of Noel Black’s reading as part of the Visiting Writers Series at Colorado College on April 5th, 2012. The poem originally appeared in a chapbook, Moby K. Dick, and a full-length book, Uselysses, both published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2011. The artwork for this broadside was adapted from the graphic novel Watchmen (written by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons), published by DC Comics in 1986. Printed from lead type and photopolymer plates on Rives BFK in an edition of 40.”

Yes, it’s all letterpress.

There are some more copies for sale. The cost is $20 plus shipping. If you’d like to purchase one, please email Aaron Cohick, Printer of The Press at CC, at aaron[dot]cohick[at]coloradocollege[dot]edu.

FRED HAGSTROM LECTURE THIS THURSDAY!

The Press at Colorado College is hosting visiting artist Fred Hagstrom this week! On Thursday, 10/11, he will be giving a public lecture about his work in prints & artists' books. 7 PM in the WES Room in the Worner Center. Free! We would love to see you there!

For more info on Fred's work, you can visit his website here:
http://www.people.carleton.edu/~fhagstro/index.html

NEW FILM ABOUT THE PRESS

One of our student apprentices, Demetria Humphries, just made this great short documentary about The Press at Colorado College. It's got printing, talking about printing, and more printing! And some books! What more could you want in a film?

POSTERS SO FAR

Last year I wrote about the first letterpress poster I ever made here. Since then I have printed many more posters, even as I spent last semester away from Colorado College and the press. As I go into this school year with new ideas and fresh perspectives, I would like to first reflect on my posters so far: the trials, tribulations, and successes of printing a poster the letterpress way.

This was my second poster and is still one of my favorite designs. Type and image mesh well and I got a few things right by chance, like type sizes and ink colors. It was a three-color poster with wood type, lead type, and two different linoleum blocks. Abe is a little more purple in person. It was also my most frustrating poster, by far. Somewhere in the translation from email to paper to design to type, I mistook the speaker's last name "Chiras" for "Chiaras". I didn't realize until the poster client called and told me the 70 posters I just delivered had a rather unacceptable typo. LETTERPRESS LESSON NUMBER ONE: PROOF-READ AGAINST THE ORIGINAL SPECIFICATIONS AND THEN PROOF-READ AGAIN. Nothing like a ten-hour all-nighter at the press to build character!

This was my next poster and the first of the school year. I printed it within the first four days of being back at school, probably my fastest poster ever. I was quite happy with the final design, the one thing I would change the shade of the blue ink: it isn't as legible from long distances as I would like, and it's too soft against the dark red. Printing this poster I learned that when working with metal type, printing is much easier if you set all the lines to the same width using extra spacing. The lock-up (how the type is placed in the press bed) can get very complicated if your lines are all different lengths.

This was my first and only poster using photopolymer plates. Although I enjoyed designing and printing with photopolymer, it is not a very cost-effective method. This is a three color poster (dark blue, black, and silver on a light gray-blue. To get the design I traced a map of the colorado river basin, fiddled with it in the Adobe Creative Suite, added text, and separated the image into three layers which would become my three colors (with the help of Aaron). I loved being able to see the image on the computer before making the plates and printing: it allowed me to make the text all the optimal size and have the optimal placement, something I still struggle with when setting lead type by hand. I also took advantage of the ability to create negative text. Although the design process took longer than it would with type and linoleum, doing the lock-up and printing was a breeze. Definitely one of my favorite results.

For this poster I used a mix of lead type, a linoleum reduction cut, and wood type placed upside-down. I had really wanted to try upside-down wood type, but it may have distracted from thinking about the poster design as a whole because this design is my weakest, in my opinion. There is too much white space and the ink colors are all wrong. If I did it again I would set the title type in a larger size, make both the blue ink colors darker, and use some of the orange/pink florescent ink for the text. (I unfortunately didn't know we had florescent ink at this point).

This poster was a sort of rebellion against the last and I had a lot of fun with it. Printers-in-training Mariel Dempster and Julia Belamarich helped during the designing, type-setting, and printing which was very appreciated: having people to bounce ideas off definitely makes the final product better. This was a two-color poster: bluish-black and silver on yellow paper. It incorporated lead and wood type, like my first two posters, and a reduction linoleum cut. If I did the State of the Rockies Speakers Series again (the client for my last five posters) I would have liked to use the line of wood type at the top in all of them, to make the series more cohesive. I think it's a strong, attention-grabbing template and quite versatile.

This is the poster I ended on, before I took a poster and press hiatus after the fall semester. Although it was a simple two-color linoleum and lead type poster, it was a good note to end on. The texture of the linoleum cut turned out well and these colors on the chip board gives an earthy, subtle feel that goes well with the design and the text.

This year I'll printing some of the Visiting Writers Series, using turn of the century book covers as inspiration for layouts. I couldn't be more excited to jump back into the world of keys and quoins (Use that in your next game of scrabble. You're welcome.)

THE DENVER ZINE LIBRARY NEEDS YOUR HELP!

And Colorado College librarians Steve Lawson and Jessy Randall are here to tell you why the Denver Zine Library is a good thing:

Donate here.

And check out the DZL's website here.

TITLE, A METABOOK

Open publication - Free publishing - More artists books

Title
A meta/historical book produced by 
the History & Future of the Book class during half-block of 2012
12 pages, soft cover, pamphlet stitch
Letterpress printed from handset lead and wood type
Edition of 100

The History & Future of the Book class, which is ending today with a wayzgoose, was taught by librarians Jessy Randall and Steve Lawson. The class, as you might have guessed, dealt with the changing forms and roles of the book in culture, in the past and in our current time. The class also involved this project at The Press. As usual, the students decided the parameters of the project (letting them choose always gives them more ownership of the project and allows for a more significant engagement—they’re not just doing an assignment, but actually making something that they are invested in). They decided on a traditional codex book, but to explore and deconstruct that form by looking at its parts and qualities and researching and writing short texts about those parts. Their meta-text was then placed in the book where the pieces described would usually go. For research, writing, and typesetting the class was divided into pairs (it was a large class—24 students) based on what parts or subjects they were interested in researching. They were given total license as to what their text would be and what information it would contain. As you can see in the book above, some of the texts are straightforward descriptions, while others are poems or “notes” from the book itself. After the text was written, they set it in lead type, and then we printed the book in teams of four, working in shifts over a two day period. Yesterday afternoon we all got together and did the binding as a group.

Because the class was the history and future of the book, we also decided to add a digital component to the project, shown above. So the book exists both as a limited edition letterpress book and as a theoretically infinite edition, readable, shareable, and downloadable ebook.

Enjoy!

KNOWLEDGE/POWER

Open publication - Free publishing - More artists books

INFORMATION!

OUR NEW MASCOT

ENRICH YOUR LIFE! WITH LETTERPRESS!

Over the summer The Press participated in the Enrich Your Life Workshop series, which is run through the Summer Session programs here at CC. We had a two-day workshop over a weekend, open to anyone—we even had one person come from western Colorado to take it.

The workshop was conceived of as being for absolute beginners, so we needed to cover all of the basics: history and context, hand typesetting, and how to set up and print on the presses. And of course we wanted it to be as hands-on as possible, with the students being engaged in the making of a finished piece.

This broadside, from a similar workshop done at the beginning of the Press’s existence, was hanging in the display case outside of our front door:

and it became the model for what we did. The students were divided into teams of two. Each group wrote a pangram: a text containing every letter of the alphabet. One of the most well known pangrams, often used for type specimens, is: “The quick, brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.” Then each group chose a typeface, and set the name of the face in caps, all of the lowercase letters in order, and then their pangram. One group added the figures in order to make their spacing/arrangement better.

After all of the type was set and proofed, each group worked on designs for the broadside, potentially incorporating images from blocks we had around the studio, and/or a title in wood type. After each group had a design we all looked at them together and came to a consensus. Then we chose paper and ink colors.

Day 2 was production day, where we set up the presses and ran both colors. Our 219 and Universal III are the same size, so we used those, which also gave everyone the opportunity to print on both an automatic and a hand-cranked press.

Setting up and printing went really smoothly, and we ended up with a really great looking type specimen broadside:

And at the end everyone signed every copy.

Teaching workshops is so much fun—there’s no academic pressure, no grading or evaluation, and every student is there because they are genuinely interested. This particular workshop was so much fun and so successful—we will definitely be doing more in the future, so stay tuned!

BOOK & BOOK STRUCTURE (5)

After the big push on final projects, we ended the class with, of course, an exhibition and party.  The Art Dept. here at CC has a nice tradition of holding informal exhibitions of all the student work from the various classes on the last Tuesday of every block, with a reception from 4 – 6 PM. So we got to participate in those events as well. The images below show some of the final projects (which was, essentially, an open project) and some shots from the show.