Printing in the D

Right before the Letterpress Trail took over life, I spent two days at Signal Return, located in Detroit's Eastern Market, hanging out, printing and enjoying the company in their incredible space. When you see a giant manicule, you know you're in the right place. And when you understand their mission to create a vibrant printmaking studio that seeks to 'Teach, Connect, Serve, and Produce', then that's even more rewarding.

Their open and airy retail space literally invites people to come in and browse. So many beautiful prints and cards from all over, as well as pretty sweet aprons and shirts. I'm happy to say that Starshaped's cards and prints are in good company here. Need an awesome gift for someone? This is the place to go, Detroit! Stop on over after you hit the markets on Saturday morning.

They had recently acquired a few new banks of incredible wood and metal type. Here you can see Meg going through it to gauge what was lurking in these cases. I can tell you, there were some real treats there, buried under decades of dirt and dust. And mouse poop. Because all old type comes with complimentary mouse poop.

Here's Bryan Baker, SR's printer-in-residence, going through some of his own new type.

And Bryan's dog Isabelle! I point her out here because she's an absolute doppelganger of my own dog.

This is 'proof press row', with 3 presses lined up and ready to print. Lynn Avadenka, the artistic director, is at the end, pulling prints of the Detroit type I brought with me.

Joel is moving in for a close up shot!

The beauty of this Vandercook is that it was actually large enough to set all of our ornamental letters in a straight line. So we took advantage of that and printed quite a few new Detroit prints. These are for sale at Signal Return and all of the cash goes directly to them to support their workshops, outreach and all around awesomeness. If you're in Detroit Friday, September 19th, you can attend their fundraiser, Type-Oh!-Rama, which looks to be a pretty fantastic evening of letterpress activities.

After printing, eating and fraternizing on Friday we went to Shinola for an Art Crank poster show. What an incredibly beautiful place this was. Here's just a tiny shot of the bike I coveted all night. If anyone wants to donate this to Starshaped, it would see a lot of use.

Their storefront is virtually a museum, and you can see the posters in the background here. Many of the prints were sold as a benefit for Back Alley Bikes, a cause we can really get behind. The community support and brisk sales of prints was heartening, not to mention the overall enthusiasm for the print community in Detroit.

After my time at Signal Return on Saturday, I headed over to Kennedy Prints to hang with Amos and see how Detroit was treating him. He has a lot of space for his vast collection of prints, type and presses. Not fully unpacked since moving from Alabama, he's got plans for a grand and glorious new space.

This is a hand lettered print Amos picked up from a school while in Alabama. Gotta love lead paint!

And a classy ampersand discovered in his wood type collection.

Amos also picked up a few cases of beautifully detailed, hand carved wood cuts with African and African American themes. These came from Italy. What a journey.

And here are a few of the prints Amos sent me home with. He's doing a lot of fantastic work for the city, as you can see.

Of course I had to go here. It felt like a pilgrimage, and it's hard to believe I felt my heart flutter when driving by. So modest. And so earth moving at the same time.

It was such an inspiring 36 hours in the D. Everyone I had the opportunity to work and chat with was filled with the midwestern gumption that makes me proud and assured of the fact that they will succeed with whatever ventures they choose to take on. Go Detroit!

Reverie

Before hitting the road on our Letterpress Trail this summer, we designed and printed a charming little cd sleeve for the local gypsy jazz (is there any other kind?!) band, Fumée. Obviously they hoped to create something that was indicative of the style of music and built an inspiration board that included references to Erté artwork. I riffed on that and drew this smoke-like image:

Double it up and there you go:

Conveniently, I had just acquired a set of accent characters so we could actually set the name correctly. Since a plate was required for the artwork, I cut into it to insert the hand set text.

The back side of the sleeve has a smaller version of the main text, so I used a tinier accent here. These curly ornaments from Skyline Type also came close to matching the art of the front.

Beautiful Parisian and Bernhard Gothic, two of the studio's workhorse typefaces.

The band found a cd duplicator that offered vinyl-looking disks, which was a perfect fit for this project. If you want to check them out, you can find more info here, or head over to Rogers Park Social every Monday night for the real deal!

The 2014 Letterpress Trail finale!

Well, we've come to the end of the road on the Letterpress Trail for this summer, and it ends in Rochester, New York. Hold on to your hats because there's so much type in this post that it's a little mind blowing. While Jo was distracted with family, slip n' slides and ice cream, I headed over to Rochester to visit Amelia at the Cary Graphic Arts Collection, part of the library at RIT. Feeling a little homesick for the City That Works, Amelia kindly pulled type specimen books from my fair city, largely from Barnhart Bros. and Spindler. Their first building was a block from where Mr. Starshaped's theater (the Shubert) is today.

What a treat. What follows are some poor photos (in the interest of preserving bindings) of some of the type I found that I both already have and that which I might die for. We'll start with what I already have in the studio and was happy to confirm as Chicago-born:

I'm missing the bug from this set of ornaments, which is a shame because he's an attractive little fellow.

While I don't have Lightface Era per se, this was a precursor to Pastel, a typeface that I do have in the studio, and one that was popular for silent film intertitles. Here's a sample of what we've done with it.

We've recently proofed up a bunch of catchphrases in our collection, including many that are here.

What follows here is a wish list of things I'd love to have for the studio.

Beautiful forms!

Pretty sure we could recreate this one with little ornaments.

And this is the cream of the crop. Totally speechless over this modular alphabet.

What strikes me most about the BB&S specimen books is the writing. Here's a little sample from various books:

Each book has wonderful samples of exactly what you can do with their type. Here are a few inspirational pieces:

And here's one that features a cyma, or tilda-like squiggle that fills the space next to a capital L (thanks, Nick). You can often find these in hand painted signs and occasionally in the stone signage of apartment buildings around Chicago.

I also found a great ad for the rule bender we currently have on loan from the Platen Press Museum. This handy tool will bend rules to create curved lines in print. For $20...what a steal!

As if that wasn't enough type to delve into, Amelia then pulled out just a tiny bit of their collection of Albert Schiller's work. His ornamental print work makes me want to pack it in. So clever and beautifully printed.

The magical ampersand machine...

This is THE press, which is currently being restored.

After an overwhelming visit to RIT, I made my way to Virgin Wood Type, the second of two wood type makers on our Trail. It was great to see Geri and Matt again; here's their humble pantograph in the middle of cutting a new font.

Boxes and boxes of patterns!

Matt's Ludlow box.

So many beautiful ornaments... how do I narrow down choices?

This is what I left with. These will be in print soon.

Then Geri and Matt took me over to Rochester's Book Arts Center in the Genesee Center for the Arts. What a great facility!

If you're going to explore a wood type collection, is there anyone better to do it with besides Geri? Here are some of her favorites.

Thanks to Virgin for letting me crash yet again and geek out on wood type for an afternoon.

Our last stop on the trip is a sentimental one. Ten years ago Mr. Starshaped and I were married at the Genesee Country Village, a complete historic village that includes a print shop. I try to get Jo there every summer to explore.

Their quirky prints are everywhere around the village and are a delight to see. They are also available for purchase and if you're lucky, someone is around the day you visit to show you how the hand press works.

Maybe Jo wasn't keen on staying behind to help like I told her she would as their new apprentice. But at least she knows her way around a shop!

That's it for our 2014 Letterpress Trail, though it's certainly not an end to visiting more shops as the year progresses. We've got some plans for 2015 already. In the meantime, it's back to the shop with a ton of new treasures to get on press.

The 2014 Letterpress Trail, part two

The next stop on our Letterpress Trail following Cincinnati was Columbus, home of Moore Wood Type, one of two wood type makers in the US and a great friend to Starshaped. Scott's humble workshop is mostly in his basement, where he has just the right set up of equipment, tools (some handmade!) and wood for production. A table full of recently cut type. And a sneak peek of half rounds in the background!

This is Scott's pantograph, next to a trim saw. You can see a pattern set up here.

A box of patterns for catchphrases.

Scott has also been laser cutting wood type, and here is an experiment with creating a border. After cutting a full sheet of finished, type high maple, he can then trim out the individual borders and ornaments. Working with the laser allows for greater flexibility of sizing, not to mention detail in the smaller sizes. And speed!

These are a few new stars sitting on top of the proof sheets of our Moore collection at Starshaped. I brought them to double check our own stock against the new Moore offerings.

Check out this beautiful block ready to be trimmed and carved. You can see the lovely wood grain, and well as a bit of the sheen from the smoothness of the surface.

These are the cutters for carving the final pieces. You can see the range of sizes to accommodate a variety of type forms and counter spaces.

Happily, I got to cut my first wood type! Scott let me choose what I wanted to do, so I picked this ornamental rule that he hadn't done yet. I even got to pick the length; the final piece can be cut to any size, which is the beauty of working with a pantograph. Scott has a notebook of configurations for each of his patterns, and also makes notes directly on them so as to remember how to set the pantograph measurements to cut accurate sizes.

The first cut is the more detailed one, and you can see how the outline of the rule is taking place. After this, the cutter is swapped for a larger one to clear the solid areas that are not part of the design.

Look at me go! I'm using the tracing side of the pantograph to outline the pattern.

Here are the final pieces.

Scott made patterns for an Antique Tuscan, a typeface that's near to my heart and one we've had the longest in the studio. Because I'm missing a few letters, we thought it would be fun to make replacement characters. Here's a box of the patterns ready to be mounted, traced and cut as new wood type.

After much configuration, we were successful and I was able to make a handful of the missing letters needed to complete my set of 12-line type. It is now at home with its 100 year old siblings.

What a delight it was to visit with the Moores for two days, sharing stories, cutting type and playing with the dogs. Can't wait to see them again!

After Scott checked the fluids in the Fiat, we hit the road to Pittsburgh to visit Matt Braun of the Outdated Press. He's got a cozy shop that's enviable for its tidiness. It's the perfect collection of unique metal type and impeccably restored Pearl presses (and he's got one for sale, folks!).

Here are a few of Matt's beautiful typefaces.

This is the next restoration project!

Here's a fine example of Matt's talent with complex forms. Also a project near to his heart; his own newborn's birth announcement! And what a cutie he is.

Matt took us downtown to the office of Bearded, his day job. They have a fine way of mixing old and new, as web designers with a stellar letterpress studio all in the same place.

These are just a few shots of their incredible wood type collection. And you're in luck, because many of these have been digitized and are available as part of Wood Type Revival.

Four hours after leaving Pittsburgh, we made it to Buffalo to catch a few hours of sleep before participating in the Western New York Book Arts Center's annual Book Fest (read about last year's event here). I was happy to contribute another large linoleum cut for their steamroller printing, which is really a sight to see.

Despite the construction, many folks came out to the parking lot to see the steamroller in action. And thanks to the construction, we had a lot of chain link 'walls' to fill with beautiful prints on muslin. You can see my ode to The Queen City 3x3' linoleum cut here.

Everyone got into the action and it was great to engage the younger members of the audience in inking up the cuts.

Yep, watching a steamroller print is indeed camera-worthy!

Check it out for yourself:

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And here's the final result! All of the prints pulled are for sale at WNYBAC, and the proceeds all benefit the Center. Sunburned and exhausted, I took a day off before finishing up our Letterpress Trail in Rochester. Given the amount of type seen that day, I'll be saving those images for their own post! Check back soon.

The 2014 Letterpress Trail, part one

This summer we decided to hit the road and see how many letterpress shops we could visit in a week. Thanks to our friends at Firecracker Press, we have a handy Letterpress Trail map, which is an attractive way to keep track of our stops. We drove down through Indianapolis to Nashville to visit our friend Celene at Hatch Show Print, one of the oldest letterpress shops in the country. It is now housed in an incredible new venue as part of the Country Music Hall of Fame, and includes a gallery and retail space as well as the actual shop.

Jo and Celene messed around with some of the large wood cuts for historic posters.

Check out the beautiful space. Hundreds of cases of types, a handful of presses and a whole lot of gumption (can you say 600 posters a year?)

I took most of our photos at the end of the day so you don't get the buzz of a working shop, but it was indeed humming! Jim Sherradin was still around, working on oversized pieces for the gallery.

This is an amazing wall of wood type that measures over 20 line, or approximately 3.5".

Jo got to hold this large wood type J, as well as hang with the shop cats, Huey and Maow.

We had a fantastic time exploring Hatch, not to mention enjoying the tasty pulled pork that was on deck after the shop closed. Can't wait to visit again.

Our next stop in Nashville before heading out was to Isle of Printing. We're big fans because they are fellow Press Bikers, with a mobile station on wheels as part of their Our Town project. Check it out!

This giant press was used for a project we got to see on the outside of the building. Do you see something vaguely pie shaped?

They have a large shop with tons of space for printing as well as exploring their numerous public art projects that are taking over Nashville.

And here are the pie shaped prints, pasted on the wall outside! One might think Jo coordinated her outfit for this shot with Bryce, the leader of the gang.

After our stay in Tennessee we headed up to Cincinnati to visit Steam Whistle Letterpress, friends we made while at the National Stationery Show. Brian has a fantastic shop in the Over The Rhine area of the city, and makes some lovely, vintage-inspired prints and cards with metal type, wood and hand carved cuts, all things we can get behind.

We took the opportunity to pick up some great cards and talk shop. Brian's awesome business cards fold into actual steam whistles, and he paused a moment to show Jo how it worked. How's that for branding!

Another friend we made at the Stationery Show was Maya from Visual Lingual. She is one half of the team that makes seed bombs, little portable gardens you can plant anywhere! We picked up a few sacks and can't wait to get them started. You can find their work all over Cincinnati as well as nationwide.

And luckily for us, Maya pointed us to the American Sign Museum, a glorified warehouse full of signage from around the country that has been rescued from the dump and obscurity. This is a must stop for anyone interested in Americana, neon, sign painting and letterforms.

We'll be back soon with Part Two of our Letterpress Trail, which picks up in Columbus!