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Fig. 06.11.01
A scriptorium. The imaginary space of this construction. [1]These past two weeks I’ve been finishing another volley of the NewLights broadsides, spending many hours a day cutting and peeling the negative space of text away from the text itself. The process creates its own tracks, is multiply inscriptive, multiply legible. And because of that activity, I have been thinking a lot about “the body writing,” and I have been about thinking the broadsides and the altered books in relation to scribal activity and manuscript books. No conclusions yet, of course. But somewhere I see the slow pulse of a poetics of inscription, of printing, of making. Not a poetics about, but of.[…] writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing. […] [2]
Barthes uses the term “scriptor” to describe his “modern” author or writer. That particular term is very unstable, especially when examined in relationship to the activity of the scribe, typesetter, and/or printer. Is there a point where “authorship” ends, and “scripting” begins? Is it the point “where all identity is lost, starting with the identity of the body writing”?So we will start with this term “scriptor,” and begin to map out the space it occupies, or creates…scribe n. 1. historical a person who copied out documents. informal, often humorous a writer; especially a journalist. 2. Jewish History an ancient Jewish record-keeper or, later, a professional theologian and jurist. 3. (also scriber or scribe awl) a pointed instrument used for making marks to guide a saw or in signwriting. v. 1. chiefly poetic/literary write. 2. mark with a pointed instrument.
script n. 1. handwriting as distinct from print; written characters. writing using a particular alphabet: Russian script. 2. the written text of a play, film, or broadcast. 3. Brit. a candidate’s written answers in an examination. 4. Computing a program or sequence of instructions that is carried out by another program rather than by the computer processor. v. write a script for.
scriptorium n. chiefly historical a room set apart for writing, especially one in a monastery where manuscripts were copied. [3]
[…] the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now. The fact is (or, it follows) that writing can no longer designate an operation of recording, notation, representation, ‘depiction’ (as the Classics would say); rather, it designates exactly what linguists, referring to Oxford philosophy, call a performative, a rare verbal form (exclusively given in the first person and in the present tense) in which the enunciation has no other content (contains no other proposition) than the act by which it is uttered—something like the I declare of kings or the I sing of very ancient poets. […] For [the modern scriptor] […] the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin—or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins. […] [4]
Fig. 06.11.02
Marking/making the word & the book is a game with serious consequences. "The Cathedral of Fulda preserves an early theological manuscript whose wooden covers are reputedly scored with the marks of sword blows received when St. Boniface, a German evangelist in the eighth century, used the book as a shield to ward off a pagan attack. The book was none too effective in this respect, and Boniface was killed, but the book has been held as a treasured relic ever since." [5] The imaginary space of this construction.1. Image from: Warren Chappell, A Short History of the Printed Word, (Boston: Nonpareil Books, 1980), 4.2. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Image — Music — Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 142.3. Definitions are from the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, Revised Tenth Edition, 2002.4. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Image — Music — Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 145-6.5. Image and description from: David Pearson, Books As History: The importance of books beyond their texts, (London: The British Library and Oak Knoll Press, 2008), 132-3.
Here on a rainy morning and there is, as usual, too much interesting stuff to read on the Internet. Here on a rainy morning and that old feeling of not knowing what I am going to write. (Terrifying? Exhilirating? Dull and senseless? All of these?) I was just reading the latest installment of the HTMLGiant series “What Is Experimental Literature? {Five Questions}” (The latest post, as of the time of this writing, was with Eileen Myles.) Often in the answers to the questions there is some discussion of the label “experimental literature.” Eileen Myles seems the most suspicious of this term, saying that she “feel[s] like [she] is being asked to endorse a brand.”And this discussion makes me wonder about that description of this press, up and over there in the sidebar --------------------------------------->& I am always wondering about the “description” of what this “press” “does.”Right now I am actually more concerned with the “literature” than I am with the “experimental.”“Everything that was literature has fallen away from me.”The reason that I call the term “literature” into question for use over there is because it connotes a finished and definable product, a thing, done, called “literature.” And there are of course a host of cultural qualifications that come along with that term. But emphasis on product is not really the whole point of what NewLights is up to. We make things, yes, but those things are dynamic, (hopefully) enacting processes in and outside of themselves.So what do we use instead of “literature?” How about “writing?” That helps to transfer the emphasis to process. And maybe the “experimental” will be enough to say “writing not like writing.” Things, made & making.Perhaps I will change the description tomorrow, but tomorrow how knows what will change?
[UPDATE: The word was changed to "writing" on 06/23/11.]
The other day I received an email announcement from Mud Luscious Press, which is run by newly anointed NewLights author J. A. Tyler. The announcement was for the new book in their Nephew chapbook series, Meat Is All, by Andrew Borgstrom. It caught my attention for a few reasons: 1) the cover, shown above, looks great, 2) the excerpt available is weird & interesting, and 3) the edition, or the mode of production-distribution of it, was described as: “This book will be available for 90 days or until 150 copies are sold, whichever comes first.”I was intrigued by this idea, so I wrote to Mr. Tyler asking him to explain a bit more. Here’s his response:We take orders for our Nephew titles for either 90 days (max.) or for 150 copies (max.) and we don't print the book until we have reached one of those two points. This allows us to guarantee that we only print exactly as many copies as are ordered (zero waste, more effective production cost structures) and it also allows us to guarantee buyers that even if a title doesn't sell out immediately, they will be waiting a maximum of 90 days to receive their books (not a bad wait time for a pre-order of an exclusive title).
Then I asked him how they were actually making these books, and he said:Our printing is done by our regular Mud Luscious Press printer, facilitated by David McNamara at Sunnyoutside - this printer allows us to do runs as small as 25 copies and as large as we like (David is fantastic!).
That’s a damn smart & practical way to handle the production of a book. And the idea of a time-based edition could yield other interesting results. Speculation aside, this approach is a concrete example of the way that new printing technologies (print-on-demand, digital presses capable of quality printing and short runs) and new distribution the technologies (the Internet) are changing the ways that small press books are produced. This kind of approach would not have been possible (at least in this streamlined of a form) 10 years ago. These kinds of innovations and changes are extremely important. And it helps to reinforce my conviction that this is the most exciting time to be engaged in textual culture since Gutenberg made that crazy invention of his.
The following quote is from: Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006) 58-9. It offers a sociological/cultural definition of authority, which is perhaps useful for our examination of authorship:[…] Authority names a complex social process of dependency. A person possessed of authority differs from a tyrant, who deploys brute force to be obeyed. As Weber long ago observed, someone possessed of authority elicits voluntary obedience; his or her subjects believe in him. They may believe him to be harsh, cruel, unjust, but still, something more is present. People below come to rely on those above them. In charismatic forms of authority, those below believe that the authority figure will complete and enable what is incomplete and disabled in themselves; in bureaucratic forms of authority, they believe that institutions will take responsibility for them. […]
What’s interesting about this definition is that it points out the fact that people desire authority—it “elicits voluntary obedience.” We, as readers, expect and believe that we need the author(ity) to explain & guarantee the meaning/value of the work. Cutting away the author is to free the work from its primary signifier. Without this we are alone, tentative, fumbling. There is anxiety. There does not seem to be a goal.I do not ask authority or authorship from the mug that I’m drinking coffee out of. Its specific function frees me of that anxiety. Can “use value” replace the author(ity) in art?
The goal is no longer to be an “artist” or “author:”[…] The new mode of book production […] In the figure of the master printer, […] produced a “new man” who was adept in handling machines and marketing products even while editing texts, founding learned societies, promoting artists and authors, advancing new forms of data collection, and contributing to erudite disciplines. […] [1]
But the “master printer” should be dissolved into the press itself:[…] The new mode of book production […] In the figure of the small press, […] produced a “new productivity” that was adept in handling machines and marketing products even while editing texts, founding learned societies, promoting artists and authors, advancing new forms of data collection, and contributing to erudite disciplines. […]
The emphasis, obviously, remains on production, but what an expanded list of activities, all out there in the world.1. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 154. The image in this post was scanned from the cover of the book. The caption describing it reads: “A printer’s shop, detail of an engraving from Nova Reperta, a series of prints, designed by Vasari’s pupil, Stradanus, in the 1580s, engraved and published by the Antwerp firm of Galleus. […]”
HTMLGiant is running a series by contributor Christopher Higgs called "What is Experimental Literature?" The posts are essentially mini-interviews with a different writer each time, gathering various thoughts on, you guessed it, "experimental fiction." This week's post featured NewLights author Brian Evenson, and it is a really interesting read. My favorite jewel-like gem is:[...] That strikes me as the heart of innovative writing: necessity and seriousness (even if it’s a comedic seriousness) inextricably bound to a real attention to language and form, whatever the specifics of that attention might be. All the other things that we might find in innovative writing–typographical experimentation, sexual transgressiveness, narrative disruption, verbal bedazzlement, etc., etc.,–all of which are readily identifiable and can be very good things in the right hands, they all come secondary to that. But since those things are much easier to talk about, we tend to think of them as characterizing innovative writing. But such characterizations are faulty, maybe even lazy, and I think end up missing the point. [...]
You can read the rest here.Also, Brian has a related essay in this month's issue of The Collagist, which is also really good, and deals with an idea (the process/aesthetics of stripping away) that I am very, very interested in.
When I was first thinking about and planning this series of posts, the idea was to base them on a close reading of two essays, the classics on the subject: “The Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes, and “What is an Author?” by Michel Foucault.B O R I N G!Actually, no, not boring, not at all. But if the intent here is to look critically at authorship now, then staying within just those two (authoritative) essays doesn’t make much sense. Refined approach: use the reading of the essays as a structuring principle, but build the “text” from in situ writing and other sources. Keep the authorial on its guard, and do not be beholden to just two powerful voices, no matter how insightful they are, no matter how much you may want to agree with them.& keep up the interchange of this series on authorship with the other series on The Hand-Mechanical and The Democratic Multiple. The switching between the three is the movement of this practice.& a new book this weekend, related & humane, and bringing other things back around. From Richard Sennett, The Craftsman, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 37-8:The modern era is often described as a skills economy, but what exactly is a skill? The generic answer is that skill is a trained practice. In this, skill contrasts to the coup de foudre, the sudden inspiration. The lure of inspiration lies in part in the conviction that raw talent can take the place of training. Musical prodigies are often cited to support this conviction—and wrongly so. An infant musical prodigy like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart did indeed harbor the capacity to remember large swatches of notes, but from ages five to seven Mozart learned how to train his great innate musical memory when he improvised at the keyboard. He evolved methods for seeming to produce music spontaneously. The music he later wrote down again seems spontaneous because he wrote directly on the page with relatively few corrections, but Mozart’s letters show that he went over his scores again and again in his mind before setting them in ink.
We should be suspicious of claims for innate, untrained talent. “I could write a good novel if only I had the time” or “if only I could pull myself together” is usually a narcissist’s fantasy. Going over an action again and again, by contrast, enables self-criticism. Modern education fears repetitive learning as mind-numbing. Afraid of boring children, avid to present ever-different stimulation, the enlightened teacher may avoid routine—but thus deprives children of the experience of studying their own ingrained practice and modulating it from within.
Skill development depends on how repetition is organized. This is why in music, as in sports, the length of a practice session must be carefully judged: the number of times one repeats a piece can be no more than the individual’s attention span at a given stage. As skill expands, the capacity to sustain repetition increases. In music this is the so-called Isaac Stern rule, the great violinist declaring that the better your technique, the longer you can rehearse without becoming bored. There are “Eureka!” moments that turn the lock in a practice that has jammed, but they are embedded in routine.
The clip above is from Emile de Antonio's 1972 film Painters Painting. The film itself (highly recommended, by the way) is made up of interviews with artists, collectors, critics, and dealers. This clip shows part of the interview with Andy Warhol. Note how he's also holding a microphone, as if he's conducting the interview as well. Warhol's "film crew" can also be seen in the background/mirror.
The role of publisher/designer/bookmaker naturally puts one in a strange and strained relationship with the role of the author. One spends a great deal of time and energy making and distributing work that is not necessarily one’s own. That is not completely one’s own. That can be very much one’s own.Traditionally the designer and printer of books is supposed to hide their work, and let the author’s text be communicated as clearly, quickly, and cleanly as possible. Multiple voices of authorship are noise in the channel. Noise complicates things. Noise makes for an impure experience. Noise is the murmuring of the crowd, or the grinding of the machine, or both. Noise is confusion. Noise is public. Noise is the penetration of the world into the hermetic realm of art.Noise is figure/ground ambiguity. Noise is far worse than figure/ground ambiguity, it is work/frame ambiguity. One never leaves, the ringing in the ears persists. The experience of the work does not stay within the reader’s interaction with the work, does not remain separate from, or other. Noise cuts right through to the receiving subject in body, space, and time. Noise speaks to the individual as one individual among many.Silence is a myth.The body is a noisy machine, always present.
The 10th year! Amazing! You can get all the info about exhibiting at this year's bigger & better show here.
The new issue (#29) of JAB, the Journal of Artists' Books is out. I got my copy in the mail the other day, and it is, as usual, an impressive production. I was looking through it thinking, I can't believe that they print this. Offset printing is amazing, and there are some choice "offset moments" in the magazine. For the contents and colophon pages they used proof sheets overprinted in many transparent layers of black, with silver text and image printed over that. The silver text is amazingly crisp and clear despite the heaviness of the background. And extra artists' books in the back! Get it here.
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.
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 PleaseOstranenie.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?
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.
ANALOG
VS.
DIGITAL
Isn’t that above image amazing? It’s a poem by Robert Creeley, with accompanying German translation, published in 1962 in issue #7 of the mimeo magazine Rhinozeros. Jed Birmingham recently posted it to the Mimeo Mimeo blog. There is some wonderful freedom in that approach. Seeing it today makes me realize how much more great stuff there is to do.Today is the eleventh birthday of the NewLights Press. I was just reading my post from a year ago, and as part of that I had a list of what I hoped to publish in that coming year, Year 10 as it has been “officially” known. I managed to do a handful of things on that list. Not too bad, considering I had no idea that I would be moving to a new state and starting a new job when I wrote that. Not too bad. Could’ve been better. Could’ve been worse. The important thing is, I think, that things are getting made, and that the pace & engagement has been able to increase since the move.It feels really good to be in the thick of production on the current project. Sure, there have been some late nights, some sore muscles, and some confused, slightly late mornings. But in less than 2 weeks there will be 200 more books. The first NewLights book in more than a year and a half. Year 10 was the first of 10 years that NewLights did not release a book. But that year is over, and now things are going to get going & going.And summer and some focused time to work around the corner.Things are good. Books are being made. The eternal questioning and wrestling continue. Thank you for reading, thank you for the future.
This song is what inspired me to get into the small press game.The line "talk me into losing, just as long as I can win" really resonated with me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 GhostWarm Milk Printing PressThe CollagistWe 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.
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.
I wants to be:[...]
a standard level of quality [...]
a certain field of conceptual or theoretical coherence [...]
a stylistic uniformity [...]
a definite historical figure in which a series of events converge
[...]
I is not:[...]
a standard level of quality [...]
a certain field of conceptual or theoretical coherence [...]
a stylistic uniformity [...]
a definite historical figure in which a series of events converge
[...]
What I is is not that. The world?The quotes are from: Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?" Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 128.
A month or so ago I received an email from a poet/printer that I admire, and in that email he wrote:
[...] I want to say however how much I admire and value your enterprise - for me, the book has to stay alive, and while I appreciate the argument (I have other reasons for being forever grateful for some writings of Roland Barthes), the author has to stay alive also - for who benefits by the death of the author, of individuality, of specific agency - well, it's money, power, and monopolistic enterprise of every sort [...]
And I realized that he had a good point—the "death of the author" is a dangerous idea. I realized that in my, shall we say, postmodern zeal I had dismissed the author entirely, had not looked at the concept critically, and had not, very importantly, examined how that concept is playing out today in the cultural field. A regular reader of this blog (if such an angel exists) would know that the work of NewLights is deeply concerned with the problem(s) of making. In fact, it is that activity of making, that problem, the risk and danger of it, the absurdity of it, the absolute necessity of it, that drives the whole enterprise. So there is something worth recovering in the idea of authorship, at least of authorship in the sense of “one who makes things.” But there are aspects of authorship worth shedding as well—that are necessary to shed—namely its links to authority and the power that denies the very act of authorship.And of course where there is danger, there is something at stake, and that is where the interesting discussions are.Mr. Beckett, via Mr. Foucault, provides our title for this series. The full quote:What matter who’s speaking, someone said, what matter who’s speaking.
I feel like I am just waking up, bleary-eyed, and seeing this screen after a long, long sleep. It is 6 AM, figuratively and literally. I have been away. A new day/week/month/year of work beckons. I hope that I am up to the task.(Too many “I”s on this blog lately. This is not about me. This is about the work. (What is “this?”))There have been two main threads of discussion-dissection-re-presentation here lately: the series of posts on hand-mechanical processes (“Machined, or the Hand-Mechanical”) and the series on the democratic multiple (“The Return of the Democratic Multiple?”). Soon, there will be a third, untitled as of yet, about authorship and based in a close reading of at least two essays. Probably bits of more, as these things are always constellations, shimmering. And all three threads will be braided together, albeit unevenly. Albeit barely a braid. Perhaps a series of clumps. But they will be there, together. And isn’t being together what counts?And of course all of those things will be here with these things, the documentation of and elaboration on the processes of making and distributing. And somehow all of it goes together, and we see, here, now, a system chaotically unfolding, perpetually cutting out its own heart. This is the only way for us to operate.
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.
Text by KC Trommer
Letterpress with hand-mechanical printing and delamination
Variable edition of 25
12” x 18”
2011
$200
Text by Brenda Iijima
Letterpress with hand-mechanical printing and delamination
Variable edition of 25
12” x 18”
2011
$200
Fig. 06.11.01
Fig. 06.11.02
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