JUNE 1997
SMALL PRESS PROFILE
CRASH PRINTING
FREDERIC GOUDY:
[1865-1947]: was a prolific type designer. The face, Copperplate Gothic,
was among his many designs.
STEVE FISK:
Seattle music producer, member of Pidgeonhed.
BASTARD
TITLE:
or Half Title, normally consists only of the main title. The subtitle is
omitted and the author's name does not appear. The half-title page sometimes
carries a series title or an epigraph. Paul uses this page to introduce
the body face of the book.
BROADSIDES:
a large sheet of paper printed on one side like a poster.
About Type
UPPERCASE:
for capitals from the way type is stored
in trays. Leading: pronounced "Lead" as in the soft, toxic metal,
this is the space between rows and comes from the practice of placing strips
of metal between the rows of characters.
Upper and lower case were so named because of how the typesetter propped the cases up, at a slant in front of him. The smaller letters were closer to save effort, with the Caps tipped at a steeper angle above.
OUT OF SORTS:
means out of spacing material, so even
though you might have type you couldn't do anything with it--which would
make somebody grumpy, the usual meaning nowadays.
CRASH PRINTING:
a profile of Paul Hunter's Wood Works Press
Matt Briggs
Paul Hunter operates Wood Works' press from his basement in Fremont on a vintage, 1904, Chandler and Price letterpress. His books are hand pressed with hand set type in hand bound books. Recent volumes include, Marion Kimes's Whirled, Charlie Burks' Gauze, Violins, Etc., and Mark Svenvold's Death of the Cabaret Hegel.
I used to live on Paul's side of Phinney
Ridge, and remember wondering who lived in his flaking grey house as I passed
on my way to the bus. Coated with pealing slate paint, the turn of the century
bungalow perches on the muddy edge of the ridge digging its basement into
the hillside. A lot of things go on in Seattle basements. Some things you
don't want to know about. I imagine that the Northwest's old preeminence
in the hemp trade came out of these basements with plants being tested for
potency and cross pollinated with potent species across town. Under halide
lights the odor of old coal and wood stoves and the THZ content grew. Seattle
music guy Steve Fisk talks about how he used to go down into his basement when it was
raining to just make noise. And Paul Hunter goes down into his basement
to print simply constructed and durable books.
This last May, he showed me around his
basement and chewed my ear off about his press, do-it-yourself printing,
technology and the modern bookstore. He'd been printing the Death of
the Cabaret Hegel, by Mark Svenvold, and the stack of books rose out
of a box; the spine of each one slightly varied from the last, the title
set with garamond and the cover art, a wood block print, on red Frabriano
stock.
His chapbooks are not like anything produced
by the commercial or even the non-profit publishing world. For one thing
they aren't like any of the chapbook's I've held, typically stapled xeroxes
promoting next year's chapbook contest. Wood Works' chapbooks are a simple
answer to the absence of any printed matter in the middle ground between
the sloppy here-this-week, never-heard-from-again xeroxed 'zine and the
heavily subsidized academic softcover poetry books. Paul Hunter's books
feel well built. Paul intends the books to be held and read and kept in
a reader's library for a while. Wood Works has published a strong representation
of some of the more accessible and talented Seattle poets.
Handling one of his chapbooks I understood
why Paul feels that something is wrong with the publishing world. He said
the industry has been locked in the same model of merchandising since the
18th century. Books are marketed through the corporate American parody of
the quaint neighborhood book store, Crown, Waldenbooks, B. Dalton. "The
book market is terrible because the purpose of publication is not served
strictly by the making of money," Paul said. Media conglomerates own
most publishers. They want to keep new product on the shelves, so the industry
pulps books much more rapidly than in the past. But readers often go to
a bookstore just three times a year to buy books. "Hell, it isn't serving
any other purpose than the making of money and isn't even going a great
job of that. Bookstores should be treated differently as far as inventory
goes." Books should remain on the shelves as long as there is any potential
demand. Paul mentions a friend who bought a book, new and off the shelf,
at Blackstone's in London. The book had been published in 1803.
Our libraries are developing the same
problem. In the past, before the library became a source of current information,
it also had a function as "a reservoir of the past" where readers
could find out of print books and find the real, the old, and the authentic.
Books are an appropriate technology, he said. Books printed and stored
on shelves are the appropriate technology for libraries. He showed me a
book, a menagerie of letters from A to Z, that had been hand set by Frederic Goudy's wife. On each page, I could feel the impact of the type gouged
into the paper by the press and the force of her arm. This book had been
discarded from its Colorado library as if it had reached an expiration date.
Over and over again Paul Hunter said,
"Appropriate technology." I wasn't sure what he meant. Of course,
he talked rapidly about how he saw letterpress working in relation to technology
and I'm nodding, sure, but I wondered what he meant by appropriate technology?
Any new technology is better than any old technology, isn't it? Too often
we assume that the most recent innovation will serve as the best method.
Progress is, in with the new out with the old. But the Green Revolution
swept the entire world in years following World War II. Third World countries
and relief agencies pumped pesticides and fertilizers and genetically compliant
crops to the four corners of the planet and within forty years, countries
like India while producing more grain have also lost a rich and varied genetic
history of rice species. They lost something like several thousands crops
and now have six or so corporate backed species. This is progress.
Likewise, in the publishing industry the
old, inefficient model of editors who sorted through drek and slush piles
while fostering authors with small print runs and modest advances, in order
to build a larger print culture, has been replaced by Acquisitions Editors.
These mega-multimedia corporate employees buy relatively little product
with publicity-sized advances. For instance Nicholas Evan's million dollar
advance kills maybe forty other first time books. They pump more product
and less content through efficient supermall bookstores and apparently earn
more money. This is progress. Where are the advances in communication technology
leading us? I hesitate to say that they empower the individual to speak
or even earn much money, as in the silly cartoon AT&T ad with the furniture
as widget designer selling his oblong chairs to the now desolate, overpopulated
and starving four corners of the Green Revolutionized earth. Technology,
specifically something like the Web, has a built in self-praise factor,
claiming a need for the user to keep current on itself, except that it contains
nothing except ads for itself.
Wood Works' chapbook are pure content
from the words to the texture of the words gouged into the paper. They are
plainly set in a clear body typeface. Paul has taken time in their design
and construction. A hand built chapbook is indeed the appropriate technology
for a bundle of related poems that add up to something. I can sit down with
this artifact, under a tree and away from any electrical socket and telephone
transmission, and make sense out of what a Wood Works' poet like Charlie
Burks has to say.
In designing his books, Paul Hunter believes
in introducing the elements of his book quietly. He said, "Only monumental
books should have the Bastard Title across both pages." With his
chapbooks, he has the half title on the first right hand page and an illustration
on the facing page. His books aren't monumental or self-promotional but
simply deliver the printed word in clean hand-set type. Paul plans making
a portion of upcoming Wood Works editions in hardback, mainly to satisfy
the needs of collectors. "I'm just not fussy about books because they
get used. They're tools."
Wood Works publishes broadsides in addition to chapbooks. "Broadsides
are public pieces, things you will have to live with," Paul said. His
print run is usually 300-800 and if it sells out, he's willing to do a new
laser printed run. "Sam Hamill at Copper Canyon press used to do that
in the early days." An upcoming project is the Art of Poetry
by Lin He-Jing translated by Paul Hansen. Another upcoming book is Driving
& Drinking by David Lee.
He returned this last spring from Colorado
with a Chandler and Price. It's a gigantic turn of the century cast-iron
machine that looks like it forms rail road spikes from molten steel. His
model survived a fall from a loading dock. One arm has a vein of metal flash
where it was soldered and welded back together. These presses have remained
virtually the same since the 1850s. They were in commercial use as late
as the 1950s. The only significant change has been in the spokes. The earlier
model has a curl to the spoke and the new model is straight. New means those
built after 1905. My MAC will be lucky to last a twentieth
of the Chandler and Price's age.
He also has a small table top press, a
Victor, which weighs about a hundred and twenty pounds. He once used the
Victor in the classroom and it was the first press he started to print books
on.
The chase is the metal frame for the type holder.
Lifting it up feels like hefting an old cast iron plate for a Franklin stove
-- the set type lays flat across the surface and you see the texture of
the rows in reverse, in metal. Traditional typesetters don't use more than
a quarter of the plate but Paul uses the whole thing in order to get the
maximum page size off his table top Victor and the Chandler and Price.
It takes Paul eight hours to set a single
poem, with three to four hours of that jostling around with the make-ready.
The make-ready is a process where he evens the type and fine-tunes the impression.
Even through Paul sets his type on a smooth sheet of leaded glass, the initiall
impression comes out uneven, leaving unregistered letters. He places sheets
of tissue on the flat surface of the platen to raise the level of the text,
using the make-ready imprint to map out where the ink isn't registering
and where he needs to increase the padding.
Paul's been learning and getting more
ambitious and has grown a long way from his first run. His first pamphlet
reads, "Set in a jolly mish-mash of 10 point century type mixed up.
I had just decided to lay something out and didn't realize that my type
cases were all mixed up. I'd used them for my classes. Days and days of
sorting type."
"I find spending the time setting
a poem makes me spend more time with the writing of a poem," Paul said.
"When I begin to publish work I enter into a dialogue with the writer.
I've asked for work. Sometimes people don't get it. Small work is just something
on the way to something bigger. With the Death of the Cabaret Hegel,
I went back and forth with the author. Sometimes I get, 'how about I send
you a bunch of stuff and you pick out something you like.' That doesn't
work. A chapbook is one thing. Everything Word Works issues is numbered.
We are at #17."
"Crash Printing" describes the
denting and embossing of the paper. "For awhile the fashion was to
put the ink as light as possible, but I think the denting of the paper,
the very slight three dimensionality of the edge, the contrast between dark
and light is the strongest it can be and can't be achieved any other way."
Describing the setting of type he says: "Working in shades
of grey, suddenly the scaffolding falls and you can see the whole thing,
that sudden reversal is magic; low-contrast to high-contrast."
Paul Hunter is not adverse to technology, but has a respect for the tradition and the physical product of the letterpress. In setting a poem, he wanted to break the straight edge of the left margin but he found he lost hours and hours trying to experiment with each layout. He had run upstairs and typed out the entire poem, finished the layout five minutes later, and then run back downstairs to set the whole thing in another day's labor.
Some of the new type styles excite Paul.
He would have bought them for his letterpress if he could find the cast
metal faces. He says he's developing some cravings and could easily spend
a couple of thousand dollars on type. Although he hasn't outworn his like
of Garamond. Considering how long it takes to set a single page and the
number of books he's already set, it's amazing he hasn't outworn his like
of the alphabet. A typeface for the hand press has to be something you won't
get sick of.
Paul is considering using photopolymer plates to unite the ease and control of computer typesetting with the physical production of crash printed books. He can then create the plates using a computer, produce a mirrored photonegative, lay it across the plate and expose it to a UV light source and then wash away the exposed polymer. Re-expose it to the UV until the plastic hardens and then you have a typeready block. A letter sized plate costs about ten bucks and is durable enough to be used for embossing.
This is a hybrid technology: it melds
a five hundred year old technology with type faces and layout software that
didn't exist last season. It would save hours of labor and produce an artifact
indistinguishable from traditional letterpress. In a sense this is a violation
of what the letterpress has become. They are no longer tools just to generate
printed material. Anyone with a photocopier and wordprocessor is in possession
of production tools that are more efficient than any of the historical printing
processes. It's the actual labor of hand laying type and then imprinting
the image into a page that adds the weight and permanence to one of Paul's
chapbooks.
David Lee, Paul Hunter, and Paul Hansen will read at Bumbershoot.Read a list of book-making resources or Wood Works catalogue.
Wood Works books can be found on-line at http:// www.zipcon.com/~pablo. Wessel and Lieberman, downtown, carries the broadsides and limited edition hardbacks, and Open Books and Elliott Bay carry the trade paperback chapbooks, as does the Fremont Book Company. Only Fine Impressions has everything.
© The Raven Chronicles 1997