After two days of photographing citizens of Newark, Delaware for the Histories of Newark: 1758-2008 eBay offered a nice diversion with some new letterpress things for the studio.

42 point Garamond Outline in foundry type. We’ve never seen this before.

6 line Goudy Italic in wood. We’ve had Goudy in wood before but never the lowercase. Has some nice letters.

This woodtype looked like it would make some nice Copperplate initial caps somewhere.

This was a nice full upper and lowercase font that we thought might be good for printing names on certificates. There is enough of it that you could set a number of names before needing to redistribute.

Our first full wood typeface and it was nice to make it Gill Sans. Gill Sans has been one of our favorite typefaces for a while now.  We even did a gravestone rubbing of Eric Gill’s grave site in Spean, England.

An eBay buy in a nice complete font of Cheltenham Condensed Outline. Now if we can develop the mechanism of producing our own wood type it would be nice to create the insides so we could print these in two colors.

Are you a student or someone new to letterpress interested in some letterpress experience?

What about an internship for the day (or more likely just a couple of hours)?

We do a lot of work that is free (important friends, important causes, important fun, important chances to experiment) or nearly free and it is that work that I’m referring to in this post and not work for ‘paying’ customers.

These are a few things on our list right now that fit into this experience.

. . .

Yesterday I printed 250 of our Boxcards printed on recycled board that reads “100 percent post consumer waste greetings” to give out to  visitors. Someone like you could have done that printing.

We recently finished printing a broadside (see right) for a student poet who had written a nice poem and we thought having a broadside of the poem would feel good. It would have been an interesting project for an intern both for the composition and the handrolling.

In the next few days we will be printing a certificate in handset metal type with an interesting CMY (no K) border for an award given in the name of a former student’s friend who recently passed away.

A photographer friend is having a Manhattan exhibition of his work in May and we are working on a keepsake idea to give to those attending the show’s opening.

We need to make pastepapers to use for small book covers made during  our ‘creative letterpress’ / bookmaking workshops.

Coming up this spring is the designing and printing of a diploma for an 8th grade class. We are excited about doing it in the style of the Nobel Prize certificates, which contain original artwork.

I could use some energy to help me get our Albion handpress working correctly as well as covering the tympans and frisket with paper.

A Minneapolis-based former student wants help doing a letterpress poster for ArtCrank (an exhibition of bicycle-related posters by local artists) to be held in April.

Might you be interested in handrolling a gazillion copies of text that would be combined to make a kind of flipbook film for a very important friend on a very important project (still doing it for free)?

Jill and Ray are members of the American Printing History Association and are working on podcasts of various letterpress printers in the Washington, DC area. While connected to letterpress this is actually a film project.

There are probably 6 more in play at the present time that we could do some part of on any given day.

. . .

We were thinking we could come up with a mechanism where we could post a project and/or a day. We don’t much care much if it is on a weekday or a weekend (just have to avoid workshops), day or evenings, so anyone who has Thursday afternoons open might push for something to happen then.

Some projects may have several steps and someone could stop in for any and all of them depending on what they wanted to get out of the experience.

Many of these projects don’t have very strictly scheduled due dates so there could flexibility in someone coming down on several different days to help finish the project.

You would probably have to be willing to commit a minimum of a 2-hour time block. You wouldn’t get paid as these are the kinds of projects we don’t get paid for, but we could give you maybe 5 copies of what we were printing.

If you sign up, you would have to actually follow through on it. If you schedule it and don’t do it, then likely you would forever be off our list for future projects.

If you already know something about letterpress that would be nice, but it often wouldn’t be necessary.

We’re thinking you would need to have ‘liked’ us on Facebook to schedule.

Also someone might say they’d like to come down on a Thursday afternoon for X number of hours without any particular project in mind and we’ll schedule something for then. Or someone might say they want to work on a specific project and we’ll find a time to schedule it that is convenient.

COMMENTS? It would be nice to see what people thought of this and it may be a way for a number of you to help us figure out a mechanism to connect our schedule to yours. What would make this work for you? What could we do to help you get some letterpress experience and all of us have some fun in the process?

We just finished a nice experimental piece using our Intertype. We were pretty far into learning how to use it when we discovered that you could cast the same line over and over. We had been wanting to use that for something. We set the word rain in varying upper and lowercase, interspersed with odd spacing and an occasional period or two. Then locked it up on the diagonal with four extra runs to get a bit of splashing going on at the bottom.

The back side of the page is a story of two interactions Ray had with Helmut Krone and Bob Gill about creative problem solving. Was nice to relive those moments.

We don’t want to give away the whole story until “It’s a Small World” comes out. Then we’ll put a larger version so you can see some of the nice detail and read the text.

We had a fun, Saturday night interaction with ‘liker”s on Facebook, giving away 10 copies for their collections.

Looking for a way to get some letterpress experience. At Lead Graffiti we’ve come up with the idea of shorternships, essentially an internship that lasts only a couple of hours.

They don’t pay as they are always tied to pro bono projects we are doing.

You don’t have to have letterpress experience.

You have to sign up for at least two hours.

If you sign up you have to come.

We have some things we will trade instead of offering pay you might find desirable.

Check out the options.

In the social revolution that is happening on the Internet, it surely isn’t happening in the concrete world of paper. I find it amazing how much trouble you can sometimes go to and have no acknowledgement from the recipient of your trouble.

Anyway, if you’ve been following us at all you should know about Craig Cutler’s CC52 project. While they were here I had commented on how nice it was to have great equipment. Little comes close to “having the right tool for the right job.” Craig had to rush out at the end of the shoot, leaving his two assistants to clean up. I took Craig to the train station and when I got back they had left their lighting stands for us.

When I called Craig to tell him “No way,” he said he was moving his studio into a new location and was getting all new stands anyway. Yeah, right. But honestly we’ve really ramped up the quality of our photos. Those stands help out a lot more than I thought they would.

This was our photographic thank you to Craig with a bit of handrolled letterpress. He left 7 stands and a couple rolls of seamless. It all fit together quite well. It is actually harder to get those arms to intertwine than you would think. Check out Craig’s photos from Lead Graffiti, if you haven’t already.

Craig Cutler, noted New York photographer, is near completion of a year-long series of weekly personal projects entitled CC52. The 49th in the series are photographs taken at Lead Graffiti.

Click on Craig’s image of some of our 96 point foundry metal Caslon below and take a look.