THE 2013 DELUGE OF AWESOMENESS SALE!!!

UPDATE: The full sale of all NewLights Press items ended on Monday, 10/14/13, but the flood broadsides shown below will continue to be sold, and all of the money from those will continue to be donated. The sale has been successful. Thank you to everyone who participated & supported.
 

The floods that ravaged the state of Colorado a few weeks ago were widely reported in the news. The waters have since receded, and the headlines are focused on other matters. But the work of rebuilding and mitigating future disasters is long and arduous, and help is still needed. The recent, massive wildfires across the state have left many areas extremely vulnerable to flooding, and it will likely be decades until the burn scars return to normal, with vegetation that can hold the soil together and ground that can absorb water.

Always the question: What can we do? Always the answer: What we do. 

So in that spirit the NewLights Press is excited to announce the 2013 DELUGE OF AWESOMENESS SALE. For the next four days, until 12 AM on Monday, 10/14/13, all money from the sales of any NewLights Press item will be donated to flood relief and mitigation efforts in Colorado, both up north in the Boulder area and here in the Pikes Peak Region.

And of course there is a new, featured item in the sale: a limited edition letterpress printed broadside, written, designed and printed by a group of students at The Press at Colorado College.

2013 Colorado Flood Broadside
by Ashley Johnson, Patrick Lofgren and Katie Smith

Letterpress from lead type, collagraph and linoleum 

Edition of 90 

10.75” x 14.75”

2013

$10

You can view the rest of the available books here and broadsides here.

Thank you for reading, thank you for your help.

BROADSIDE PRE-SALE ENDS THIS WEEK

This Friday, April 15th, 2011, will be the last day that the 2009 - 2011 NewLights Press broadsides will be available for purchase at the pre-sale price of $50 for one, or $220 for the set of five. Click here and scroll down for more info and images.

UPDATE: BROADSIDE PRE-SALE

The pre-sale on the 2009 - 2011 NewLights Press broadsides will be ending on April 15th, 2011. On that date they will go up to full price: $80 for a single broadside and $350 for all five (Sirois, Evenson, Trommer, Iijima, and Yau. The Al-Mutanabbi broadsides are not for sale.). Obviously those are high prices for broadsides (why do broadsides sell for less than prints?), but there is an enormous amount of time sunk into and peeled away from every single copy. For a full documentation of the process, scroll down or click here.

The pre-sale has been going on for a long time, and now the editions are almost to a point where I will have enough complete to readily fill orders.

MEAT COVE, CAPE BRETON

Text by KC Trommer
Letterpress with hand-mechanical printing and delamination
Variable edition of 25
12” x 18”
2011
$200

THE TRAGEDY OF CYMBELINE

Text by Brenda Iijima
Letterpress with hand-mechanical printing and delamination
Variable edition of 25
12” x 18”
2011
$200

ON AL-MUTANABBI

On Al-Mutanabbi
Poem by Justin Sirois
Arabic translation by Haneen Alshujairy
Letterpress with hand-mechanical printing and delamination
Variable edition of 15
12” x 18”
2010
Not For Sale


This poem and broadside were made as part of the Al-Mutanabbi Street Broadside Project. What is the Al-Mutanabbi Street Broadside Project? The official text from the poster:

On March 5, 2007, a car bomb exploded on Al-Mutanabbi Street, the center of bookselling in Baghdad, killing 30 people and wounding 100 others. The Al-Mutanabbi Street Coalition sent out an international call to letterpress printers to craft a visual response that would bring attention to this bombing.

You can read more about the project and see some of the other 130 broadsides here.

A note on process: This broadside was made in essentially the same way as the three described here. The primary difference is how it was delaminated. Instead of removing all of the surrounding paper, 130 different cuts were made into the sheet, and the paper was pulled away for as long as I could keep it intact.

But wait, there’s more: for those of you in the Bay Area, the San Francisco Zen Center will be hosting the first exhibition of all 130 broadsides, and a panel discussion about the project. The info:

Al-Mutanabbi Street Broadside Exhibition
April 2 – May 2
Opening on April 2 at 7:30 PM
300 Page St.
San Francisco
news.sfzc.org

The panel discussion will take place at the SF Zen Center, on April 30th at 7:30 PM.

91% BATTERY POWER REMAINING

Text by Justin Sirois, from the book MLKNG SCKLS
Letterpress with hand-mechanical printing and delamination
Variable edition of 25
12” x 18”
2009
$200

SOUTH OF THE BEAST

Text by Brian Evenson
Letterpress with hand-mechanical printing and delamination
Variable edition of 25
12” x 18”
2009
$200

HOTEL RULES

Text by John Yau
Letterpress with hand-mechanical printing and delamination
Variable edition of 25
12” x 18”
2009
$200

FULL SET OF THE SERIES 1 NEWLIGHTS DELAMINATED BROADSIDES

The complete set of the Series 1 Delaminated Broadsides (2009 - 2011) are available for $900. "91% Battery Power Remaining" by Justin Sirois, "South of the Beast" by Brian Evenson, "Meat Cove, Cape Breton" by KC Trommer, "The Tragedy of Cymbeline" by Brenda Iijima, and "Hotel Rules" by John Yau.

TEXT-OBJECT-PROCESS: IDEATION & DESIGN

Acting on a very good suggestion from Mr. Sirois, I have attempted to thoroughly document the production of these first three broadsides, and it seems appropriate to post those photographs here on the IDE(A/O)(B)LOG(Y/UE) along with a written description of how they were made—or of what went wrong—however you want to look at it.

Whenever I start a new project, I try to think through the common assumptions that we all (or myself mostly) make about certain objects and/or the way that those objects function. When I first thought of doing broadsides, my mind first went to the ones that I have done in the past (for the Dolphin Press at MICA), and to other really nice ones that I have seen. I realized that there were basically two types of broadsides: 1) all text, elegantly composed and typeset, or 2) that same well-composed text plus some sort of “appropriate” image. Sometimes the text and image will be integrated in some way, but usually they are not. There is a long, fine tradition of work of these two types and new, wonderful examples are produced by presses around the world on a regular basis. So no need for me to do that as well.

How then to approach the broadside in a way different than the “text + image” formula? In order to figure out a (provisional, as always) answer I looked at the assumption that the formula rested upon; that is, that the broadside is a two-dimensional, single page expression of a text. Within that basic definition of the broadside there are three separate claims to consider:

1) The text as a thing that exists separately from the broadside itself. That a broadside must have some sort of text—if not, then it’s a print, right? Okay, so we’ll keep the text. Not that I would ever really want to give it up.

2) The broadside is a single page. It could be some sort of diptych or triptych or multi-panel piece, but that seems awkward and is edging towards a book on the wall, and if I am going to make a book, even a two-page one, I do not want to put it on the wall. (But could one go in some sort of Warholian direction with that?) So the single page remains.

3) The broadside is two-dimensional. The strange philosophical/phenomenological distinction between 2D and 3D (both of which do and do not exist in the world, it’s all 4D) is one that I find to be infinitely fruitful. One of the reasons that I find books so fascinating is that they are objects that move continuously between 2D (pages), 3D (the object in total), and 4D (the text-object as experienced in time). So that same idea can be carried into the broadside through a method extrapolated from some of the NewLights altered books—the articulation of a sheet of paper as a three-dimensional object (which it is, and is not) through delamination (cutting into and peeling away the layers of a sheet of paper).

After arriving at that general idea for an approach to the form, the next step was finding the content. I contacted a few different writers whose work I admire, that I have worked with before, and/or who knew and felt connected to my work. Justin, Brian, and John were the first three to answer. I proposed generally what I wanted to do and they sent back pieces that they felt could mesh with the process. When I approach a text with the purpose of deconstructing-actualizing (just thought that combo up) it, I try to locate some point in the text, some nexus or cluster of potential that can be opened up to maximize the meaning-potential of the (never) total object that I intend to make. The key is to access those potential readings in a way that transfers that access and its generative possibilities to the potential readers.

So I constructed a process (which will be explained in full) that simultaneously generates and is generated by the potential objects, that integrates with and runs in contrast to the texts being utilized, that imagines the text-object-process as a chaotically contingent bloom of the action of meaning.

I knew what I was going to do, and how I was going to do it. I did not know how it would end. It started with these first three digital layouts, all developed in concert with one another and with the authors’ input:

TEXT-OBJECT-PROCESS: PRINTING, or LET’S GET PHYSICAL

(First a quick note: please excuse the blurriness and/or changes in lighting on these process photos. I took them on the fly, throughout the course of many long days, under many different weather/lighting conditions.)

The next step was to make those digital files into photopolymer plates, so that I could print the basic layout (the letters in white, the negative space around them in black) quickly and accurately on a Vandercook. From the pictures below you can see the press and some of the plates. I tried to make these broadsides as big as I could on that press.

TEXT-OBJECT-PROCESS: PRINTING & CUTTING

After all of the letters were on the pages, I moved the operation to a different theater, my home studio. The next step is the one that contained most of the action—the simultaneous cutting and printing of the letters. Using a xacto knife, I cut around each letter, about 2/3 of the way into the sheet of paper. My other hand was inked up as I cut, leaving prints over the formerly empty shapes of the letters. They were two rounds of printing/cutting, one for the titles in red and one for the main texts in black.

TEXT-OBJECT-PROCESS: AN UNPLANNED DIGRESSION

It was after the printing of the black that I ran into my first (and only real) problem—some of the letters were being completely covered by the finger/hand prints, so I could not see the outlines in order to cut them. There was no way to reprint the letters, so I decided to make a stencil so that I could redraw the letters over top of the ink. It made sense to use the films that I made the plates from, seeing as how they were a) plastic, and b) a perfect match.



After the stencils were complete (for now) I redrew the letters where they were needed and finished cutting (sans inked hand, so as not to repeat the covering problem ad infinitum).

TEXT-OBJECT-PROCESS: “NEGATIVE SPACE IS THE NEW BLACK”*

* A phrase coined by my friend Peter Bugg.

And the last step is the most fun, the peeling away, subtractive shaping of the text. This seems like it would be a dangerous, nerve-wracking thing to do, but the paper is incredibly resilient (it’s Somerset Book Heavyweight) and the work is slow enough where it is actually hard to make mistakes (and mistakes are easy enough to fix on a partially destroyed object anyway, and part of this is about all of the “mistakes” made).



I want to figure out way to take advantage of the way that the partially peeled pieces look. It’s a question of legibility (is the partially covered text legible?) and how to structure the action (hand-mechanical, anti-compositional). Perhaps for next year’s broadsides.

Doing things like this always leaves behind interesting detritus:



Yes, I keep them. No, I don’t know what to do with them yet. But one thing leads to another….

THREE DAY LABOR WEEKEND

Fig. 09.09.03
The substance of the life these days.

The image above shows the detritus from the main activity of this past weekend: a pile of letters removed from the stencils for the new broadsides. Hey, Aaron, I thought those broadsides were supposed to come out today. Well, you’re obviously mistaken, because my last post clearly says that they will come out on Wednesday.

But seriously, I want to do this right, and I am already late for work, and I refuse to hurry and do a half-assed job. So tomorrow. Really.

BROADSIDE TEASER

These are some of the in-process photos of the new broadside by Justin Sirois. It's a piece from his new book MLKNG SCKLS (which I highly recommend, by the way).

MORE BROADSIDES!

The NewLights Press is pleased to announce that there are two more broadsides on deck for this year, with poems by:

KC Trommer
Brenda Iijima

That makes a definite five broadsides for this year’s subscription. Images of the first three will be posted in one week, and they will be officially available for order.

EXPERIMENTAL BROADSIDES

Pictured above is the design for the first broadside, with text from MLKNG SCKLS, by Justin Sirois.

Not really.

This is an image of an unfinished design, unfinished because I moved on to a different idea, to make, I think, a series of objects that will be far stranger in the end. But I still like that way this one looks, so I thought I’d share.

ON THE SIDE

As part of the publishing escalation leading up to and through the 10th year of the NewLights Press, we will be releasing a series of broadsides. Of course this is the NewLights Press and we can’t let anything be, so these won’t be like traditional broadsides (i.e. text paired with “appropriate” image/illustration). We will be trying to make them into pieces that are text-image-process total objects, in the concrete sense, in the Beckett sense (“total object, complete with missing parts”). Some sort of variable editions produced through a combination of letterpress printing, collage, delamination, and mixed media drawing. Some sort of terrible mess. Late last night after a few hours of labor on the design for the first piece, I think I hit upon the structural idiom, as least for the first three. It is (as one may have guessed) strange, minimal, and somewhat unsettling. To provide a clue, the main typeface is 48 pt. Arial Black. I am curious to see how these will come out…

The broadside series will be ongoing, released sporadically in editions of 25 (that number might increase based on interest) or so, probably about $40-$50 apiece (they involve a fair amount of handwork). They will be distributed through this website, either as individual pieces when they are ready, or, you can buy a 12 month subscription for $100, which will get you all of the broadsides (three guaranteed, almost certainly more, and probably some other fun stuff, that price includes shipping too) that are produced within that 12 month period. Purchase through PayPal at the right, or contact me directly at newlightspress[at]gmail[dot]com.

The authors for the first three broadsides are:

Brian Evenson
Justin Sirois
John Yau

More will follow as I hear from other folks. Interested in submitting? Let me know (at email provided above).