Maize Jenny Pawed a Studio

There's a scene I remember from a Monty Python movie – possibly The Meaning of Life -- where Death has shown up at a door of a house where some British folks are entertaining guests from Gringoland. Death is there to do a job but he's been mistaken for one of the local rustics, and thus ends up at the table with the Brits & the Gringos.
     Something about the Gringos pisses Death off so much that he finally speaks, saying something like "You Americans are all so bloody pompous!"
     As a Gringo and as a person who has lived in what could be called Third World societies, I think I know what Death in the movie was talking about.

There's a certain kind of self-absorbed, petty, puerile, self-aggrandizing sense of self-importance that hangs over many Gringos. It also is part and parcel of most cultures in that there's always somebody who thinks that what he or she does is the most damned important thing on the planet, even if it is nothing but changing the bed linen in a $20-a-night motel off some rural state route. Even if Buddha says that all work is important.
     Sometimes this is to be expected. Everybody wants their presence on the planet to be part of the grand cosmic plan. Everybody likes to feel that they have some kind of value to the ongoing process of the universe. It comes with the frontal lobe.
     On the other hand there are some who look at what little they know about something artsy and see themselves as artists. From graphic artist  I suppose. Thus such artists figure that they don't have a shop or a business. They have a studio. Like a letterpress studio. You know. You've seen 'em. You might even know somebody who has one. Hell, you might even have one your own self, bein' an artist and all.

A studio.

Now somewhere in the deep past there might have been a time where a printer's digs were connected with the art  of making something out of colored materials and paper. Like the artistry in a page of illuminated text from a hand-copied book. That kind of art. And it would make sense anyway, going on what other languages say about print shops.
     L'atelier in French, for example, is a word that can be translated into an artist's "studio," except that it also means shop as in work shop. Or printery.
     In Spanish it's taller and means the same things as the French word from which it is obviously derived.
     So I have an atelier, although I'd be hard pressed even on a good day to call it a "studio" because I do arty stuff in there. And when I talk about the shop in Spanish I always call it el taller.
     Es un taller, my shop.
     But it ain't no studio, see?
     I don't look at it as some sort of space with big windows letting in the sunlight so that my sense of color and tint may regale itself in the beauty of what's smeared and rolled out across the ink disk. Even if that does look a lot less like the catacomb place in the garage that I presently share with my wife's car.

Simple put, it's a print shop, not a pompous little studio.

I bring all this up because I had a conversation with a friend in Michigan who told me that I would never be a hip sort of printer smashing expensive type into expensive paper because I didn't have a studio. I asked him if he was still calling his type casting operation a type foundry.
     Neither of us could come up with a good word to explain that, at least in English.
     See, the whole thing about a studio versus a print shop or whatever is how the word shop shows up in French & Spanish, which might explain where nominally monolingual Gringos would misinterpret something and call a print shop a studio.
     In the long-back there was a word in French for shop. L'atalier, as previously noted. It shows up in English since about 1840, at which time it was where the artist hung out, although it's got a more down-to-earth meaning (as in: work shop ) by about 1890.
     For those less pompous the word taller is used in Spanish to name auto garages where you'd get your car fixed. Or a place where you show up for work. And given that my printery is now seriously in the garage – as opposed to behind a wall in the garage building – I'd be tempted to get snooty enough about it to say that I had un taller by the Spanish definition.

But un taller does not a studio make. Not even in French.

Having thus gotten this far, I might mention that what I enjoy most about letterpress printing, other than the huge amounts of time that I can waste out there en el taller just cleaning up, is the joy of being able to do something so completely mechanical to the end of producing algo tan artistico.
     I can't think of anything more studio-ish.
     But I am not in the mood to have a studio if having a studio means that I have lost all contact with the grapheme in a wild misunderstanding of what letterpress is all about.
     See, I look at what letterpress does as a part of a grapheme-ordered communications system that reaches back to cuneiform, if not before. Letterpress finds its most beautiful example in the graven images of Egyptian hieroglyphs and eventually gets to hand-copied, illuminated pages before showing up at Gutenberg's type-founding atelier millennia later. And to me that's the beauty of it, a beauty that, for all of the artsy stuff involved, does not come out of a studio like a painting of a sunset or a can of soup.
     Printing is an ancient tradition of communication using graphemes to represent sound. I don't see that happening in a studio because human speech doesn't happen in a studio and because the communication of ideas is itself outside of locus. I don't talk or think or write from a studio. I don't read in a studio, although I may study what I read. My changing of speech sounds to graphemes be no different.
     I have a print shop, not a studio, even if Buddha does say that all work is important or that I might be an artist. Unless you want to take the tack that everyone is an artist in that they manage, in some form or the other, to create themselves out of experience and education and never truly finish that evolution until they snuff it, at which point they become memories, which in themselves can be creative, which goes to the failure of coincidence thing again . . .
 

Where the Hell Did You Learn That?!

One of the first memories I have of my father & his print shop is standing in front of his press, staring at the treadle. I remember this most easily because I had been told early on in life to leave Dad's stuff alone. Get hurt. Lose fingers. But I also remember one day in Indianapolis when I got snagged by the neighbor's rose bush by the fence and thought "If I just slip my hand away contrary to the way I was moving, it won't hurt." So at some point I stood in front of that press and thought that it would be easy to push the treadle as long as I didn't put my fingers anywhere near the rest of the mechanism.
     So I did it. I put my foot on the treadle and, since the treadle was at the bottom of its movement relative to the press, nothing happened.
     I remember smiling.
     And I remember ratting myself out to Dad later on – maybe a few days later – and not catching hell for it. From that it's quite easy for me to understand how that moment became one of the first memories I have of my father's shop.
     The next real memory I have is having learned at some point early on how to hold a composing stick. I think there might have been a lay-of-the-case lesson in there somewhere, but the proper way of holding the stick is a solid memory.
     After that we get to the lesson of how to lock up a form in the chase, even if it's a linoleum block or maybe a couple lines of type. That memory is solid because it's associated with my wanting to have a business card like the character Paladin had in the television western Have Gun, Will Travel. To that end I had carved a lino cut of the chess piece on the card and then, having printed that, setting the words in type, followed by the lesson about locking up the form.
     As general knowledge this information was stored in memory by the reinforcement of having pilfered my way through some composition for a business card that I printed, first for a now-defunct and then barely-existent jazz band, and later for a hippie Indian music "group" that I'd formed in a moment of considerable petrification.
     So let's just say that I learned enough early on to print on my own and not pinch my fingers. And that I had this knowledge stuffed away somewhere when, after Dad died, I started reconnecting myself with a piece of his past that I could keep alive in me. But it was not a single-handed venture at all. Years in college and years of time spent keeping up with the rest of the planet long before had made a book-reader of me. And I can easily credit my mother most with that, since she taught my sister and me to read before we got to kindergarten age.

I remember at some point in the process of setting type for the jazz band thinking "There's got to be some kind of reference book around here." It only made sense at the time because Dad was a collector of books and reference books in particular. He had two or three dictionaries, a couple thesauri, a book on rhetoric & a few other word and language-related books. I couldn't imagine that he wouldn't have a book on printing around as well. But all my searches and all the cobwebs I pulled out of my then resplendent mane proved fruitless.
     "Papa i no got buk tasol," as they say in Tok Pijin.
     Thus, when it was time for me to re-establish my understanding of the art of printing and thus keep my father's memory most alive in me, I turned again to the world of reference material and found The Practice of Printing by Ralph W. Polk in the university library. I checked the book out on the usual thirty days allowed faculty & staff and then renewed that check out another couple weeks.
     Everything in the book was familiar territory to me: the composing stick, the lock up, the press parts, the strings around the forms and the proper use of furniture, leading, quoins, gauge pins, tympan paper, make-ready, all of it. What I knew about but didn't know I learned from that book and all the while it was as if my father were standing there behind me urging me on, reminding me of this or that signature moment in whatever memories I revived.
     I must have gotten pretty good at it, 'cause it just worked out so well. Over the course of the next ten or twelve years I managed to get high honors and awards from the two amateur press and hobby printer organizations to which I held membership. I got awards for writing and overall excellence on what was, in the end, a one-off sort of ephemera that will clutter a special collection somewhere after I've snuffed it.

My reset of the print shop clock dates back now nearly 25 years. Since that time and up to the present, every lesson I learned from my father, from books and from others in the printing game has made absolute sense.
     Physics is a very broad discipline and its laws and rules and theories cover all the bases. You cannot expect things to stay in place if you only smash 'em together with one clamp. You cannot expect things to not wear down if you don't provide enough lubrication or isolation of parts rubbing together. You cannot print well if you don't lock up the form correctly, pay attention to how you hold the composing stick or perform other actions that prove a serious flaw in research or learning.

Así la vida. Such is life, as Dad said. That's the way it plays.

Prior to a recent discovery I did not know that letterpress was still interesting to anyone. Prior to that recent discovery I did not know that there are younger folks interested in this as a hobby – or, perhaps more importantly, as a business – and from that ignorance comes a huge lesson. It's a lesson that reinforces what I know and what my father taught me about setting up a job and getting it on the press and off again. The lesson comes down to a simple question:

Who the hell is teaching these people?

Look at the picture stolen off page 106 of Practice of Printing. It shows a form locked up in a chase. It's noted as the way to lock up a two column form. The same rules of locking up a single column or one line of type or a lino block of a chess piece. You'll notice that there are quoins on two sides, confirming the existence of a simple law of physic having to do with squeezing stuff so it don't fall out of the chase.
     Now look at the next picture. It's a picture off the web, off a website that claims allegiance to letterpress printing. It's almost the same form that is shown in a video where the presenter shows how to set type in the stick and how to lock the form up in a chase. And we'll get to the other problems in that video (and subsequent pictures on a web site) later. For right now let's just say that this picture is a fine example of a bad lock up.
     See, the laws of physics say that the form shown is going to spring. The only tension holding the few lines of type in the chase – and notice they're all different lengths – is one quoin. Just one.
     Now the way I was taught, a form is square first and tight second. If you start out setting in 20 picas and you have 10 picas full of copy and it needs to be centered, quad the line out until it's tight. Then the next line, on a 20 slug, for whatever space it takes and quad that one center. In the picture here, every line appears to be set on its own slug and none of them are square to the rest. It's a ragged looking lock up and, if the press were something more speedy than a Kelsey P, I'd bet the type would come flyin' out of the chase & make interesting noises as it passed through the press to the deck beneath.

Who the hell is teaching these people?

And then there's the packing, which in the next picture you will notice is comprised of the drawsheet paper and nothing more. In other words, the distance between the type and the steel of the platen is whatever micrometer's thickness the drawsheet. Only that and nothing more, Lenore. Only that and nothing more.
     Now I know for a fact that there's supposed to be a chunk of press board in there, mainly 'cause (a) that's the way Dad did it, (b) that's the way I was taught to do it and (c) it says about as much on page 124 of Polk's book. To wit:

"The tympan usually consists of one or two sheets of pressboard, possibly a sheet of tag, and three or four sheets of book paper, under a heavy manila drawsheet. A hard tympan, i.e., one consisting of hard materials, is ordinarily better than tympan of soft packing, as the former gives a sharp, strong impression, without punching the type into the paper. It also causes less wear on the type. The platen should be adjusted for an even impression."

Which is exactly as I was taught and is exactly what was taught – at least until the "revival" of letterpress began, probably upon the death of so many folks who really know how it works – by folks using Ralph Polk's book as well as many other such books from era of letterpress.

So either I'm nuts, the books are wrong or somebody ain't payin' attention. And the question of "Who the hell is teaching these people?" really should be more like "Where the hell did you learn that? with an interrobang on the end. That is, after all, what we're talking about here.
     Somebody ain't doin' the research. There's tons of reference materials out there and nobody seems to either know about 'em or even want to know about 'em. And that leads to horrible violations of the laws of physic and a horrible break in the continuation of an artform that has for a long time recognized the need for a vigilance toward the laws of physics.
     In order to dispel any further contention that I am a snooty old man stubborn to the extreme, let me say right now that I am simply trying to point out what I have seen as error on the part of some folks who went to the trouble of putting a helluvalot of effort into their web space and youtube.com space where such effort would be best served (if not better served) if they'd put some research time into how letterpress printing is supposed to work.
     If this makes me a snooty old man stubborn to the extreme, tough.
     And this is not to say that I am the pope. Like all monkeys with frontal lobes I do make mistakes and I have done shitty work. I have misspelled, misspoken and crushed my share of type. And not wanting to sound like Jimmy Swaggart, I will admit freely here and now that "I have sinned before yewwww!" Y-e-dubya!
     It is to say that if you want to do something, you have a fifty-fifty shot.
     You can either do a full ass job or a half ass job. And from what I've seen in my recent explorations of what is supposed to be a "revival" of letterpress printing and interest in such is pretty scary. Almost as scary as a half ass job.
     So here's that book title again: The Practice of Printing, Ralph W. Polk, 1959. You can buy it online as noted or you can search it on Abebooks.com and/or Alibris.com.
     Also from the Polk brothers is Elementary Platen Presswork
     There's also this 'n, a bit more recent and, since the author does show a proper lockup on the visible pages, probably a good way to start in PostModernist stylee, Letterpress: New Applications for Traditional Skills, David Jury.
     Or you could find a copy of Practice of Presswork by Craig Spicher, 1929. That's if you order today. It may not be available in a couple days hence. I might even buy it. Have two copies that way.
     An interesting side note to Spicher's book is the fact that it was Linotype/Intertype cast, at least as evidenced by a huge pile of text that stops on one page and continues elsewhere. Once you get past that, it's still a very reasonable how-to & should at least be read if not bought for your library.
     And last but not least, there's Printshop Practice by Loomis.

If that ain't enough to get the point across I don't know what'll set the record straight. The way I was taught and the way I learned it and the way I relearned it – and all my experience from handset through the three-magazine Intertype machine that I ran for a while says that what I saw on the InterWeb is wrong. And those who are working like this cannot, in good faith or honesty, call themselves printers.
     And for all my mistakes and sloppy work, I will snuff it some day proud to have been taught what I do know by a man who did the work for a long time before he got into hard-core journalism, that kind of journalism that's three or floors up and two hallways away from the composing room or the pressroom. And that man, my father, even to his last days, was a printer. He was a printer and I'm just tagging along.
 

The Challenge of Art to Psychology

Last rant ago I mentioned that Dad & Mom had tried to put together and publish on a regular basis a little magazine about arts & crafts. It was a hard haul for them, I'd guess, because the first such venture, Tagalong, didn't get past the second year. The second such try, when we'd moved from Amarillo to Indianapolis, also died a short time after re-entry into the arts & crafts world. That second attempt, The Hobby Shopper, was less print-oriented and more general in scope. The few issues that I have from that time had columns worth of classified advertising, much more than the Texas attempt had had.
     I think it'd be safe to venture that the post-WWII world was not quite yet up to speed on arts & crafts as a general activity for the average white American family. Those who were involved in it had other sources of income that allowed for what today would probably be the "Martha Stewart" school of pastimery. To be sure, the print shop was a hobby shop for Dad but it also made a few shekels on the side. The "little magazine" movement was tempting but the realities were something else entirely.

Today I suspect that things are not much different, even with all the TV shows about home-making & crafts & the sorts of busy-hands activities that someone in the broadcast industry thinks will pull in the viewers. Those involved in making money off arts & crafts items seem to put in a lot of overtime just making sure the buying public knows the stuff is out there.
     And then there is the so-called "Arts & Crafts" movement, the tip of which iceberg I noticed when I came across the Arts & Crafts Press, publishers of The Tabby, the "Chronicle of the Arts & Crafts Movement."
     About six lines into discovering that it costs $65 for a year's subscription to The Tabby, I realized that my parents' attempts at getting into the arts & crafts publishing business was another case of being born too soon. Obviously, and considering that they'd have to give up their day jobs to do it, they would have flourished at least enough to pay their own bills with today's InterWeb allowing people to discover online that which they would pay good money for to read off line.
     No, that's not a note of sarcasm.
     It's a note of reality.
     The reality lies in the obvious amount of time that obviously goes into producing The Tabby. One does not do nouveau arte deco with the colors and typography on the cover (shown above) without some serious time in the linoleum block/wood block engraving room with an order of color separations on the side. All that and the temptation to believe that the journal is printed letterpress (or maybe at least the cover) makes me remember the huge amount of time that my parents spent on just trying to get their dreams running.
     The simple realities of my parents' experience, I am sure, drove Mom to go back to grade school teaching and the eventual masters in education which helped pay the bills and allowed my father to get out of printing the "hits list" for his employer's radio station. And even then I know that Dad did odd job printing for other folks with whom he was acquainted. Lawyers, doctors, city officials & the like.

Doing go-it-alone publishing is a killer & whoever goes into it – at least with my parents' lives as witness – should be ready for the interminably long late night hours, the constant attempts at cutting costs without cutting quality and a damn big pile of money growing somewhere to make it all worthwhile. Or to put it another way: if it's too much like real work, it's an enterprise best left to the gifted, wealthy or those blessed with a nearly limitless supply of caffeine or crystal meth.
     Falling well outside those limits as I do, you can bet I'll never get involved, even if I have spent weeks and hours hand-setting & printing a twenty-four page whatnot for a printers' hobby organizations "bundle."
     Sure, it'd be sweet to have a regular publishing bit to run off as proof that I am among the gifted, even if it were obvious that I ain't wealthy. And I've had enough experience with caffeine and crystal meth to know better.

Thus I am in awe at "The Arts & Crafts Movement" while at the same time envious of them what are able to involve themselves in it enough to make money off it.
     It would be nice – and probably run if it weren't such a job – to produce, as I have often before for hobby printers outfits, some trifle of a few dozen pages that would elicit joy or a smile or a laugh or a shake of the head from some reader who, unlike the putative readers of blogs, would take joy from the reading. Be sweet, actually.
     I suspect, however, that most of the stuff goes into the various "bundles" of hobby printers' and "amateur journalism" organizations' monthly mailings goes directly from the top of the desk into the recycled paper bin without too much more than a passing of the hand across the sheet. There are only so many joke cards or business cards of four page flimsies that one can collect and tolerate in the domestic environment. A couple years' worth of "bundles" is a huge pile of real estate and a considerable weight. And for as much of a hoarder as I can be (with 18 radios in one room & ten domestic cats running about la estancia) there is only so much ephemera I can handle at one time.
     This should make it pretty clear that, while I do enjoy thinking that what I write and print is appreciated deeply over time, I am hip enough to my own assay of the way things work to know better. As I have said elsewhere, I ain't an artist. I don't live in an artists' commune with artists and I am not surrounded by artists sipping mint tea on the front porch while clove cigarettes smolder in the ash tray.
     Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe art doesn't have to do anything. It just is, man.
     Or not.
     Probably or not.
     All of this cogitation brings us back to a very simple problem, one that has been explored again and again over the course of human investigations into consciousness. As Lev Vygotsky so quickly noted, art is a challenge to psychology. Art stands in the doorway and blocks the smell of the passing trains. It gets in the way of perfectly hideous waste by giving us sunsets and people sitting on the grass with a Victorian picnic. It gives us literature and statues and even printing presses. And it serves no other purpose, in which state it does posit a direct affront by its place in human consciousness.
     And for the life of me I can't figure out what's wrong with that any more than I can figure out why I enjoy printing stuff with old metal type, even if the stuff is something I consider slightly less brilliant than my ruminations in blogolandia. Not that anyone else is gonna notice.
     And yeah, that is a "gimme."
 

Re-Entry

The irony is not missed on me. I'm starting a blog – one of many such blogs – about a printing technology that everyone thought would disappear with the advent of dirt cheap and graphically ugly computer graphics. For those not schooled in the mysteries, this is a blog about my relationship with old-fashioned, hand-set type, a collection of cast iron printing presses and all the accouterments of a supposedly by-gone era.
     And for those unschooled in the irony, it has already struck me strange that I am blogging on a computer keyboard – which affords me limitless "virtual" type and paper – about having limited amounts of type and an ever-more expensive source of paper. But that's what this is and this is the first posting.

Suffice it to say that my childhood knew very few moments when there was not some sort of printing press in the house. A picture of me at the age of two with my father, George Bull Young, in his printery serves as evidence of that. I like to say that at some point he dipped my hands in ink and thus bound me to a servitude from which I have never yet successfully escaped.
     Because of that baptism I have always been close to the printed word and from that to the word. Early on I became interested in language, probably because my parents both came from bilingual & immigrant backgrounds. Between what I know about linguistics and what I know about the mindness state and what I know about how type & paper affect the way we understand the grapheme & text, it probably makes sense that I would carry on my father's tradition.
     Dad maintained until near his death the myth that he had learned printing from his father. The truth was, his father was a cobbler – and a violent, belligerent drunk – and it's likely that Dad picked up the trade because he needed a job and a relative with a local newspaper showed him how it all worked.
     Work was the main reason Dad set up the printery. He started out doing the usual job work on the side: business cards, stationery, multiple copies of letters that someone thought should look like they were typed. At some point Dad fell into the delusion of publishing a "little magazine" and chapbooks. He managed a few copies of Tagalong in Amarillo before recognizing how much work it took out of his day after a regular day at work. When we lived in Indianapolis, he and Mom tried to get The Hobby Shopper off the ground but it also dropped out of existence. When we moved to Dayton, Dad tried for a time to print the "hits list" for a local radio station but it became so horribly time-consuming that he was eventually asked to stop.
     During all of this time Dad always had a regular job. He'd gotten into the radio news business after the war and, except for the time he worked at the newspaper in Indianapolis – which was also part of one of the local radio stations – he was a radio newsman all day long. In 1964, when the sound of radio was starting its plunge to today's shock-jock, teenage-prankster, loud-mouth punditry, Dad was let go from the local radio station and, for a while, worked in the printshop of a local Roman Catholic university. Then he got a job as a newspaper journalist with a weekly newspaper and sneaked himself back into heaven.

There is something more substantially creative and satisfying about newspaper work. One way or the other it's always about an elevated presence. What the reporter writes and what the ad salesman puts into print hangs around the house for days. There's a sense of permanence even beyond that in the way that written information seems to live a lot longer in memory than the everyday chatter of what's on the radio today.
     It is perhaps that which gave my father the greatest joy: the sense that he would be here even after the door closed and the press had been cleaned up for the night. He came to believe in the printed word very early, I would guess, and it was his constant companion until his last days. And while his voice may still be out in the cosmos as modulation on an electromagnetic wave, his writing and the lessons that I got from his print shop will remain here as long as I'm breathing.

I'll admit straight out that there is a certain egoism in starting a blog, and this blog, despite my tip of the hat to ancestry and custom, is surely as full of egoboo as anything else I might do.
     In the interim this blog will sporadically recount the stories of the press and of the amounts of time and money that I spend pushing it all together. And if it also gets me out there in the shop more often – especially if I go out there and do nothing more than clean up and dust – it will be good enough for me.