Johnny Utah’s is a new restaurant opening up at Rockefeller Center in New York City in early July, 2007. Terre, Ray’s daughter, designed the menu and encouraged them to print it letterpress to give it a handmade quality and that brought Wallflowers Press into the project. 3,000 lunch and dinner menus in 3 colors. Terre’s design used type that was incredibly detailed, but we thought it would be be a good incentive to push our technical craft a bit.

Here is a closeup of the 1/4″ type. It is a test to get that kind of detail when you are also printing some larger, more solid areas like the word “Dinner” at the same time.

The background texture is the laid texture of the paper which doesn’t show up very well in a straight-on scan. We used Neenah Classic Laid Cover 120# in the Natural White color.

Lead Graffiti has added some page lock up furniture. One of the things we wanted to do when we started Wallflowers Press was small, limited edition books. This might help get us started toward one of the three we are currently planning.

This is one of the two cabinets that came with the furniture. This one holds 8 pica to 42 pics. The other cabinet holds 8 picas to 72 picas. We’ll post a lockup to add to this information once we try it out on a book.

Lead Graffiti is proud to announce the addition of a nice run (20 cases) of foundry Melior from 12 point to 60 point. The font was designed by Hermann Zapf in 1952. I was especially knocked over by that ‘y’.
Here is a sample.

Jill and I traveled to New York City for our impending granddaughter Attie Blu’s baby shower.

Here is a photo of the impending parents.

The evening was great with about 70 of Marc and Terre’s friends there.

Terre’s mom and mom’s sister Nancy unexpectedly flew in from Florida which added a nice flow of tears to start off the evening. Presents piled up everywhere. Our gifts were Attie Blu thank you cards and AttieBlu.com. Food and drink was abundant and a good time was had by all. Just for the record this photo was taken about 5:30 am the morning after the party.

Bridge issue…

On the drive up to New York we were just ready to start across the Delaware Memorial Bridge and drove under a sign that we’ve seen dozens of time but never much thought about. The sign said something to the effect that if you felt a lot of stress and pressure you could call … and it gave a number. We were discussing the sign as we drove up the bridge and Jill figure out that it was probably to get people to NOT STOP ON TOP OF THE BRIDGE AND JUMP.

Hmmm.

So this started a question. So let’s say you were planning to jump, drove to the top, got out your cell phone, called the number, climbed up on top of the railing, and got a “Please hold” message and music came on. What is the worst song you could imagine. I was thinking Elton John’s ‘Rocket Man’

. . . And i think it’s gonna be a long long time
. . . Till touch down brings me round again to find
. . . I’m not the man they think i am at home
. . . Oh no no no i’m a rocket man

And then the type of the trip …

We walked by this type about five floors up the side of a building (I’ve adjusted the perspective with Photoshop) while headed to Buggy’s for breakfast. We love playing with punctuation and are currently working on a series of cards where you add punctuation inside of a word to change its meaning, but that is for a later post.

Check out the “Manufac’g” as an abbreviation. Pretty cool. But then check out how ugly that F is along with the letterpsacing between it and the A. Wow.

And then the ampersand looks like something from ‘American Typewriter’ slammed in there.

Nice trip.

We’ve finished the main effort toward taking citizens of Newark photographs. Here are the totals.

Scheduled hours included in photoshoots: 98

Total number of citizen photos taken: 5,054

Total file size of originals (color .jpg images): 6.86 gigabytes

Total number of retouched photos: 1,237

Total file size of retouched photos (black/white .tif images): 2.79 gigabytes

Estimated hours for retouching: 155

Total citizens (some in multiple images): 3,767

The design of the book includes a 1″ band that will run through the middle of every page of the book to include current citizens of Newark. A book on the history of the city doesn’t have room for the contemporary city and a lot of the old photos do not include much of the humanity that has gone into that history.