Lead Graffiti is pleased to announce the upcoming publication of The Multifaceted Mr. Morris. This is the catalogue of the William Morris exhibition mounted in the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection at the University of Delaware for the “Useful & Beautiful” conference held in October 2010. More than 30 books, manuscripts, drawings, and other works are described and an introduction tells the story of how the collector came to collect Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites. The author, Jane Trippett, is a PhD student in Art History at the University of Delaware.

The book is printed via letterpress in Caslon type, with eight color plates, 150 copies will be available, 100 in wrappers ($50) and 50 hardcover ($125), signed and bound with parchment.

Books will be available through Oak Knoll Books and Lead Graffiti.

As we at Lead Graffiti approach printing via letterpress as designers, we wanted to find an interesting way to incorporate some visual element to the project. Many of the pieces included in the book are fabulous, often either one-of-a-kind or ones with an important provenance.

We took each entry and looked at the piece for some visual element we found interesting. Often it was typographic, in the instance of a photo or a drawing it might just be a small area that attracted us or a word in a letter. We took those elements, photographed them, put them through Livetrace, and designed a space at the top of each page printed via letterpress for them to inhabit. We printed them in a light tone so as to not detract from the main reason this book exists. It will be interesting for someone who visits the MSL Collection to look through some of the pieces and see if they can find the image. Sometimes it will be easy. At other times it will be quite difficult.

Here are a few of the images we used in the book to give you a taste.

We’ve finally gotten a moment to post a schedule of Lead Graffiti letterpress & bookmaking workshops for January - June 2012.

LETTERPRESS

METAL TYPE COMPOSITION

Saturday, January 7
Sunday, February 5
Saturday, March 3
Sunday, April 8
Saturday, May 5
Sunday, June 3

VANDERCOOK

Sunday, January 15
Saturday, February 11
Sunday, March 11
Saturday, April 14
Sunday, May 13
Saturday, June 9

C&P FLOOR-MODEL PLATENS

Saturday, January 21
Sunday, February 19
Saturday, March 17
Sunday, April 22
Saturday, May 19
Sunday, June 17

BOOKMAKING

PASTEPAPER PRIMER

Sunday, January 8
Saturday, February 18
Saturday, April 7
Sunday, May 20

ONE DAY, ONE BOOK

Sunday, January 22
Saturday, April 21

COPTIC STITCH BINDING

Saturday, February 4
Sunday, May 6

CLASSIC CLAMSHELL

Sunday, March 4
Saturday, June 2

We love projects that push the physical envelope of letterpress. We were challenged to do a 50″ manifesto for Red Tettermer, a very creative ad agency in Philadelphia. Our Vandercook Universal III is limited to an 18″ x 24″ printing area. But that didn’t stop us.

I bought my first Macintosh (128k version) about 5 weeks after they came out in January 1984 from ComputerWorld in the Astro Shopping Center on Kirkwood Highway. I paid $2,495 for it.

I have truly loved being known as a fanatical supporter of Apple.

Steve Jobs - February 24, 1955 - October 5, 2011

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One Macintosh story.

From 1988 to about 1997 Cypher + Nichols + Design served as the advertising agency for Alanx Products, makers of wear-resistant parts for hard rock mining equipment. Starting a new campaign for Alanx we designed the “Moon” ad below left. The films required for printing that you sent to the magazines were produced by LithoColor here in Newark. In those days in the early 1990s it was no small task to accomplish things like having that product shot lay overtop of the photograph and headline. It was a very time consuming process and required a serious degree of craft.

The first set of films for the moon ad cost us $2,250.

We were heavily committed to Macintosh, but moving from a mechanical done on Illustration board to one on disk took a serious leap of faith. In the two months between those two ads we decided to bite-the-bullet and give “all digital” a serious try. We tried rather deliberately to not make the retouching Ray was going to have to be doing in Photoshop (I believe it may have been 2.0) any more difficult than we needed to, but those four elements to the product shot were all photographed individually and the type does run over the headline.

The cost for those four CMYK films was $72.50. We never used Illustration board for a mechanical again.

Here is a photo of the 23 posters in 23 days we created in our Tour de Lead Graffiti project. Each day after lunch we would hang the one from the previous day that we had used for scanning.

Click on the image if you want to see a 1440 pixel wide version. This one is 512 pixels wide.

This is Ray talking about the sensation. Jill might have a very different take on this.

It was an interesting phenomenon putting them up. For the first 4 days when I put the poster up I could feel the four days of effort. On the 5th day it felt like maybe a half day was added. Each day after that the ’sense’ of how much work it had been did not change. At day 10 it still felt like 4 or so days work. The wall was filling up, but there was a disconnect between the actual work that must have been expended and my memory of that work. Same was still true at 15 and 20 days. It was like someone had sneaked in and slipped extra posters into the display. That continued up until #22. I’m not sure I truly felt like how much work it had been or that I could just sense the light at the end of the tunnel. #23 was a long day. The next day when I got up with nothing to do, it was a strange feeling like you can have when you get on a plane in Philadelphia and fly to London. You get off the plane and you are still you, but something is very, very different.

Interesting.

We had a nice Lead Graffiti workshop on pastepaper and came up with a few nice new looks. Can’t wait to pull out 5 or 6 and experiment with those as a starting point. Here is a sampling of five interesting ones.

We do a lot of Creative Letterpress workshops with design students where we produce a book and we typically use our pastepaper for the covers. Here is an example of one of those 4″ x 5″ books from a recent workshop.

It is a great workshop for kids as the process is quite a bit like finger painting.

Jill and Ray took a fun workshop lead by Val Wells at the Philadelphia Center for the Book on May 14. Marbling is a process of dropping paint (acrylic in our case) on a fluid carageenan surface, drawing with stylus, rake, and comb, then laying down a treated paper to transfer the design. Val has exhibited albums and journals which feature her original marbled papers at craft fairs throughout the Northeast.  She has studied bookbinding and marbling since 1985, completing a BA in book arts.

Here is a photo of Val setting up a demo with Jill anxiously looking on.

Three examples from Jill’s experiments.

And three of Ray’s

While we were watching the opening demo it seemed like all of the mystique about marbling was going to dissolve. It turned out you could make something that at least had some interesting parts. What was impossible was trying to do something and then having that happen.

Great fun and we encourage anyone with an interest in bookmaking