Fine Press Book Association

Dear letterpress printers & FPBA colleagues,

I am writing on behalf of the North American chapter of the Fine Press Book Association to invite you to contribute an ephemeral piece to the special copies of Parenthesis 19, which will go to press this summer. The special copies are hard bound, and slipcased with a portfolio which includes pieces of ephemera from various presses and printers. We are asking this as a donation of time and materials, with the object of having your work shown to an audience who might otherwise not encounter it.

The ephemera can take almost any form you wish, but there are restrictions as to size. The finished piece should measure no more than 8 1/2 by 11 inches [215 by 275mm], although of course it may be a larger sheet folded down to that size. We will need 114 copies of whatever piece you print for the deluxe membership editions and for a bundle exchange amongst contributors. Please note this is a portfolio exchange for contributors — you will not receive the bound edition.

For this issue we would especially like to receive submissions from California printers and presses—but that does not preclude anyone else from participating.

So go ahead, throw some ink around, stretch your typographic legs! Color is not essential but is always welcome, as are illustrated pieces. This is your opportunity to print that little broadsheet, pamphlet, poem card, or whatever else you have had in the typographic corner of your mind for months or years. We only ask that you do not simply send a prospectus for a book you are printing, or which you have printed. This is not a forum for direct advertising, but an opportunity to show your style and to have some fun. In the process, you will greatly help Parenthesis and the Fine Press Book Association.

Some past contributors of printed ephemera to the North American Deluxe Edition include:

Arion Press, Aliquando Press, Cotton Socks Press, Barbarian Press, Gehenna Press, Full Moon Press, Incline Press, Leopard Studio Editions, Lock’s Press, Loveletter Press, Midnight Paper Sales, (m)Other Tongue Press, Passim Editions, Red Howler Press, Robin Price, Sherwin Beach Press, Walking Bird Press, Warwick Press, Whittington Press, and Yellow Barn Press, to name but a few.

If you are not a member of the FPBA already, that need not preclude your taking part, but please consider joining. The association is the only organization that is furthering the work of fine press printing and the book arts in both North America and the UK, and Parenthesis, which appears twice a year, is the only forum in which books from presses such as yours are reviewed and advertised. To join the FPBA, go to: http://www.fpba.com/join/sign-up.html.

IMPORTANT NOTES:

1. If you wish to contribute something, please contact me (Mark McMurray) by e-mail to confirm. My address is mcm@stlawu.edu

2. Your contribution should be sent NO LATER THAN June 15, 2010. Please send your work to:

Mark McMurray

Caliban Press

14 Jay Street

Canton, NY 13617 USA

3. Remember that the overall size of the finished piece must be 8 1/2 by 11 inches or less.

4. Please email me a short blurb about yourself and your submission, as we will include a cover sheet in the portfolio that will give some details about you.

We thank you very much for your consideration, and we hope you will be joining us in this project.

With all best bibliographic wishes,

Mark McMurray

Deluxe Ephemera Coordinator

The American Printing History Association has announced the date and topic of their 35th Annual Conference, “Learning To Print, Teaching to Print.” It will be held in Washington, DC, October 15th–17th, 2010, at the Corcoran College of Art + Design. Download the Call for Proposals here. (It’s a PDF.)

–Bob McCamant

Wilber H. Schilling (aka Chip; proprietor of the Indulgence Press; recently elected to FPBA NA board) has been named the 2010 Minnesota Book Artist of the Year. He’s been getting a lot of ink, and has a solo show at the Minnesota Center for the Book Arts. Here he is being touted by the Saint Paul Public Library. The show runs til March 21.

–Bob McCamant

From the Fine Books Blog comes the news that Fine Books and Collections, which went digital in 2008, will be returning to print in April. Rebecca Rego Barry, a Fine Books Blog contributor, writes,

In announcing its plans, the magazine said it would continue its monthly e-letter online and its very popular blog. According to associate publisher Kim Draper, the web site has grown tremendously in the past year, having just topped 50,000 monthly visitors.

“We don’t hope to achieve as much readership in print, but we do think print has a certain charm and value that is impossible to obtain online,” says Draper.” It remains a conundrum why collectors of print love reading online, but we are delighted to be able to serve both needs.”

Read the full story here.

A number of FPBA members will be showing their artists’ books, calligraphy, and prints during the Bath Literature Festival at the Gallery in Chapel Row, Bath from February 13 to March 2, 2010. The list of exhibitors includes Susan Allix, Olivia Clifton-Bligh, Gwasg Gregynog, Impact Press, Incline Press, Inky Parrot Press, Spoon Print Press, Mintyfresh (Kate Holland), Andy Moore, Old School Press, Old Stile Press, p’s & q’s press, Whittington Press, Woodcroft Press, and engraver Neil Bousfield.

A big thanks to Frances McDowall of the Old Stile Press for the tip. — Paul Razzell

John Kristensen and Jesse Marsolais of Firefly Press have received a Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Grant awarded by the Massachusetts Cultural Council. The grant will allow John to make time to teach Jesse the ins and outs of the Monotype system. Already competent at running the Linotype, young Jesse will no doubt take full advantage of this opportunity and help keep Monotype alive for the next generation. The Boston Globe reports on John & Jesse’s grant here. And, incidentally, John Kristensen also has a well-illustrated article in the latest issue of APHA’s Printing History.

— Michael Russem

This morning I learned that Kat Ran Press’s The Certainty of Numbers has been nominated for the New England Art Awards’ Best Book of 2009. According to Kat Ran Press’s Michael Russem, “These awards are sponsored by The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research, which, despite the fact that it presently has a picture of Paris Hilton at the top of its Web page, seems to be a useful survey of New England museums and galleries. If (alas) a Republican can win Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, then our little book, printed in an edition of sixty copies has a chance at winning the Best Book title of 2009.” To vote, click here. The Book category is at the top of the page so just click the dot next to Michael Russem of Kat Ran Press in Cambridge and Florence, Mass., publisher of ‘The Certainty of Numbers,’ written by Bruce Snider and illustrated by Michael Russem. Enter your name and e-mail then click submit ballot at the bottom of the page. The whole thing shouldn’t take more than a minute.

We wish Michael and the whole Kat Ran Press team the best of luck.

— Paul Razzell

Printer and typographer Jim Rimmer, who passed away last Friday, touched the lives of hundreds of artists, illustrators, printers, typographers, musicians, and friends over the years, and no doubt there will be many tributes to Jim in the coming weeks and months. One early tribute is the Facebook page Remembering Jim Rimmer, which you can see — and contribute to — here.

Photo copyright Ryan Mah.

— Paul Razzell

Rollin Millroy reports: “I’m sad to report that Jim Rimmer passed away yesterday. We’ll all miss not just his expertise, but his spirit & generosity.”
I had the honor to interview him in March of 2008. Here is my report:

Jim Rimmer is a Vancouver typographer, printer, and designer. He is also one of the pieces of glue that holds the world of Vancouver fine printers together; countless times, I heard people say things like, “I had a problem, and Jim was able to fix it,” or, “I had no idea how I was going to get accents for the font, but Jim cut some for me.”
Rimmer was apprenticed to a Vancouver typographer, J. W. Boyd, in 1950. After his 6 years as an apprentice, he worked at composing another 6 years, but by then he could see the handwriting on the wall; there was no future in typography. So he went to night school to become a graphic designer, after which he worked at newspapers and design firms. He hung out his own shingle as a free-lancer in 1971, and never worked in someone else’s studio thereafter. But metal type and letterpress printing interested him all along, and he started to accumulate equipment in his basement and work/play with it in his spare time. “In 1964 I started collecting like crazy. So many people were getting rid of type and letterpress equipment. Some of it needed to be saved,” he said.
He has several presses, including the very large Colt’s Armory. He also has a complete Monotype setup, which lets him cast individual letters for handsetting and complete pages of text when driven by punched paper tapes. But the most unusual thing he has is a pair of pantograph machines, which allow him to engrave matrices for making new type faces. (I’ve seen working Monotype setups half a dozen times in my life, but the only pantographs I remember eeing were in books.) In fact, he even has a third pantograph in storage, a Ludlow Weibking pantograph he got from the late Paul Hayden Duensing who had, a couple of decades earlier, acquired it from the Caxton Club’s own Robert Hunter Middleton, who was allowed by the Ludlow company to place them with deserving individuals. But unlike the ones Rimmer uses, the Ludlow one has no markings for setup, so it is much harder to use.
In the graphic design world, Rimmer was always good with a brush or pen, and he frequently hand-lettered logotypes or drew insignias. (“They called me a ‘wrist,’” he joked.) So it was not a big step for him to design typefaces. He tried a few in the era when the Photo Typositor was the king of setting headlines (the 1960s and early 1970s), but was disappointed that they did not sell particularly well because they were not the kinds of styles then in vogue. But in the digital era he has a huge number of typefaces to his credit. P22 type house, of Buffalo, sells more than 200 of his faces, distributed through 18 type families. Many of these are revivals of classic faces (some done first for Lanston or Giampa) while others are entirely original. I have half a dozen of his adaptations in my font library, but didn’t realize he had done them until I spoke with him in Vancouver.
Here again, Rimmer goes one better than type designers I have known. He has not done just digital type, but metal versions of some of his faces. When he’s going to make a metal face, he first draws it by hand, then transfers it to the Ikarus program on the computer. That allows him to play with spacing and do trial settings to be sure it looks right in small sizes. He prints out outlines from the computer, and these are used to hand-cut cardboard ones. The cardboard outlines are used with the pantograph to create smaller lead matrices. A final pantograph step creates actual-size matrices in brass for use on the casters.
His most recent face, called Stern (in honor of friend and fellow typographer Chris Stern, who died unexpectedly in his 50s), is to be simultaneously released to the public in digital and metal by P22. The foundry has even made a video of Rimmer at work in his basement casting the metal. “They had a lot of fun shooting it,” he said. “My workshop is close quarters, and they had to be careful not to bump their heads or get into something hot.”
The big project front and center in his shop right now is his edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Right now all the pages of metal type are in cabinets around the room. “This one I’m having proofread four times. In the end, eleven typos were discovered in my last big book, which I consider an embarrassment. So this time I’m being as careful as I can be.” The Tom Sawyer includes his own drawings and uses his own typeface, Hannibal Oldstyle. The type is standing and he’s gotten the paper in (a cream-colored paper from Arches), so now all he’s waiting for is the completion of the proofreading.
This is actually the fourth big book from his Pie Tree press. He did an edition of Dickens’ Christmas Carol in 1998, Shadow River: The Selected and Illustrated Poems of Pauline Johnson in 1999, and Leaves from the Pie Tree (the story of his life in typography) in 2006. And in between, there have been dozens of pamphlets and broadsides for just about every book-related event in British Columbia over a span of many years.

–Bob McCamant

A perfect film to watch while procrastinating on the last day of the year (or the first day), Final Marks: The Art of the Carved Letter is a classic documentary about letters, lettercutting, and doing things carefully. The film follows John E. Benson and his team at the John Stevens Shop in Newport, Rhode Island, as they carve and install pieces in Newport and Washington, DC. One fact that always blows this reporter’s mind is that Benson cut JFK’s grave and memorial at Arlington when he was just 25-years-old. Incidentally, a little more than halfway into the film, Benson starts on an alphabet stone commissioned by the printers Michael & Winifred Bixler. Watch the entire 49-minute movie here.

— Michael Russem