Monthly Archives: September 2016

Exhibition Exchange

Another part of this Matariki exchange has been the exchange of exhibits between Dartmouth College and the University of Otago. As I write this post, the University of Otago Printer in Residence exhibit is going up at Dartmouth College.

While I was in Dunedin the Dartmouth College Book Arts Workshop exhibit focusing on the  25th anniversary its opening  went up. It is called “A Letterpress Legacy”. It was interesting to see how Donald and Romilly worked with the materials and information from our 25th anniversary exhibit, that we displayed in March of 2014. The exhibit shows a lot of different projects printed and bound by students and community members throughout the years at the Book Arts Workshop. SOme projects were done as part of a curricular class, some in workshops and some just for fun and interest. Donald and Romilly tracked down and emailed students and recent alums and from long ago to learn about their experiences in the Book Arts Workshop (and Graphic Arts Workshop before 1970). The results were exhibit captions with intriguing backstories and fascinating personal accounts to go with the items that people have made over the years.

The exhibit space is a very different kind of space than our space at Dartmouth. Our space is very grand and public—very prominently located in Baker Library’s main hall. But because it’s a very public space it can be difficult to linger over text. The University of Otago’s Special Collection space however is a bit quieter. It is still a public space in the Central Library and everyone is encouraged to visit, but it is more removed from the main entry and thourough fares of the library. It is also somewhat enclosed. This makes it a contemplative space, where spending time with items on display and accompanying text is easy to do.

 

This is the large poster/banner leading viewers up the stairs in the library to Special Collections and the exhibit. The image is from an old woodcut of Dartmouth Hall that someone (presumably a student) made years ago. I wish we knew who did it, but it makes for a great image for advertising the exhibit.

IMG_1247IMG_1146

 

Putting up the big banner in the exhibit.

IMG_1149IMG_1162

IMG_1168

Along with the nice deep cases, there are drawers viewers can pull open to find more items on display.

IMG_1231IMG_1193

 

This is the view of the exhibition space and Special Collections as you walk in the door. Notice the manikin on the table to the left. She is left over from an exhibit about fashion and now is a fixture in the space. We decided she needed a Dartmouth t shirt.

IMG_1675IMG_1372

IMG_1169IMG_1173

IMG_1191IMG_1223

IMG_1167 IMG_1166

IMG_1359IMG_1192

Of course the opening reception for the show was yet another opportunity for speeches. Looks like I’m talking to myself here, but I swear there were people there listening.

IMG_1228

The reception was well attended by some of my favorite people. Here is Lyle Hanton the head of the chemistry department and an avid book collector. Enjoying a glass of wine with Lyle is Romilly Smith, Donald’s assistant in Special Collections. She is a bookbinder as well as fabulous exhibit designer and researcher.

IMG_1230

I even ran into Marion Mertens, who worked—a few years before me—at the same conservation lab where I worked as a book conservator back in Massachusetts. Funny to have to go all the way to New Zealand to meet her!

IMG_1226

 

 

Wayzgoose!

To celebrate the completion of our book we had a wayzgoose. According to Wikipedia (I know I should use better sources), “a wayzgoose was at one time an entertainment given by a master printer to his workmen each year on or about St Bartholomew’s Day (24 August). It marked the traditional end of summer and the start of the season of working by candlelight. Later, the word came to refer to an annual outing and dinner for the staff of a printing works or the printers on a newspaper.” A wayzgoose is also a celebration for the completion of a big project—kind of like an opening reception for an exhibit. Our wayzgoose was held in the afternoon with nice wine and nibbles in the beautiful library staff room. Here are some photos.

IMG_1668

IMG_1670

Of course there were more opportunity for speeches—including from me.

IMG_1665

I was so happy to meet and talk with Margery Blackman, author of the book “Dorothy Theomin of Olveston” Dorothy Theomin was a prominent Dunedin resident and climber of mountains. She made regular excursions to the Southern Alps and Mt Cook around the same time Freda Du Faur did.

IMG_1669

Are here’s the three collaborators! Rhian, me and Lynn.

IMG_1671

Printing Done

Printing the text and images for our book is now done! Lynn and I finished up on Wednesday late afternoon and then went right over to the Cook (Captain Cook’s Hotel—pub) for schitzel and blue cod.

IMG_1189IMG_1182 IMG_1184 IMG_1183IMG_1185 IMG_1186 IMG_1199

Now the book is with Don Tobin and the gang at University Binders.

IMG_1205 IMG_1207

We have quite a bit of cleaning up to do, but in the mean time I’m sneaking in a bit of fun with the wood type and maybe some printer’s cuts and ornaments. Definitely spending some time with the Columbian Press!

IMG_1239 IMG_1236 IMG_1324 IMG_1235

IMG_1363

We had a great tour with Chris Smith at the Anatomy Museum, which is part of the Medical School at University of Otago. He showed us some boxes he found in the collection full of printing plates from medical journals. I suggested I try printing one of them to see what he had. This is the result. So very cool with so much potential for future projects! I think Lynn will take these images and do something fantastic with them soon.

IMG_1365

Inking

There have been a few aspects to this project that have been tricky. Working in a new place far from home, collaborating with new people  and using unfamiliar equipment are a few things that caused a bit of anxiety—and excitement before I arrived here. A few weeks before I set out, I was looking at photos of the Otakou Press room and the equipment. I looked at them before, but somehow I had missed the fact that the Vandercook #4 had no rollers. I emailed Donald to ask about the press. He confirmed that the rollers and inking system had been removed a while ago and that many printers he knew preferred hand inking for better control. My anxiety increased.

I’ve used a number of different models of Vandercooks and done a lot of tricky printing, but I haven’t hand inked blocks of text in small type. The prints I’ve hand inked  before were usually with larger than 12 point type and with designs that were a somewhat loose or that made use of imperfections. It would have probably been a good idea to design our book in a similar way, so there wouldn’t be too much pressure to be precise with the inking. However, Rhian’s poems and Freda Du Faur’s story didn’t seem to lend themselves well to wild typographic or inking experiments.

So onward I went, determined to get this right and not embarrass myself. And now I’m telling you all about my trials and errors. So much for not embarrassing myself I guess.

IMG_0670IMG_0990

In an earlier post I mentioned that the titles of the poems would be gray, while the poems themselves would be black. “What a great idea!” I said at the time. “Why not make twice as much work for myself!” Usually each color in a print is printed separately. I often have students wanting to take a “short cut” by hand inking separate colors in one run. I always tell them they’ll be sorry and it’ll end up making more work as they try to be super careful with their inking. For some reason all that left my head when starting to print this project. With the time crunch I felt like printing both colors at the same time would be better. Here’s a video of how that went.

Using roller bearers—strips of type high metal or wood—to support the roller as it goes over the type would have helped me have much more even inking. That would have been great if I was using a roller wide enough to be supported outside the paper area. But with the smaller rollers (and the one I ended up using was still pretty big) and the large paper area, there was no way to avoid making marks on the paper if I used roller bearers. I thought about putting them in for inking and taking them out for printing, but that would have been too fiddley. So no roller bearers.

The roller I’m using in the video is one I brought from Dartmouth. At first it was working great and it’s lighter than the one already in the print room. Eventually though, I realized it wasn’t working so well after all. Seemed like the rubber was too slick and maybe glazed, so the ink wasn’t distributing well. When I switched to the heavy, freshly covered one—nice fresh rubber—it was much better.

Still, wiping the black ink off the titles was slow and way too fussy. It was also impossible to clean the black all the way off (or to ink so carefully as to avoid the title type all together. So eventually I smartened up and printed the black and gray separately—like I knew I should have from the beginning! This didn’t make the process go any quicker, or slower really—just less irritating and more successful.

I didn’t get any video of me inking up the poems in black, but here’s the titles being inked.

I also changed a bit of my technique in that I charged the roller (got more ink on the roller)more often. I found that many passes in different directions—around 4 passes with maybe extra attention on problem areas—with thinner layers of ink worked best. By the last poems the inking was looking great!

Here’s a couple of the early attempts

IMG_1014IMG_1059

An one of the later ones.

IMG_1141

IMG_1129

The whole process was a good experience. I certainly learned a lot and managed to print the text for 120 books.