ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ [AN ISLAND]

The NewLights Press is very excited to announce the release of J. A. Tyler’s ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ [an island]. As detailed in earlier posts, this is a collaborative project done in conjunction with other small presses and one online journal, all who are releasing their part of the project today.

Below is the author’s description of the project, with links to the other pieces:

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ is wreckage. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ takes place as five distinct works, all built around the same core story. Each narrative is that of a girl who holds the last water in the world, a herd of chaos that takes it from her, and the boy who comes to resuscitate it all. But each story takes this kernel and shreds it in a new direction, incorporates other elements, reshapes the narrative in its own image. And each press that came aboard this project, releasing this wreckage into readers’ hands, worked on the same principle of core unity with distinct press-specific alterations. All that is left is the beautiful static hum: zzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Thanks to the following presses and their editors and journals, where you can gather
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ:

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ [a well]: Greying Ghost (Carl Annarummo)
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ [the stars]: Warm Milk Printing Press (Ben Spivey)
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ [this town]: The Collagist (Matt Bell)
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ [an island]: NewLights Press (Aaron Cohick)

And I would also like to take this opportunity to thank J.A. Tyler, Matt Bell, Carl Annarummo and Ben Spivey. This whole project that has been a lot of fun, and I feel like some corner has been turned for NewLights, as we find our footing in our new home.






Story by J. A. Tyler
36 pages, soft cover, pamphlet stitch, 5” x 8”
Letterpress printed from photopolymer plates
Edition of 200
2011
$15 (plus shipping): as of June 28, 2012, all money from sales of this and other NewLights books will be donated to the Red Cross to assist people displaced by Colorado wildfires.

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Figure 05.11.01
Prospectus for Color for the Letterpress, a book by Jim Trissel/The Press at Colorado College, made in 1987. An elegant book demonstrating the possibilities for color in letterpress and relief printing. Similar in many to the screenprinted plates of Josef Albers's Interaction of Color.

Last night as I was printing I was thinking about color and I was thinking about physical, viscous ink. I was thinking about the concept of making letterpress printing the books necessary and integral to them, and the black text that I was printing seemed to disappear, to retreat into processes that we all know and do not see.

The process is not completely removed from the text—when comparing it next to a digitally printed piece, the letterpress obviously has more heft to it.

Figure 05.11.02
Text from the book printed digitally (from one of the mock-ups). The typeface is 10 pt. Palatino Linotype.

Figure 05.11.03
Text from the book letterpress printed from photopolymer plates (from one of the many proofs).

Figure 05.11.04
A close-up image of the letterpress printed text. Overinked.

There is the impression, and there is also the irregularity of the print—the ink squishes over the sides of the letterforms, the solidity of the strokes varies with the amount of ink and the arrangement of the fibers of the paper. The edition breathes.

Figure 05.11.05
A close-up image of the digitally printed text. Nothing is perfect. The key is to decide which imperfections one wants and can use.

Upon close inspection it can be seen that digital printing is also highly irregular (it’s also often more subject to environmental degradation than other printing methods). But digital printing is a generally more “transparent” medium than letterpress (“transparent” in the sense of being unobtrusive and not being noticed on most occasions) precisely because it has no impression—the interaction of digital printing with the paper’s surface is far more subtle.

(The planographic, chemical process of offset hangs somewhere between the two. Offset, on most occasions is also very “transparent.” But it doesn’t have to be.)

Figure 05.11.06
Bruce Nauman, Please Pay Attention Please

Ostranenie.

The chaotic forces of the process of printing threaten to burst through every printed word. The irregularity of the printed letter is language’s link to the physical world.

The trick is to get the reader to experience the book on multiple levels—to make a book that employs multiple legibilities that are all accessible to the reader. Accessible, not necessarily concise and clear—there will hopefully be something to dwell in.

So maybe black text on white paper doesn’t make sense anymore, or at least doesn’t make sense for the future. “Make sense” in terms of being apparent to the senses.

(Those of you who know my work and the extremely limited palette that I use will understand the statement above as being a big deal, at least for me.)

The next book will be in “full color.” The next book will be in techno-color. Pure color and four color. Not black but not quite. Is there such a thing as neutrality?

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Less than a week until the release (5/15/2011) and production is drawing to an end, though there’s still a great deal to be done. This past weekend was spent printing, with Saturday being a smooth, easy day (800+ impressions/4 runs) and Sunday being exactly the opposite (200+ impressions/1 run). Both days helped to remind me why I enjoy letterpress printing, and why I’m using it for these books.

The following disjointed musings on letterpress printing, and on the analog processes of the book vs. the digital processes of the book, will be interspersed with various photos of the production process. As seen above, as seen below.



This book seems significant to NewLights from a production standpoint: it’s the largest edition done of a substantial chapbookish project (200, 36 pages), it’s the first book in more than a year, and the first to be done entirely in Colorado, it’s all letterpress printed, it’s all printed on Vandercooks (as opposed to the Heidelberg that I was printing on in SF), and it’s a new (but simple) structure/binding for NewLights. And it’s all being made relatively quickly—a little bit more than a month of focused design/production time.



This weekend brought the earlier comment “letterpress seemed to me to be a natural way of deliberately (and often painfully) connecting one's entire body to the words on a page” to mind.




Printing these digitally (or having them printed offset) would have been easier, but the thought of sitting at my desk, waiting for my laser printer, choking on its fumes, just collecting sheets, makes me existentially nauseous. I want to be an active participant, on all levels.



That being said, there are issues of clarity, of legibility. I am not as consistent and accurate as the laser printer. Usually I try to be. I almost always fail.


The printing of this book is becoming more about lack of control, or about a kind of chaotic control, than I had initially planned. Its physicality will be readily apparent, will be an integral part of the book.


The network of small impressions on the cover feels like woven cloth.


There are parts of the design that require more accuracy in registration than a laser printer can provide. I at least have a fighting chance of pulling those off.


Loud music helps.


These books don’t make themselves. Somehow, that’s important. I am struggling to articulate why.


Second wind, third wind, fourth wind, fifth wind. & so on. To be continued.

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ANALOG


VS.


DIGITAL

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (20): ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ (5)

Speaking of the interplay between analog and digital techniques, one thing that I do quite often is make digital mock-ups of something that will be letterpress printed. It’s a quick way to work with multiple colors, transparency, and sometimes, depending on the discrepancy between a face in lead and a face in bytes, the computer can be used to rough out what type set by hand will look like.

(Side Thought: Might it be useful to have a digitally rendered version of certain faces in lead, at an accurate scale and set width? One of them main advantages of digital design is the “bottomless typecase” and how it allows for the breaking of one massive barrier to book design: the ability to see the book and the text as a complete sequence before all the time is spent setting it in lead. A printer might have enough type to set a small book of poems up in its entirety, but it is rare that one printer has enough of one face to set even a short (10 or more 5” x 8” pages) prose piece. One could have one’s book Monotype cast as a whole thing, and then refine in the stick from there, but a) that’s expensive and time-consuming, and b) you end up with a lot of Monotype afterwards.)

I start the design process with the color digital mock-up, testing out a bunch of ideas, usually moving from very drastically different overall approaches to very small refinements once a general design has decided upon. (The mock-ups are usually made as multi-page InDesign documents so that I can click through and compare different versions rapidly.)





The images above show some of the mock-ups for the cover/jacket of ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ [an island]. The long images are what the cover will look like completely folded out (there are flaps that wrap around to the inside of the book) and the smaller images are what the front cover would look like on its own. The paper I will be using is orange, and the printing will be in a bunch of different colors, at varying degrees of opacity, all overprinted closely. The transparent gray circle is actually a digital rendering of an already existing relief block. (We have lots of interesting shape blocks at the Press at CC, and I often make digital versions of them. Which goes back to my earlier comments about a digital lead type.) This cover, despite all the colors, will actually only be printed with one polymer plate and the single circle relief block. It will be 7 or 8 runs (there’s printing on the interior too). It’s always interesting to see the real, physical print slowly emerge at the press after I’ve become so familiar with the screen version. I am always surprised by how the printed thing looks, by how much better it looks, by how real it is someone’s hands.

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One theme or question that keeps re-emerging (for me) as I work on this book and daydream about others, is the question: why letterpress? What is it about that particular method of printing that makes it the best choice for the production of these books? How can the “best” choice be qualified/quantified? And as I work through this project (designing, proofreading, kerning, emailing, sweating over the paper cost, getting nervous about the cost of the film & plates) this question, “Why letterpress?” keeps coming back into my mind.

And if why letterpress, why use digital designs and photopolymer plates? Why not use lead type?

And, related: How does digital design translate into physical letterpress printing? Does the printing process influence the design (in a way beyond the limitations of the physical medium) or is the process of printing a mechanical-technical execution, a transparent rendering of a transparent design?

Why all this time and all this money on this process? Because it’s “nicer?” Because it’s “finer?” Because it’s more “expensive?” Because it’s “older?” If it is better, or even more appropriate for these projects, let’s figure out why.

***

A friend once commented that one thing she liked about the NewLights books is that “there was a reason for them to be letterpress.” She observed something that I want to be embedded in every book (and strung through the form-content-reception): a series of observations & reflections on, and experiments with, the chosen mode(s) of production. This series of “Production is Reception” is literally that. But these explorations must be enacted in the objects, and re-enacted every time a reader interacts with the books.

I think that an interesting way to address these “Production is Reception” posts for ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ is to look at the project specifically in terms of letterpress printing, of letterpress working with and against digital design. So we’ll probably flicker back and forth between exploratory posts on the “why” of this kind of printing and technical descriptions of the processes of working between the analog and the digital.

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This whole weekend was spent dwelling in and on the minutiae of typography. The image above shows a piece of that—the pink highlighted dots are character combinations that needed kerning. (Translation: the space between the letters looked wrong, often too wide, and it needed to be adjusted manually.) I will spare you the details of this process (at least for now) and let’s just say that I am trying to be thorough, careful, and thoughtful, on a micro level, about the typography of this new book. But the important question is: why?

And I have been asking myself that same question between each 1/1000 of an inch adjustment. Why? I certainly enjoy the work (most of the time) but that may not be enough to justify this activity, which 99.5% of the readers of the book will never notice, as the time for printing and binding shrinks. & time is our primary joy, our primary tragedy.

It’s partly about “doing a good job” or “doing it the right way.” It’s also important to remember that typographic decisions are aesthetic decisions, and so the “right” way is always culturally determined and needs to be interrogated in order for the discipline to grow. The discipline. But of course a part of that interrogation entails a thorough understanding of the rules to be questioned. Part of doing this is about educational self-discipline. And no art disciplines the producer like typography.

Why is the spacing important, just in terms of aesthetics & functionality? The space between and around the letters, words, lines and paragraphs, the negative space, is the glue that holds the text together visually. It’s a matter of balance, of the shapes of the letters being made to sit in and move through that space. The type always relies on the negative space for its articulation. It can also be overwhelmed by that space and disappear into the blankness of the page. Making type hold weight, compositionally, spatially, temporally, is one of my primary concerns as a designer and maker.

But back to process. Why the kerning? Another attempt: I am an advocate of meditative rigor, of looking and working hard. (Side note: in these descriptions the matter of “depth” keeps reappearing in my initial writing, but the postmodernist me carefully edits those out, suspicious of such things. What is depth? Why is it bad? Or good? Is it spatial? Or can it be temporal?) Again this idea of discipline emerges.

Why are you worried about the kerning? This kind of fine tuning kills the immediacy of production, the “make it & get it out there” ethic that keeps an energy flowing through this kind of literature. If I wasn’t concerned with the (choose one: ethics, politics, aesthetics, economics) of process, and only cared about “getting it out there,” I definitely would not be messing around with the spacing. Can you read it? Good. It’s fine.

You’re not just spending time and energy on the spacing itself, but also in debating its ethics. Is it that important? Maybe and maybe not. But I think it’s a key or point of departure towards a larger discussion about practice. And that discussion is maybe the point of the practice. As always, to be continued, as always.

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One of the first things that the group of presses agreed to keep consistent across all of the books was the page size: 8” x 5”. That’s the largest size one can comfortably get out of a folded 8.5’ x 11” sheet and have a little space to trim the edges of the book. And we wanted to size them for convenient digital printing. So based off of that page size, I started working on layouts. I began with splitting up the space of the page/spread into regular divisions:

(The process for this is explained in more detail here and here.)

Those divisions are then used to determine the margin scheme of the book. When I was working on drawing the schema to divide the pages I was intuitively drawn toward dividing the page into thirteenths. I wasn’t entirely sure why, but it sounded like fun—it’s an odd number, with cultural resonance, it’s prime, etc. So I built a grid, based on the page/spread, that is divided into rectangles that are each 1/13 of the dimension that they are made out of. (Note: all of my divisions are based on the 8 x 5 page, which is then just doubled into the spread.):



And after the grid was built I started playing around with margin schemes, and settled on this “reversed” scheme:


I wanted the text/book to look and feel heavy. Breaking the traditional margin set-up helps to draw the reader’s attention to the book as a made object, to the materiality of the text, and to the overall proportions of the book and how it sits in their hands. That lowered text block gave me an idea for the title page sequence. And it just seemed to “work” with the story and the 1/13 based division.

And speaking of 1/13, as I worked more on the design I realized that the number 13 makes other appearances: the sum of the two dimensions of the page: 8 + 5 = 13. Also, when the phrase “ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ” shows up in the text (which it does a lot) the default number of Z’s is 13. Intuition in design often links up to “real” properties as the design progresses.

Then it was that old, favored question of the typeface, and the proportions of that. After much waffling, I settled on my old friend Palatino Linotype, because it was the only one that seemed dark enough—all of the other standard, serifed text faces just looked weak on the page. After some playing with scale and proportion, I settled on 10 pt. Palatino with 12.4 pt leading. The .4 points on the leading brings the baseline of the bottom line perfectly in sync with the margin scheme. Being able to easily make fractional, minute adjustments like that is one of the nice, expansive things about digital design.


The face on the left is 10/12.4 Adobe Jenson Pro. The face on the left is 10/12.4 Palatino Linotype. And then I think somewhere around this point in the process I decided that I was going to letterpress print the whole thing.

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Somewhere around a year and a half ago the writer J.A. Tyler contacted NewLights and a few other small presses to see if we were interested in a project idea. Mr. Tyler had written a story that existed in five different versions or iterations—not five parts in a sequence—one story realized five different ways, all based on the same “core.” And the idea, after the stories were written, was to see if he could get all five iterations published, each by a different small press, all at the same time. The main title of the project was ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ. The proposed release date was May 15, 2011. I said yes. The time is drawing near.

The other presses involved in the project are:

Greying Ghost
Warm Milk Printing Press
The Collagist

We had a fifth press, but they folded in the interim between conception and execution. And now it’s too late, so we are down to four for now.

The idea spoke to me for a few reasons. First, it involved a group of presses all working together. Anything that expands and deepens the community I am all for. Second, the project relies on the idea of repetition and difference for its shape. I’ve been experimenting with multiple iterations of my own texts/books, so it’s interesting to see how someone else approached the same problem. And third, the story fit the specs for more chapbookish type production that I was looking to do. Good timing and a good fit.

Right now the book is towards the final design stages. Future posts will go into more detail about the individual steps.