More letterpress adventures

There are no pictures of me in action this time as I was the only one in the studio Book Studio, due to term break and Caren is having a well deserved research break- part of which was at Otago printing press, Dunedin. So it was just me and The Beast. I was a little nervous so I did venture into the nearby honours studios and ask the conscientious students socialising working to come running is if they heard screams. But I am please to say that I did not fuck up the press or rip the paper drum (I have forgotten it's Proper Name) although I did print red hate and silver love onto it once or twice. It does sound as if it has a new wheeze but I could just be being paranoid.

I was printing up a couple of things- the extra chapzines (which is still in process but fairly straight forward as the chases are already set), and a cover for the new Flaps: Hate Mail #3. With Caren not being there to check my chases I made several mistakes. Not so many on the first plate- which I printed in red- so I could so straight over the orange of the chapzine plate and not have to clean the rollers. But with the second plate- silver- it took a a while to work out how I should set the chase and place it on the bed.

Take one:

Take Two:

There are four changes that you can see. There was more padding to bring short letters up to type high. With photocopying it's so easy to make a change to where you put a page and my mind is so geared to reversing and the paper and printing face down that it was a little weird thinking through how I had to place and set each plate. Caren would have answered all my questions in two seconds before I had placed it on the bed, where there is not enough space to turn the chases without lifting them up and therefore losing loose letters and all the paper padding you have in place.

The original idea was to have the two plates printed over each other as you can see below:

But as you can see it wasn't working. I set both plates with wooden type as they are a lot larger and you can quickly create a solid page of type. However the same scale makes over printing in this style harder read. I was realising then what was working with the two colour plates in the Nature Strip Chapzine. But the biggest and mist painful aspect about making changes when you have the chase in place , is that it takes many hours to set the plate, and a good hour to clean up so you feel very committed to getting something printed- or using the plates that you have. So an emergency decision was made to print the second plate on the back side. Here's the two sides:

It still needed something to make it work and to make it clear what the zine was about and who by. So we stamped the cover with our trusty rubber stamps- used in three Flaps editions now, the other two being Sad Sack Saturday Night and Joe Jobs.

You can buy Flaps and other zines at Sticky in Melbourne and online with Smells like zines and hopefully soon Format.

Procrastinating- Berlin alphabet

I bought this set of type 10 years ago in Berlin. At the time I thought they where rubber stamps- and it might turn out that they are in fact rubber stamps, but lately my theory is that they are some hybrid letterpress. They seem to be a very hard rubber that has been glued onto some pine bases. For the arguments pro and contra them being letterpress:-

Pro:

The rubber is too hard for rubber stamps and it seems to reject water based inks. The ink tends to separate on the surface of the letter making it hard to get good coverage and a dark print (in next post). As I bought them in Berlin from someone selling various pillaged things from the former East, it could have just been bad quality rubber.

Contra:

The bases seem to be some kind of pine or other soft wood. Pine is not usually used in moveable type as it gets dented too easily. I have been wondering though whether the rubber tops have been removed from their original bases and remounted as the bases have no ink stains and x heights are also not consistent. The other fact that counts against these being moveable type is that the profile is too high for moveable type.

I can’t remember what the standard measurement is for type, Caren has it pasted helpfully on the wall opposite from where you would stand in order to set the pressure of the press: the beast (I’m not sure whether it has a nickname or gender- for me it is gender neutral). My memory says .987 but maybe that’s from an inch? All the measurements for type and furniture we have in the Book Studio are in inches (is all moveable type like this?), which make all the measurements really abstract for me.

However whatever the original use of these letters, I am going to cut the bases and use them as moveable type. And as there is only one alphabet I have started to make several sets of letters in polymer by filling up some of the negative spaces on the films I set to get the centre of the Nature Strip chapzine made.

Of course I have absolutely no spare time to be doing this or writing this entry- I am filming part of the Aichi work tomorrow and have things to do before then- but I find myself being quiet fascinated by this little project.

Along with the questions above my main question is: What is the type font? And what would the capitals look like? Any ideas out there?

Packing and planning while working

Second last day here at Tokyo Wonder site. Photos above give should be compared with the first ones I posted. I don’t think it’s too bad… Could be worse, but still it’s going to take ages to sort it all out. I don’t know why I am such a paper hoarder- mainly because I am afraid of forgetting things. And a zine maker… this would look good, extra photocopy here of a page etc.

Working on some stamps at the moment- will post (ha! you are probably not believe those promises now).

This is the lovely JR lady fixing up my pass and booking my first trip to Beppu for Thursday morning. It’s going to be a 4:30am start- ouch! She used every one of those stamps in the kit to activate the pass. The large one set to the Japanese year calendar is my favourite.

Abiko Bird Museum

I’m not sure why anyone would want to sit in a room full of stuffed birds, although the purple leather couch is sort I would make a bee-line for in other surroundings. I’m not quiet sure what I was expecting from “Bird Museum” and I guess should have guessed there would be lots of dead birds- which usually doesn’t bother me too much- I mean I’m not the sort to cry over dead birds per se, perhaps it was that this space felt more lifeless than the other conservation/ education reserves I have visited here. Although I did learn an important piece of information (perhaps this is because it was one of the only signs translated)- the Japanese Crested Ibis, which is on the cover of the field guide I am using (and makes an appearance in my first zine here- pictures coming), is like the Kakapo in New Zealand, the last 5 where rounded up and are in a captive breeding program on the Island of Sado (there are now 10).

I was thinking about how field guides often have a really rare bird on the cover- New Zealand’s has a Kakapo and Kiwi among other birds, I wonder whether this is because it attracts the twitcher hunter or that rarities have a fame beyond the bird world so are identifiable for non-birders? (while uploading the field image to flickr I realised that the field guide to the birds of Asia also has two very rare birds- the Mandarin Duck and the Baikal Teal)

It was a really really cold day, down round zero with a nasty ice wind coming down from the north, so I didn’t see much moving in the marsh. I did see some white swans- I’m still finding it hard to de-program my Australian birder bias of filtering our ferals and ‘junk’ birds. The marsh around a large lake and it's a fairly urban area so I just assumed that the swans where introduced European Mute Swans and therefore could be ignored. After flicking through the guide at the museum I realised that there are 3 local types of white swans (as well as the Euro feral). On the walk back to the station I saw them again- Whistling Swans.