THE PRESS ON BOOK TV

The Press at CC was featured as a part of C-SPAN2 Book TV's Cities Tour. They produced a whole show exploring literary and historical aspects of Colorado Springs, and The Press was a part of it. The class in the video is a History FYE (First Year Experience, so these students are brand new to CC), taught by Carol Neel. The image above is just a screenshot, but you can watch the whole video here: http://www.c-span.org/video/?321938-1/press-colorado-college

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!

CULTURE, SOCIETY, AND HISTORY: CULTURES OF THE BOOK (16)

"The Library of Alexandria"
by Alex McConnell & Andrew Salazar

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"The Warring States Period"
by Yuchen Zhao & Will Harris

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"The Story of Boudicca"
by Sonora Miller & Lizzie Hunt

CULTURE, SOCIETY, AND HISTORY: CULTURES OF THE BOOK (13)

"Libraries through History"
by Max Perryman & Linda Jimenez

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"Pokemon and the Classic of Mountains and Seas"
by Catherine Zaumseil & Jeffrey Collett

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"Robin Hood, Through the Ages"
by Rebecca Smith & Peter Elliott

CULTURE, SOCIETY, AND HISTORY: CULTURES OF THE BOOK (10)

"The Book Burning of the First Emperor of the Qin Dynasty"
by Bobby Meller and Mariel Dempster

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The finished piece:




"Dear Scholar, do not be deterred by the complexity of this construction! It may seem at first glance to be confused, muddled, and lacking any sense. But does not time itself look that way when we first peer into its depths? Chaos is the natural state of time, while order is the constructed nature of history. This map, prepared by many hands in intentionally disparate visual styles, seeks to represent that chaos and that order simultaneously. Each of the seven sections, roughly demarcated by the folds of the map, represents a different history of the book in cultures throughout the world. Each image tells a story, and is rendered in exquisite detail in order to help you, brave Reader, inscribe that story into your memory. On the back of every panel is a textual explanation of the image. First, memorize the arrangement of the scenes on the body of the dragon. Then, with the aid of the text, you can commit each scene to memory. After you know each picture by heart and can recall it at will, you are ready, intrepid Voyager, to set sail on the turbulent seas of time. Go forth, daring Champion of History! You carry the light that guides us home."



The title panel. When the map is folded up, this is on the front.


The "How To Use This Map" inset, which is part of the large title panel on the image side. This is the text that begins this post.


And the colophon. When the map is folded up, this is on the back.

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And fold,


and stack,


and food.

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And then we went to press.

The total size of the map was fairly large (20” x 27.5”) so we printed it on our giant press, the Vandercook Universal 4. Each pair of students came in to print together, in 2 hour shifts. The runs were arranged in logical printing order (light to dark), so each group of students were responsible for more than just their image and type—everybody contributed directly to the whole piece.

The press is 30” across the grippers (which is the long side on this model) so feeding was done by two people at a time.









And we had one “master printer” on the end, pulling the sheets and checking the ink levels.


Despite the size of the sheets, the fact that this was the first time the press had been used in a while, and that this was the first class project that I oversaw here, the printing went pretty smoothly.

There were, of course, a few minor mishaps, but nothing we couldn’t handle….


Gradually everything built up into an (almost) finished piece.

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From the beginning of the project we planned on printing the images with photopolymer plates. But as we drew closer to going to press, we decided to make the images 2 colors. The line art that the students initially made would be the key color (black), and then we would add a second color to provide contrast and make the images pop a bit more. In most cases, the second color was essentially solid fills in certain areas of the image.

One of the problems with using polymer plates with a beginner group is that it tends to make the process of image-making for the press very abstract—they make a picture, the picture goes into the computer, becomes a film, and then they push some buttons on the platemaker and out comes a plate. (We didn’t have the time or resources to allow them to experiment and possibly fail with the plates, so I took care of the digital pre-press and supervised the making of every plate. Which is a shame, because as one of the professors of the class, Carol Neel, said several times, “Learning is making mistakes.”) The “abstraction” of the plate technology tends to eliminate a hands-on engagement with the material aspects of making/printing, and the whole point of this project was to provide a hands-on engagement. But the speed and ease of the plates was also necessary, so what to do? Analog platemaking!

For the second color, instead of making digital films, I had them cut rubylith stencils from print-outs of their final image files. Rubylith is very straightforward and easy to use, but most of them struggled with it—they weren’t used to cutting gently with a Xacto knife (if they had used a Xacto knife at all), and they also weren’t used to thinking in reverse to make the negative (they had to cut away the section where they wanted the second color to be).

[I wish I had picture of this step, but I don’t. My apologies.]

In the end, using the Rubylith was successful, and I think that the students got a better understanding of, and appreciation for, the plates than if we had done it entirely in the computer.

And at that point we were ready to start printing.

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Each group wrote texts to go with their images, to provide background information about their subject and to explain how their image represented that information. Due to space and time constraints, we set a limit of 150 words. After some proofreading and revisions they began to set their text in lead type. Each group used a standard line length of 35 picas (because they all had to fit in the same amount of space) but each group chose their own typeface, in either 12 or 14 pt. Then they began to set, and of course when you have that many beginners all setting at once, and a teacher still figuring out the studio that they are working in, interesting problems arise. One group, writing about the Warring States Period in China, ran out of capital Q’s (the word Qin was used repeatedly in their text). We did some rewriting around the capital Q, but it wasn’t quite enough to get us all the way through. They were something like 2 or 3 lines away from the end, so we just decided that we would print the first section, then reset, and print the second part. Had I known at the time that we would be doing that resetting at 10 PM, after a full day of printing, I may not have been so keen to suggest it. But I’m learning a lot too, mainly about logistics.

Some interesting solutions also came up:




That one made me particularly happy.

One of the fascinating things about teaching a process this particular and specialized is that you get to see each student’s personality emerge in their relationship to the process. Some are hurried and frantic. Some are careless and easily distracted. Others are intently focused on getting it right. Calm, quiet, stressed, chatty—each person sets type in a different way.

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After we had the general plan for the project together, the next step was for the pairs to choose a specific topic (something that we covered in class that they wanted to learn more about) and begin researching it. After they had gathered information, they needed to do two things: 1) construct a visual representation of the information that they wanted to communicate, and 2) write a textual explanation of their topic and image.

The process of making the images was interesting and challenging, as the majority of the students (all but one, really) had little or no experience with art and design. I told them to use whatever methods that they felt comfortable with—drawing, collage (analog or digital), tracing, etc. Most of the groups ended up using a combination of those three methods. Some used an entirely digital collage approach, and one pair drew their image entirely by hand.

The images that follow are the scans of the originals that the students turned in.


"The Library of Alexandria," by Alex McConnell & Andrew Salazar


"The Warring States Period," by Yuchen Zhao & Will Harris

"The Story of Boudicca," by Sonora Miller & Lizzie Hunt

"Libraries Through History," by Max Perryman & Linda Jimenez

"Pokemon and The Classic of Mountians and Seas," by Catherine Zaumseil & Jeffrey Collett


"Robin Hood, Through the Ages," by Rebecca Smith & Peter Elliott

"The Book Burning of the First Emperor of the Qin Dynasty," by Bobby Meller & Mariel Dempster