PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (54): THE NEW MANIFESTO, SECOND ITERATION (4)

It was so much fun to make the modular titling type for The Heads that I wanted to do it again for the second iteration of the New Manifesto. In the first iteration I used the face Placard Condensed for the titles, which has been a longtime favorite of mine, even before I realized that it is essentially, at least in the capital letters, supposed to look like the lovely, generic, “Gothic” wood type that is common in letterpress studios. The thing that I don’t like about that typeface is that it often looks too condensed for my purposes. This is a major typographic confession—I’ve often used it and widened the glyphs 20% – 30%. As far as I know no one has ever noticed, but after I started looking carefully this time around, it became awkwardly obvious. So it was time for some new titling type.

Why modular type? The main answer, for me, is constraint & how that drives formal & structural decisions. I am drawn to the aesthetics of modular type, and it fits nicely with the formal qualities & structure of books—books (often) have rectangular pages, and they are at their core modular constructions—page after page after page designed on grid over grid over grid.

The complication (or perhaps luxury) that I gave myself this time around was the inclusion of a second modular unit—a triangle that is one half of the base square. I knew that I was going to print these letters from photopolymer plates, so why not, you know, get crazy?

I played with shapes & contours of the individual letters themselves for a while, trying out different shapes and refining. I needed numbers for this book, and that complicated things a bit, as the shapes of “S,” “Z,” “2” and “5” are very similar once curves & angles are eliminated. I could have used the same shape several times and relied on context to make the glyph, but I wasn’t sure that context would be enough in the case of the titles.

As the shapes of the letters developed I realized that there was something else to consider—proportion. While I was trying for letters that weren’t as narrow as Placard Condensed, I still needed them to be somewhat condensed so that they would fill the marginal space of the page. The width of the individual glyphs is one thing, but how narrow they are depends on the relationship of width to height. (This is all basic stuff, I know, but I am a beginner when it comes to type design, and these small realizations are an important part of learning.)

After I settled on the proper proportions for the letters, I was able to refine the contours within those proportions and determine the final letterforms. One challenge with modular type (at least in how I’m approaching it at this point) is its monotony & rigidity. It often looks forced into the flexible space of the book, particularly when paired with a great text type—like Palatino Linotype, which is what I was using for the main text of the book. The last tweak I made to the modular face was to change its base unit from a square to a vertically-oriented rectangle that was half of that square. The original square was still used for most of the letters, but that rectangle allowed for some small subtle differences that gave the letters more character and made some of them appear less awkward. The “F” and “G” are two examples.

Using the rectangle of the base unit also gave me more flexibility when typesetting and spacing the letters, allowing me to stay within the modular system when spacing but giving me enough options to balance the spaces out better.

The above images show the actual setting of the titles. I did not make these letters into an actual, usable font—I just drew them as vector objects within InDesign and cut & pasted them into place. Once they were set I could just copy them into the actual book document and scale them appropriately. Even during typesetting I still played with the letterforms a bit—it’s just so hard to resist the impulse to keep refining the letters. But there was a deadline & I had to get to printing. So here are some images of the type printed from the photopolymer plates:

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (53): THE NEW MANIFESTO, SECOND ITERATION (3)

The second iteration of The New Manifesto of the NewLights Press is essentially complete (though I need to reprint exactly half of the covers and then finish binding, due to a, shall we say, minor incident), but won’t be released for Internet sales until Monday, April 22. Right now most of the edition is acting as an installation-ish piece in a show here at the Coburn Gallery in CO Springs. So this next series of posts, detailing the production of the book, are not as in-the-moment as the “Production is Reception” posts often are. But here we go.

The Second Iteration has been percolating, marinating, for quite a while. For more than a year, perhaps two. It was never quite a real thing until I decided for sure that it was going to be a (major) part of the latest show. For most of its existence it has been a bunch of notes, some pieces of sketchy text, and some vague design ideas, like this:

The idea was always to make this new iteration a revision-ing or rewriting of the first book, similar in structure, design, themes, etc. But not simply an “updated” version of the same text, same book. I didn’t know exactly what all of this meant until I really got in the thick of the writing-design. In fact, the specificity of the relationship between the two iterations did not fully emerge until I was just about ready to start printing. The books, when they’re working, funnel themselves towards a precipice. They crystallize at the edge, silent in their poised, posed, paused ideal. Time restarts & they fall, not in a beautiful, freefall dive, but in a clumsy tumble, banging against the side of the cliff all the way down.

Such drama, such wounds to be sustained. To be continued.

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (51): THE NEW MANIFESTO, SECOND ITERATION (2)

Work on the second iteration of The New Manifesto… continues, and the NewLights mission statement continues to be tweaked. Here’s the latest:

The NewLights Press is an independent printer & publisher of experimental writing and artists’ books, concentrating on where the two can and do overlap. All of the books are printed & bound “by hand,” using a variety of techniques, ranging from the obsolete (letterpress) to the utilitarian (laser printing) to the meditative (delamination). We try to maintain inclusive (& purposefully problematic) definitions of such mutable terms as “experimental writing,” “artists’ books,” and “printing techniques,” and to be similarly inclusive in the kinds of books that we produce, in an attempt to allow the different kinds of production to merge, separate, and converse with one another. We believe in the actual use value of art objects as soft, temporary spaces in and against which individuals & communities can envision & articulate their relationship to, and shape in, the world. We are not searching for the Ideal Book—we are looking hard at & reading closely from the book-in-the-world. We represent only one of the many geographical/historical meeting points of a vital and diverse community of active, thoughtful people, and our work would mean nothing without that community. The production of books is our own, weird way of saying to the world: we believe in you. & you & you & you & you & you & you & you & you & you & you […]

VISTA SANS WOOD TYPE PROJECT: UPDATE

 
The folks at the Vista Sans Wood Type Project (see post below for more on this) have started a new, improved Kickstarter campaign to fund their book project. Now when you donate you can choose exactly which print you want. Which is awesome, because these things are fucking sweet. No really, I just saw them all at Codex. Get on this.

AGAINST PRESERVATION: THE VISTA SANS WOOD TYPE PROJECT

Hatch Show Print’s motto is: “Preservation Through Use.” When they say this they are talking specifically about their collection of historic type & image blocks. They “preserve” those physical things by continuing to use them and keeping the iconic images that they produced circulating in the culture. The idea of “preservation through use” is an oxymoron—using those blocks is not going to preserve them. That use is going to destroy them.

Generally speaking, when it comes to Book Arts & letterpress printing, I am against preservation. Not that I want to see all of our lovely tools, equipment & materials burned & scrapped. Quite the opposite, actually. I am against preservation in the sense that something that needs to be “preserved” is something that has died, that is in the process of rapid decay. The preservation impulse in Book Arts, while noble & in some ways worthwhile, is holding it back.

Letterpress printing, hand bookbinding, small/private press publishing, etc., etc. are commercially obsolete. That does not mean they are “dead”—historically over, sealed shut, capable of no further development in aesthetics and/or technology. The Economy is not the only economy. These things—these techniques, tools, equipment, processes, materials, ways of doing-learning-moving—are living things. & there is, terrifyingly, excitingly, more work to be done.

The Vista Sans Wood Type Project gets at several very important things:

1) It literally advances the technology of type production & letterpress printing. There is now a typeface that was never available as type, in lead or wood, in the world in physical form. And the type is different from traditional wood type—some of it has a very visible grain. It is not so precious anymore—it can be kerned, mortised, cut, spliced without worry. It points toward even more possibilities.

2) The project is not just about the type, it’s also about its utility & function. The functional/shareable is the new relational.

3) The project is not just about the type, it’s also about how it’s used to advance the aesthetic range of letterpress printing. You can see lots of the prints in the video above. Very few of them look like a “traditional” letterpress broadside. & that points to one very, very important thing about letterpress printing—it’s an extremely flexible & adaptable medium. The pinnacle of its aesthetic achievement was not/is not black, serifed text type on white or off-white paper.

4) The project is not just about the type, it’s about community, about this community of incredible people making incredible things.

Things like the Vista Sans Wood Type Project are absolutely crucial to keeping the fields of book arts, printing, typography, design, publishing, etc., etc. moving & interesting & fun. Tricia & Ashley have already made the type, but now they need some funds to make a book documenting the project—a book that will take the project even further. Please consider helping them out by following the link at the end of the video or by clicking here.

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (50): THE NEW MANIFESTO, SECOND ITERATION (1)

Because the new New Manifesto is being written:

The NewLights Press is an independent printer & publisher of experimental writing and artists’ books, concentrating on where the two can and do overlap. All of the books are printed & bound “by hand,” using a variety of techniques, ranging from the obsolete (letterpress) to the utilitarian (laser printing). We try to maintain inclusive (& purposefully problematic) definitions of such mutable terms as “experimental writing,” “artists’ books,” and “printing techniques,” and to be similarly inclusive in the kinds of books that we produce, in an attempt to allow the different kinds of production to merge, separate, and converse with one another. We believe in the actual use value of art objects as soft, temporary spaces in and against which individuals & communities can envision & articulate their relationship to, and shape in, the world. We are not searching for the Ideal Book—we are looking hard at, & reading deeply of, the Book-in-the-World. We represent only one of the many geographical/historical meeting points of a vital and diverse community of active, thoughtful people, and our work would mean nothing without that community. The production of books is our own way of telling the rest of the world that we believe in them.

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (50): THE HEADS (9)

It is hard to be aware of how little one pays attention to something. Big things are moving in Art & Life these days, and the mornings, usually reserved for writing blog posts, have been filled with the meditative work of cutting and peeling paper. So there’s that. But today some time to write a bit about the nighttime activities—the continued adventures in the printing of The Heads (of My Family, My Friends, My Colleagues) by Justin Sirois.

In earlier blog posts and on the NewLights Facebook page, there are some cryptic photos and descriptions of the “pixel grid” of The Heads. So I thought I’d explain a bit about what that actually is, how it works. These images are a bit old now—production has advanced to some later stages/colors. But more on that soon.

In the designs of other NewLights books where I was printing from photopolymer plates I tried to make that decision to use the plates count—to use the plates to print a book that only could have been made with them. For The Heads I wanted to try something different: to use a combination of good ol’ laser printing with letterpress, and to see where that led the book. This helps keep material costs down (those plates & films are expensive) and is appropriate for the content of the poems, which talk about life and images on, off and between our screens.

So the pixel grid. It is made from lead type, specifically from spacing material for lead type. With the assistance of the nice people at the M & H Type Foundry I was able to get 10 lbs. of 12 pt. en quads in “high spaces”—spaces that are a bit higher than regular word spaces. (I believe that these spaces would normally be used to support the kern of letters at the end of a word, say the “f” in “of,” but I’m actually not sure about that.) So with the high spaces I can still use regular spaces as spaces, and regular leading to hold the lines. And that negative space is important—it is what makes the grid do its work.

So the columns of the gird are assembled in lines, with copper spaces between each piece vertically, and 6 pt. slugs and paper leading (equal to 1 pt. in thickness) between them. The gaps in the columns will form the letters of the poem titles (the titles are all all-cap “acronyms” like TFIEG), made from the modular alphabet described in earlier posts. The grid itself, when complete, will contain groups of three columns in different colors—made to emulate the RGB grid of the screen. So the spacing matrix is assembled to print all of the red columns on a single page spread, and then it can be broken apart/reconfigured to print all of the green columns by just moving it 6.5 pts over in the press bed. And then the blue after that. I am doing all of a single color first, so there is a great deal of reconfiguring before the press runs containing titles. The lines of spacing are extremely prone to falling over at the ends, so it has taken me some time to get into the haptic rhythms of working with them effectively. But now things are moving. The text, the grids, the book, accumulate.

WE HAD A READING HERE IN THE SPRINGS ON FRIDAY NIGHT & IT WAS FUCKING AWESOME & IT FEELS SO GOOD TO BE HOME

It was the first reading in a new series called “Say Hello to Your Last Poem.” The readers were Matt Potter, a promising & motivated Colorado College student, and Corina Copp, a fantastic poet from Brooklyn & author of Pro Magenta/Be Met (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011). The series is being organized by Noel Black (author of Uselysses, also Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011) and myself, and it was held at the home of Noel and his wife, artist/curator Marina Eckler. They have this incredible house with a backyard that extends up to a red rock outcropping, like a mini national park, and that’s where we did the actual reading, with crazy colored lights and the vastness of the sky & mountains behind the readers. It started with a potluck dinner and just the right amount of people came out. Everything synced.

So why am I making such a big deal out of a little house reading? It’s not a novel format, even here in the Springs, which has a thriving house-show-music scene. And one would expect a good reading from two good poets. Hey, no big deal.

& “no big deal” is absolutely correct, which is why it was awesome, and which is why I am excited about it & the future of doing this. Because these things don’t have to be a big deal, and they’re often better if they’re not. All one needs is an interested & loving & awesome local community. & we’ve got that here in Colorado Springs, believe it or not.

The people, the place, the work, the event itself. It’s all there, shimmering, and on top of all that I realized what’s been missing from the work of the NewLights Press for far, far too long—being anchored in a community, one that is both local & reaching out & welcoming in. (It’s been since the early days in Baltimore, when we were organizing readings, making chapbooks, and having a great & terrible time all of the time.) I’ve often said, on this blog and elsewhere, that one of the most important & vital parts of small press publishing is the community, the community already established, and the community that the making & sharing of work is constantly building. But in all of my transience over the last 8 years (!) I had forgotten that literally bringing people together is one of the best parts, one of the most important parts.

I had somehow forgotten about the interplay between the work produced (the writing, the books) and the local-right-there-and-giving-you-hugs audience, about how important those flesh & blood & laughing people are, and about how work made in that environment can become an anchor point for a shared, lived experience.

More readings? Yes.
More books? Yes.
We hope to see you all here soon.

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (49): THE HEADS (8)

Nothing like a weekend of technical failure to reinvigorate the spirit. This weekend was reserved to begin printing the “pixel grids” on the pages of The Heads (of my family, my friends, my colleagues), the forthcoming book of poems by Mr. Justin Sirois.

Those grids are being printed from lead matrices constructed from spacing material—“high spaces”—in this case 12 pt. En quads. This first set-up was supposed to be the “matrix-matrix,” the modular set-up that would yield all the others.

I eagerly set it up on Saturday, anxious to see if it would actually work, knowing that I would probably have to adjust it, but hoping beyond hope that I wouldn’t. It printed:

But as I had guessed, there won’t be enough white space between the individual “pixels” in a column. In the above image you can kind of see them, but once they are printed with more impression & ink, those tiny cracks will fill up. So I thought, Okay, no big deal, I’ll just add some paper spaces between all of the lead pieces.
& besides I had forgot to reverse the matrix for printing, so it was all going to have to come out anyway.

Little did I realize that all of my schemes for producing roughly 3,500 6 pt. paper spaces would also fail. After messing around with the guillotine for a bit, I decided that I could set up the lines in InDesign, print ‘em out & cut them by hand. But that didn’t work either:

So it looks like I’ll be ordering a bunch of 6 pt. coppers.

Luckily, there are other pieces of the book that I can work on while I’m waiting on those. So I don’t have to waste any more time.

& speaking of wasting time—one thing we like to say around here is that “learning is making mistakes.” I sure am doing a lot of learning on this one….

AL-MUTANABBI STREET STARTS HERE: THE ANTHOLOGY IS OUT!

The anthology of written work from the Al-Mutanabbi Street Coalition has been published by PM Press & is now on sale. Here’s the description from the PM Press website:

On March 5th, 2007, a car bomb was exploded on al-Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad. More than thirty people were killed and more than one hundred were wounded. This locale is the historic center of Baghdad bookselling, a winding street filled with bookstores and outdoor book stalls. Named after the famed 10th century classical Arab poet al-Mutanabbi, it has been the heart and soul of the Baghdad literary and intellectual community. This anthology begins with a historical introduction to al-Mutanabbi Street and includes the writing of Iraqis as well as a wide swath of international poets and writers who were outraged by this attack.



This book seeks to show where al-Mutanabbi Street starts in all of us: personally, in our communities, and in our nations. It seeks to show the commonality between this small street in Baghdad and our own cultural centers, and why this attack was an attack on us all. This anthology sees al-Mutanabbi Street as a place for the free exchange of ideas; a place that has long offered its sanctuary to the complete spectrum of Iraqi voices. This is where the roots of democracy (in the best sense of that word) took hold many hundreds of years ago. This anthology looks toward al-Mutanabbi Street as an affirmation of all that we hope for in a more just society.

For more info (including a complete list of contributors) & to order a copy of the book, go here.

I have been involved with the Al-Mutanabbi Street Coalition for a few years now (see the NewLights broadside here and some notes for a panel presentation here), and I am consistently amazed by the unwavering dedication of this group and of its founder, Beau Beausoleil. In addition to the initial broadside project and this anthology, there is now also an artists’ book project. I have heard Beau say many times that the project (in its broad sense) is not an “anti-war” project, nor is it a “healing” project—it’s about looking hard at violence, how it affects people & their culture, and about not looking away.

Buy this book.

NOW (NON)LIVE ONLINE: CLERESTORY

Otherwise known as “the JAB book,” or “as-of-yet untitled.” This is a tricky one to translate to digital form, because the book is dependent on the reader being able to really stick their nose into it to read the pale text, and to be able to turn the book to read it in its multiple directions. So to help out a bit, here are two versions of the finished book, in different orientations. We highly recommend using the zoom feature on the reader to get to all of the text. & the thing in the middle is an all-digital study using the original photographs in sequence.

Open publication - Free publishing - More artists books

Open publication - Free publishing - More artists books

Open publication - Free publishing - More artists books

Image/Text by NewLights Press: Aaron Cohick, et al.

16 pages, saddle stapled

4.0625” x 8.125” (closed)

CMYK offset of digital photographs (printed by Brad Freeman, Jenna Rodriguez, & Claire Sammons at the Center for Book & Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago), letterpress from photopolymer plates

Edition of 600

2012

This book was made as an insert for the Journal of Artists’ Books #31. More info (including how to get yourself a copy) here.

A SHORT FILM ABOUT THE PRESS AT COLORADO COLLEGE

This is a short documentary about The Press at Colorado College, the institution and studio to which the NewLights Press is symbiotically attached. The film was made by a student apprentice at The Press, Demetria Humphries. It's a really great little film, and I was honored to be a part of it. It's got lots of great letterpress action!

AN ACCIDENTAL IMAGE OF THE BOOK

NOW (NON)LIVE ONLINE: THE DROWNABLE SPECIES by BRIAN EVENSON

& this post is the fulfillment of another long-term goal for the NewLights Press Digital Archives: in the spirit of The William Blake Archive, not one, but three complete copies of The Drownable Species by Brian Evenson.

Why three? Because the process of making these books (detailed here) was rooted in chaos and variability, taking advantage of the unpredictability of water and the often unnoticed physicality of inkjet printing. Each book in the edition is different, and three seemed like the right number to allow readers to see how those differences emerge from copy to copy.

All of the other archived books on this blog are either out-of-print or unique. The Drownable Species is still available for purchase. It originally was published in late 2008 (right around Halloween actually) after 3 years of on & off labor. I am still very proud of this book. & now it’s more accessible. & if you enjoy the story, it was very recently published in Brian’s newest collection of short stories, Windeye (buy here and reviews here and here).

The three copies that have been digitized are numbers 6, 29 and 34. 

Open publication - Free publishing - More artists books

Open publication - Free publishing - More artists books

Open publication - Free publishing - More artists books

The Drownable Species
Short story by Brian Evenson with images by Aaron Cohick 


48 pages, hardcover, casebound, 8 ¼” x 5 ¼” 


Letterpress printed text, digitally printed images with hand manipulation 


Variable edition of 40 


2008