We just completed a whirlwind 8 days with Virginia Green from Baylor University. Virginia wants to jump into the deep end of the pool of letterpress. She got a nice grant to come, study, and print at Lead Graffiti.

The photo above illustrates a few memorable events. From the top left: when we got back from picking Virginia up at the airport Ben Kiel of House Industries was printing a poster for the Tour de France; visiting with Roland Hoover, former letterpress printer for Yale University; talking with Mike Kaylor, looking over the woodcuts and letterpress with Chris Manson; setting a full 15″ x 20″ area of 48 point Garamond; visiting Mike Denker and his wood type collection; drooling over a Kelmscott “Chaucer” with Rebecca Johnson Melvin of Special Collections at the University of Delaware, and speed printing twenty 2-color carefully registered notecards, including trimming / creasing / folding, in less than 90 minutes.

I think she knew she was here.

Jill and Ray are giving a talk to the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference at the end of April on our work designing, photographing, and cooperating with 50+ authors for Histories of Newark: 1758-2008 that we published under our Wallflowers Press name in 2007. The book was a 288-page, hard cover book with some nice details published in an edition of 1000 numbered copies which sold out in about 6 months.

MARAC was nice enough to use a few photographs of Newark citizens that ran as a band through the entire book on their Spring 2010 booklet cover.

description of the $450 deluxe copies: still have five of the twelve for sale

all of the entries on our blog related to the project

Ben Kiel and Rich Roat of House Industries, the wonderful & nearby digital type foundry, spent a late night at Lead Graffiti working on a poster Ben had designed for Richard Sachs Cycles. The posters are going to be sold at the Shimano North American Handmade Bicycle Show in Richmond, VA at the end of February.

As it turned out, it was the largest photopolymer plate (about 17″ square) we had ever printed. Luckily we have been experimenting with a new base material for photopolymer plates to fill the beds of our Vandercooks. Up until now we didn’t have enough bases to cover the space required for this project and at the same time fit within the form size on our Vandercook Universal III.

The poster was a first time use of a beautiful new stencil type from from their forthcoming Eames Century Modern collection that is scheduled to premiere in March 2010.

Here is one more photo of ink hitting paper.

Other blog hits on the project.

thewashingmachinepost.net

trackosaurusrex.com

The Wieden + Kennedy Attack guys of Grand Army occupied Lead Graffiti for a weekend long letterpress experiment with fun. Ephemera happened. Ink happened. Wood type happened. A boatload of leading and furniture happened. Hopefully some equality will happen, but that is for a later post.

a bit of teaser: images from the printing (then next to see the images)

a bit of film: GrandArmy x Star Wars

final result of the effort: Manifest Equality

As the image of the official Lead Graffiti ‘Stormtrooper printer’s devil’ (aka Tray Nichols / TK4251) has spread like a virus across the internet we thought we would add an image to this post to provide a little credit where credit is due.

Six wonderfully aggressive graphic design seniors from Philadelphia University took it upon themselves to set up a Creative Letterpress workshop with Lead Graffiti on Saturday, January 9. We wanted to set up a group project that really let them see how letterpress worked and also might provide them with a piece they could use in their portfolio.

Each student was let loose in our wood and metal type collection to develop a spread about typography or design. They also each set their name in large metal type. These pages were printed on three different colors along with a cover called “Textiments.” After the workshop Lead Graffiti bound the three signatures together. Each student got three copies of the book with their spread as the center of the opening signature.