Workshops and Other Projects

After many months of intermittent work, a long and ongoing project is finally complete. I’m very happy to be a part of the international bicentennial celebration of Herman Melville and his 1851 Moby-Dick, as curated by the Centre for the Study of the Book (Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford). This project took several months, and is now (as of today) on its way across the Atlantic for collection among 79 other “extracts;” together, these will make up the total set of quotations, allusions, references, and other mentions compiled “by a sub-sub-librarian” at the beginning of the novel. Mine (#58) was drawn from the nonfiction narrative of Mr. Owen Chace, who survived a “stoving in” by whale in the Pacific Ocean.

I was interested in this extract because the Chace narrative was important not only to Melville but also to one of his most ardent readers and advocates in the mid-20th century, Charles Olson. There’s a lot to say about Olson’s Call Me Ishmael—an idiosyncratic poet-scholar’s take on the genesis, themes, writing, and impact of the novel—but I had in the back of my mind Olson’s extrapolation from Moby-Dick of what he calls one of the central facts of America and American life; that is, the sheer broadness of the continent, the expansive space of the place. Or, as he phrases it, “Large, and without mercy.”

With this in the back of my mind, I knew I wanted to work with both the whiteness and the bigness of the whale and the sea. And (perhaps again channeling Olson, who turned this sense of space and place into a plastic, typographic poetics of the page—what he called “projective verse”), I wanted to do something where the typography was performative and expressive. Finally, given Melville’s attention to the archive(s) of the whale, and in turn his own contemporary status as part of the literary bedrock (or sub-current) of the American cannon, I wanted there to be more than simply the extract itself (however finely and/or adventurously printed).

What I came up with was a large-format print (larger than the technical size of my press, at 14″ by 22″–deckle to deckle and edge to edge), combining several printing techniques, several sizes of type, and at least one “collision” between the various archives before and after Melville’s Moby-Dick. The final print was executed through four print runs, combining printing from a magnesium die, a plexiglass plate (engraved by laser and then pressure printed), non-orthographic text from 18-line Gothic wood type down to 10-point Craw Clarendon, and a final colophon added outside the normal printing area of the press through the use of a frisket carrier sheet. I include images in the following, with short captions narrating the various stages. I’ll post a high-quality image of the final print soon.

Friday, May 31, 2019, was Walt Whitman’s bicentennial. Since doing a print workshop with one of my nineteenth-century American literature classes a few years ago, I’ve had in the shop a magnesium die of the famous image at the front of the first edition of Leaves of Grass. The stance and attitude projected in that image go hand in hand with the tone of that great long poem–but I also love seeing how that image works with other texts. (Once, in the gentle run-down toward the Thanksgiving holiday, students and I assembled a quick print with the image and some wood type, and thus was born the Whitman meme “POETRY IS BETTER THAN TURKEY.” Yup; the image goes with that, too!).

To mark the bicentennial of the poet and printer, I put together a little booklet. As noted in the colophon, the text collages language by and about Walt Whitman (from The Walt Whitman Archive) with the assorted flavors of the Whitman’s Sampler.

Multiplying this image makes me happy. And somehow, the Warholian repetition of this image also chimes with Whitman: “I am large, I contain multitudes…”. The book is constructed from seven spreads, printed front and back. There are fifteen candies but only fourteen different flavors in the 12 oz. Whitman’s Sampler; one flavor–the Toffee Chip–occurs twice in the box. “The Great Laws do not treasure chips…”

While the idea behind the project emerged from the coincidence of their shared last names (Stephen Whitman was a confectioner in Philadelphia, and I don’t think there’s any relation, but I could be wrong…!), I was surprised at how quickly the concept tipped me back into those most moving elements of Whitman’s life and work–his work as a nurse during the Civil War, and his recording of that work in his stunning book, Memoranda During the War. Before medical science could catch up to military technology and heal what humans do to themselves with their own inventions, Whitman kept long, exhausting hours tending to men who would almost certainly die from perforated bowels or irreparably damaged limbs. (In dark coincidence, the overflow of wounded were housed in the U.S. Patent Office, where Whitman observes models of technological advancement among the injured and dying.).

One of the first passages in the book depicts a pile of uncounted amputated hands, scattered like a toppled cord of wood. It’s a heartbreaking book, made more so by the apparent practical futility of much of Whitman’s efforts. Despite being unable to improve their prospects of survival or recovery, Whitman kept tending to the wounded, and carried both stationery and candy and sweet drinks; writing letters for those who couldn’t write home, and handing out sweet treats to men who were closer to boyhood than he was. So while my Sampler began as a pun, it reminded me again of why I love and am moved by the poet. There are of course actual candies and appreciations of sweets in his poems, but it’s a testament to his work that such a silly project as this can again uncover the deepest and most enduring of his themes.

Between restoration milestones, summer print-work proceeds. Whitman’s birthday is coming up, by the way…

Several student-groups from Dr. Randy Ingram’s “Early British Literature and Media” returned to the lab in early April to plan and execute a “re-mediation” of a text from the time-period. Earlier in the semester, the entire class (all 23 of them!) visited the lab for a full week to typeset and print a decidedly anachronistic text: “Alphabet Aerobics” by Blackalicious. The goals with that project were three-fold: first, to consider the features of oral literature (abecedaria and mnemonic devices, for example); second, to consider the overlaps and departures between oral literature and print (“Alphabet Aerobics” is in fact an “unstable” text, and we worked between and across multiple versions to produce our own, ossified in print); and third, to gain insights into the specific technologies of moveable type and letterpress printing. Each student set a full couplet (many memorized theirs in the process!); and by the end of the week, we were able to print the full broadsheet–our typefaces, by the way, run the gamut, from Goudy Text (imitating Gutenberg’s blackletter) through Bodoni and Bodoni Shaded on into Gill Sans and lovely mid-twentieth century faces like Brush Script.

Some in the class decided to return for the end-of-semester “re-mediation” project. One student group is printing an edition of Queen Elizabeth’s poetry (which circulated in manuscript only, and was only published posthumously). That edition will be altered by group members and the public. Interested to see what happens…

Another student group is producing an extract from Milton’s Areopagitica.

As always, with lots of perspectives and questions in the lab, I’m the one learning the most! These items will be presented, along with the groups’ description of their process, at the Verna Miller Case Symposium. I can’t wait to see how the work evolves between now and then.

Two colors. Lots of gothic wood and metal. A nice array of manicules. Really great to get more and more of this type into rotation. Each time we print, we put it back cleaner than when I found it. Designed and printed by Rebecca Pempek, Carolina Thornton, Emilie Hoke, Emma Morrison, and Helen Sturm. Photo by Emilie Hoke.

To mark the upcoming Annual Student Art Exhibition at the Belk Visual Arts Center–and the reception!–interns from the Van Every/Smith Galleries visited the lab to plan and print a limited edition event poster. Posters always provide for interesting design discussions, since the goal is to communicate a maximum amount of information with a limited amount of text that will be consumed during a very brief moment–usually, the short span of time someone spends traveling past the poster. Posters are deceptively simple, but they give us the chance to consider typeface, type-size, and orientation in relation to the copy-text. Photographs (below) were taken by Chris Record, and are shared here with his permission.