This photo taken at the center of the Tughrul Tower in Iran. The tomb of a Seljuk ruler, Tughrul Beg of the eleventh century. Once capped with a dome, itself a symbol of the cosmos and the infinite, the sky seems a more perfect replacement to its missing roof. Photo by Matthias Blume.

Architects and dreamers have shared the VABC this month. Artists on different missions yet sharing a common geometric figure as the home base for their explorations. The figure of the circle. Rich in meaning, the circle can symbolize completeness, a line with no beginning or end. Cultures have also seen it as a symbol of the unknowable and undefinable, perfection, divinity, the sun, the creative force.

When man began creating his own shelter, the circle became the first idealized blueprint, inspired perhaps by the circle of family around the fire. Built of mud, stone, sticks, and skins it provided security as it invented the sacred space separate from the profane “out there.”

The Printmakers’ Left is the name of a loose collection of artists born in the University of Virginia’ printmaking studios and continuing as a creative collaborative for the past decade. In 2005 Charlottesville hosted an exhibition and catalog of their creation, The Land of Wandering. Other works by the group have included The Labyrinth, and The End of Language. Over the past year these artists set themselves a new challenge: an examination of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges short story in which the circle figures prominently, The Circular Ruins.

The Circular Ruins tells the story of a wizard who retires to the remains of a ruined jungle temple to focus on his ultimate project. It is the creation of another human being through the power of his dreams. After much struggle he succeeds, but only by enlisting the assistance of the god, Fire. Being born of  the god Fire, the wizard’s creature is significantly and iconically immune to incineration by its flames. When fire engulfs the wizard’s refuge and leaves him unharmed, the wizard discovers that his existence, too, is merely the product of another’s dreams.

This story provides an axis around which the work of this group of twenty or so artists, the Printmakers’ Left, rotates. Their final creation is a 200 page  book produced in a small edition of 25. A copy now resides in the collection of the University of Virginia, but you can see an exhibition of the detritus of the book’s creation at the VABC now. “Unbound excerpts, working proofs, alternative endings, outtakes, and debris” is the description the Printmakers’ Left gives this interesting collection of pieces all framed identically and hanging like so many book pages upon the wall at the VABC gallery.

Circular architecture is also the theme of the work of artist Craig Pleasants. Pleasants has spent a great deal of his life as a sculptor seeking to understand the aesthetic and spiritual nature of the piece of architectural sculpture we call a home. Inspired at times by the fable of the “Three Little Pigs” he has built artwork/living spaces from a variety of materials including not just the wood, and brick of the story, but the straw as well. One of his most memorable works was a fabulous structure of straw bales and soil covered in blooming marigolds.

Laura Hoptman, sculpture curator at MOMA wrote, “Whereas shelter can be understood to imply a barrier against the harshness of natural phenomena…for Pleasants, home is at once a safe and private environment, and a world in which the organic and the human are in harmony.”

Not surprisingly, the earthquake in Haiti and the struggle to recreate homes for its victims before the onset of hurricane season became an object of Pleasant’s attention.  While monitoring the relief mission, Pleasants, an artist who unapologetically describes his work as often politicized, became obsessed with the history of the former French plantation colony of St. Domingue, what we now know as Haiti.

Digging deeper into the complicated social, economic, and cultural history he discovered a country created over centuries by repeated racial exploitation and european colonial struggles. His research revealed a surprising connection between Virginia and St. Domingue. St. Domingue owed its economic life, much as our state honoring the virgin queen, to an exploitive plantation system based upon human slavery. St. Domingue was the home of the most successful slave rebellion in the western hemisphere leading to the abolition of slavery there and the creation of the state of Haiti. Horrified that this might spread, our young nation, through the offices of President George Washington and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson sent three-quarters of a million eighteenth-century dollars to the landowners of St. Domingue to provide arms and support to repress the rebellion and guarantee the continued oppression of thousands.

When Pleasants learned that it was eventually another financial gift sponsored by George Washington which made possible the creation of Washington and Lee University, the need to make a political statement, a proclamation, became imperative.

He put his proclamation in words as:

“In the name of God, amen, I George Washington of Mount Vernon—a citizen of the United States, and one-time President of the same, having remained silent for these two hundred and eighty years, do on this 22nd day of February in the year 2012, in consideration for my actions while President of the United States in support of the French Planters of St. Domingue in their efforts to suppress the slave rebellion of 1791 which resulted, twelve years later, in the liberated nation of Haiti, now most solemnly entreat and enjoin the Trustees of Washington and Lee University, in the County of Rockbridge, in the Commonwealth of Virginia, to take my original gift of $20,000 to their institution and pass it to the people of Haiti in a fashion that ameliorates the suffering of those still homeless two years after the devastating earthquake of 2010. It is my ardent wish that this be accomplished without undue delay, notwithstanding the necessary assurances of due diligence.”

Pleasants and I met this last February in Amherst at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Hearing about the work of the Virginia Arts of the Book Center, he became inspired to make his proclamation a real living object as a cornerstone of a planned exhibition at Washington and Lee’s Staniar Gallery.

Pleasants visited the VABC and decide to print his proclamation from our fabulous collection of wooden type. The VABC has no presses large enough to hold all of the wooden type that would be needed to print the proclamation. So the artist improvised, creating his own press bed from a huge piece of perfectly flat medium density fiberboard. After composing and “locking up” the wooden type on his bed, Pleasants planned to print his piece on the largest piece of paper he could find using an inked brayer and hand rubbing.

It was a work monumental in commission as it was in size. Pleasants and his remarkable assistants (his lovely wife Sheila and daughter Margo) made numerous trips to the VABC to accomplish this work.

To date, it is the largest piece ever printed at the VABC!

Providing space for the accomplishment of Pleasant’s political proclamation of what is right as well as the exhibition of the Printmakers’ Left has enlivened the VABC this spring. And whether dreaming of what cannot be or what should be, printmakers have made surprising discoveries about the circle and its iconic meanings at the VABC!

“Wow! Look at that giant printer!” These were the words of a student visiting the VABC in the nineties. It was the first time I noticed that the identity of the printing press was slipping away. The student was pointing to the huge cast-iron Washington press which Rare Books School had loaned to the VABC. When I explained that printers are people, the student corrected me as well, reminding me of the machines beginning to appear in every home next to the desktop computer…the digital printer.

The Washington press had been the perfect tool for explaining the essential principle of relief printing—pressure. You pull the handle—hard—to apply pressure. The giant machine is just a mechanism for converting your muscle power into compressive force to push the paper into the raised and inked surface of the plate, block, or type.  Students could pull the handle and watch the platen move and see the resulting impression.

Contrary to conventional knowledge, Gutenberg did not “invent” the printing press. The screw press had been in use since classical times…most commonly for the pressing of fruits for wines, ciders, and oils. It is very likely that the screw press had even been used to print woodblocks before Gutenberg’s time. [Gutenberg was almost certainly the first European to discover the advantages of movable type—an invention which made it possible to print entire books from a single drawer of cast metal—one signature at a time.]

Today, the Rare Book School’s Washington Press lives on the second floor of the University of Virginia’s Alderman Library where it is used for the occasional printing demo. The VABC’s presses are much more modern. Our principal presses are a cylinder press (a Vandercook Universal One proof press), a platen press (a Chandler and Price clamshell), and an etching press which uses a mechanism similar to the mangle on an old wringer washing machine. With these few machines we successfully continue the traditions of relief printing for the creation of the printed word and image.

In the early years of the nineteenth century, as the industrial revolution ignited the  imaginations of the handyman inventors of America, dozens of patents appeared for new machines which used various techniques for using pressure to put ink on paper. They replaced the screw with various combinations of levers, joints, and toggles which provided so much pressure that even the new cast iron frames could be cracked by excessive use. With the invention of the rotary press and the application of the steam engine the days of the hand-operated press came to an end. But today artists and fine printers are are still discovering the joys of working by hand in community printing shops, and hand operated presses are back. The incredibly inventive DIY youngsters of the web generation have conceived of and shared plans for new versions of hand operated relief printing presses using common house hold tools such as the ubiquitous car jack.

My first introduction to one of these new DIY presses came through an introduction to the retired English professor, Paul Loukides. Paul has taught creative writing and film studies at Albion College in Michigan for 38 years, but in retirement he began exploring other artistic directions by taking classes in drawing and ceramics. Moving to Charlottesville, he continued to nurture these interests in classes at our community college. While creating a gift for a grandchild, he discovered the fantastical and bizarre creatures lurking the fringes of his own imagination. Printmaking and ceramics turned out to be the perfect medium for putting his sketches of these beasts into forms which he could share with others, and today he shares his menagerie with the public through his Etsy shop, WheeledFishStudio.

The lack of access to a printing press (Paul had not yet discovered the VABC!) inspired him to build his own. Reading about the newly designed DIY presses in the web, he was enough to put him in motion. Paul began experimenting, building several versions of these presses from two by fours and then plywood and making his own improvements. Paul succeeded in building an easy to use yet powerful press for very little cost. He is now using this press to populate our world with his colorful bestiary buddies.

The VABC is thrilled that Paul has offered to demonstrate how he prints with his homemade press. He will also provide instructions and tips on how you can make your own version!. Join us at the VABC on Saturday afternoon April 21 at 1:00 p.m. for some terrific play with this printing press.

At 74, Paul is living proof of George Bernard Shaw’s adage, “We don’t stop playing because we grow old…”

Dropping from their tower perch on the Water Street parking garage a small flock begins its acrobatic flight.

A skeleton and a neon sign were all that remained. When my fellow artists and I were seeking a new location for our collective, a studio that would be named Ten Flavors after the dust-covered neon ice cream parlor sign we discovered above the old downtown storefront. To be sure, the skeleton was only a pigeon, but polished to its pure ivory wire frame of being by decades of heat and emptiness in this abandoned loft.

It was a treasure hard to part with, but its old shoebox home would eventually lose its welcome in my busy studio. But the idea it represented, a precise expression of a season’s flight, would remain, sitting on a bookshelf in my memory.

Avian descendants still calligraph poetry across downtown Charlottesville’s skies. Even today you can see them loosed from their perch above the Water Street parking garage to roll, tumble and wheel in the golden light of afternoon’s setting sun.

The expressive beauty of these flights of birds, mere pedestrian’s pigeons, evidence their original classification of “rock dove,” the beautiful flocking, cooing clowns of riverside cliffs.

My downtown neighbor, Greg Antrim Kelly, has also had his eyes turned skyward as he walks across the hot gray parking lots behind Charlottesville’s downtown mall. He has named his latest creative project after these flop-butt angels. Pigeon.

Greg’s work can be called an artist’s book, and as such it is on display at the Virginia Arts of the Book Center as a centerpiece of our participation in this year’s Virginia Festival of the Book. Hanging in the VABC gallery below The Artbox in the Ivy Square Shopping Center are the original pieces of work which would become the personal yet prescient poetry of Greg’s book.

Here, on display, are original portraits in black ink brush pen on expressive soft drawing paper. In several scrapbooks on the shelves below are observations and ideas, bits of verse, which have been hammered out on random bits of paper using an old manual typewriter.

“Older man, silver hair
profile; —————
broad nose, beak)
picking his nose with the
pad of his thumb.
(stuck in traffic,
in a moving truck,
mid-day (late August.”

The visages of old men, black ink spittle and snot, bits of skin and clothing rise Rorschach-like from napkins and other random bits of paper. Text and images, a self portrait, according to Greg; expressions of a multi-year passage in his life.

But how do image and text become book? Greg used the perfecting printing capacity of the modern offset press to reproduce as pages individual drawings and quotes from his diary. Pages as stiff card with rounded corners and uniformly patterned backs. To be read or actually dealt off of three stacks like a game of cards. And that game an apt metaphor for the apparently random experiences of the life passage he journals.

The digital hyperstacks of the nineties and the websites they evolved into, have successfully weaned us from the coddling codex. No longer do we read a book limited to a fixed sequence of pages. We can flit from webpage to webpage stored on servers around the world, each of us creating our own original experience of reading and interaction with text and image. Thus it is not unusual to find this form mirrored as a collection of cards in Greg’s book, Pigeon.

“i rarely read anything in its entirety”

When the book artist Dieter Roth offered up “The Copley Book” in a limited edition in 1965, it was a mind expanding exercise to view this assemblage of apparently random bits of paper, text and image as a “book.” Art professor Dean Dass of the University of Virginia recently pointed out its availability in the stacks of Special Collections at the University. Roth’s “book” was the product of a similar artistic experience. Text and images collected from a specific life period conveyed in a (dis)organized fashion to a commercial printer and then bound with a desktop staple through the stack of multi-colored ephemera. Roth’s book paved the way for the hyperstack reading experience of today, and it is as a continuation of this genre that Greg’s journal as three decks of cards can be understood.

“list everything which
is vibrant, sweet, all)”

Josef Beery has worked at Ten Flavors Studios in Charlottesville, Virginia as a publication designer for almost three decades. He is a cofounder of the Virginia Arts of the Book Center and an early organizer of the Virginia Festival of the Book. He shares observations on the fields of typography, printing, and books to promote discussion and interest in the activities of the VABC.

The eyes of Afghanistan's children are upon us.

I was arrested by the emotional power of the written word on my visit to Sweet Briar College several weeks ago. Gay and I had traveled down to Amherst County to participate in a poetry reading featuring recent work of writers resident at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts across the highway from the college at Mount San Angelo.

The VCCA’s Mount San Angelo campus is situated on the grounds of a historic Virginia estate and blessed with miles of rural Virginia landscape in many directions. The poems featured in this reading were all poets’ responses to their sublime experiences living and working quietly in the Virginia landscape.

The poetry reading, held in Sweet Briar’s Pannell Center Art Gallery, was complimented by an exhibition of visual art inspired by landscape from Sweet Briar’s fine collection of art. The event was the ideal distraction for a cold and wet February afternoon.

After a convivial reception and tea, our host, Carrie Brown, the college’s writer-in-residence, took us on a short tour of the neighboring Cochran Library, part of Sweet Briar’s original historic campus. Walking to Professor Brown’s office, I came stock still in a stair hall as we passed a display of student artwork. Here was a small yet overwhelming exhibit of eight framed broadsides. Working in the same medium, I recognized the style of these pieces. A cool classic text design contrasting with a stark illustration positioned to draw the viewer in and lead them to spending time with the accompanying text. I was jolted from what had been a pleasant rather pastoral reverie by these stark black and white linoleum cuts illustrating the poems of Afghan women.

These writers living in a war-ravaged landscape, are participants in an amazing program which encourages and facilitates expression through the written word. The illustrations drew me in, but the words of these women transported me to the world of human struggle of which I had only been vaguely conscious. Cries of pain mingled with hope made their way through the Afghan Women’s Writers Project to these library halls where they served to embrace me in a reminder that human emotions span a range of feelings which represent not only the sublime, but also the grotesque gamut of human suffering. I was stunned and overwhelmed by the power of these works of art and resolved to share my experience in this article.

I have been working with college students creating broadsides of poetry and smaller pieces of prose for several years, so I was not surprised when Sweet Briar’s professor of creative writing Carrie Brown had called me last Fall and asked if some of her students might come on a Saturday morning and visit the Virginia Arts of the Book Center. Their morning was planned around the opportunity to view some of the many different broadsides printed by the artists of the VABC. The students excitement filled our small classroom as we explored the wide range of work which had been translated by type and illustration into pieces worthy of wall display.

After viewing the work, several of the students asked how they might create works such as these at Sweet Briar. Not having a letterpress facility, they do have a printmaking studio as part of their studio art program. I suggested that they concentrate on creating dynamic illustrations in linoleum and printing these by hand on fine paper which they had preprinted digitally with a poem’s text. (This would give the students the opportunity to learn a bit about typography and layout as they prepared the computer files for these pages.)

I had no idea that this brief conversation would lead to such intensive work by several students. Sweet Briar juniors Sally Toms and Kaitlyn Holloway, with the support of Professor Brown and art professor Laura Pharis, had been inspired to publish broadsides of work created by the Afghan Women’s Writers Project in honor of a visit by the 2009 founder of this program, journalist and author Masha Hamilton.

The Afghan Women’s Writers Program was created by Ms. Hamilton with the help and support of many as a means to empower Afghan women to share their voices with the world. “Women determined to tell their own stories gather online and in ‘writing huts’ in undisclosed locations in Kabul and Herat to receive mentoring from American women authors and professors, and to participate in writing workshops and reading salons. AWWP’s online magazine is the vehicle through which their stories are shared. The project also aims to promote greater economic independence for these women by strengthening their self-confidence, computer literacy and writing skills, and to encourage the inclusion of women’s voices in Afghanistan’s national dialogue.” [Mission statement from the AWWP website. ]

“Security remains a concern for many women in Afghanistan, especially those who are trying to work, or further their education, or who frankly tell their stories. Out of concern for their safety the online magazine does not use family names or specific locators.”

“Since the project was founded in May 2009, over 90 Afghan women have participated in the AWWP mentorship program, honing their writing skills in English. While the project also includes workshops in Dari (Afghan Persian), it has heard from many women that they want an opportunity to improve and deepen their ability to communicate in English, the international language of commerce and diplomacy. They know that by making it possible for many, many people in the world to read their work, they will be helping their sisters who have yet to find their voices. Many learned English while living in refugee camps, so this is not just the language of the privileged.”

Funding for the program has come from small individual donations organized through the AWWP website. [You can visit awwproject.org to read more about the work of these talented and courageous women.]

Back in the rolling landscape of Virginia’s foothills, Sally and Kaitlyn had decided they would put their creative efforts to work publishing the writing of their Afghan sisters. Working late hours between classes and other activities the students’ output was phenomenal. They produced broadsides of eight different pieces, each with its own original linocut in an edition of 180! A very daunting semester’s project for what would normally require an entire class of students. In addition to these pieces, the pair created three original monoprints for auction during Masha Hamilton’s visit to the college. The students successfully marketed their newly published work collecting $2200, enough to purchase a laptop and provide the very expensive Afghan wifi access for one woman for a year.

Inspired by their success, the students printed an additional edition of fifty selected pieces for fund-raising use by the Writing Project. This creative pair’s energy is growing as they discuss future projects with other nonprofit organizations. Having discovered the power of collaboration in the creative process and enjoying the rewards of working together, Sally and Kaitlyn plan to grow their publishing and fund-raising program.

Sally and Kaitlyn recently joined eight other Sweet Briar students in a semester-long internship at the Virginia Arts of the Book Center. They are learning how to search for just the right type to set a poet’s words as they poke through our multitude of wooden type cases. Discovering hand composition and learning to impress the image of the writer’s voice into the magical surface of paper seems a logical next step for these artists. It is a slow technology which encourages the reflection required to fully appreciate the power of words.

I am very excited to see what these two students produce next as they master these centuries-old skills!

Josef Beery has worked at Ten Flavors Studios in Charlottesville, Virginia as a publication designer for almost three decades. He is a cofounder of the Virginia Arts of the Book Center and an early organizer of the Virginia Festival of the Book. He shares observations on the fields of typography, printing, and books to promote discussion and interest in the activities of the VABC.

Exhibition Hall at the Grolier Club (photo from Grolier Club website)

Oh fortunate man, I successfully lured my wife, Gay, into the august halls of New York City’s Grolier Club on our whirlwind two-day holiday trip to the city!

The Grolier Club, with a clubhouse in midtown Manhattan, is one of America’s oldest associations of bibliophiles. It can never hope to compete with the blockbuster exhibits of the Metropolitan or the MOMA. But Gay had suffered through hours in line at the Metropolitan this fall and still missed the exhibit of Alexander McQueen’s high fashion dresses, “Savage Beauty.” She was potentially piqued enough to give the Grolier’s five-centuries-with-no-waiting exhibit a glance.

The Grolier Club exhibition, “Printing for Kingdom, Empire, & Republic: Treasures from the Archives of the Imprimerie Nationale” successfully satisfied Gay’s taste for books, especially the antique and the unique.

And, after all, how could the exhibition, collected from the vaults of the French government’s official printing works, disappoint? As suggested by the exhibition’s title, this “printing office”, like the book itself, has survived centuries of regime change and only been enriched in the process. Founded as the Imprimerie Royale in 1640 by Cardinal Richelieu, it was the exclusive printer for the French government, whether royal, imperial, or republican.

Decades before Richelieu established the Imprimerie, the French king had been served by royal printers. A royal company of printers (Imprimeurs du Roy pour le grec) had been established by François I in 1538 as waves of Renaissance change rolled through France carrying the infant technology of printing with movable type. A royal committee set about creating their own typeface to print the works in Greek needed to satisfy a growing hunger for books. It was this group which appointed Claude Garamond (Garamont) to create a suite of types based on the hand writing of the royal scribe Angelo Vergetio. The Greek font was soon followed by a Roman font, and the rest of the story is typographic history.

On display as one of its premier treasures, is a collection of the steel punches engraved by Claude Garamond to create this first sixteen point Greek cursive font. Garamond’s design of a roman minuscule based on Vergetio’s calligraphy and a roman italic based on the handwriting of his assistant Robert Granjon became the standards which would guide the hands of type designers for the next half millennium.

Garamond died in 1561, but with the establishment of the Imprimerie Nationale, his type designs evolved in the hands of successive punch cutters. In 1827, a type specimen of a Garamond-like font created in 1621 by Jean Jannon was discovered, but unfortunately not attributed to him until the twentieth century. During the reign of Louis XIV, and after the creation of the Impriemerie Royale, a new “King’s Roman,” the “Romain du Roi,” was cut in steel by Phillippe Grandjean (Grandjon).

Here exhibited in the Grolier’s cases are the actual steel punches and brass matrices used in the creation of this essential type face, the Romain du Roi. Huge steel punches for the creation of 120 point type are the central attraction. These monsters make quite clear the work required to design the intricate shapes we now call type.

What is all this about steel punches and brass matrices? Gutenberg’s movable type was cast from lead, a metal easily accessible and moldable for medieval craftsman due to its low melting point. In order to cast a piece of type or a sort, a mold had to be created. And preferably a reusable mold. Thus a finely crafted brass matrix would become the cradle for the casting of the dozens of sorts which would fill one small compartment in a font’s type case. To create this matrix required the skills of jewelers. They knew how to create this mold by carving special steel punches which could be hammered into the softer brass to create the exact impression which became the mold for a letter of type. Thus the first type designers, like many of the early illustrators of the printed book, came from the jeweler’s benches of Europe.

The Grolier exhibition displays hundreds of the many thousands of steel punches and brass matrices in their vaults. Included in the exhibition are punches for many foreign alphabets including Tamil, Cambodian, Brahman, Javanese, Khmer, and Tibetan among many others.

And what is it that is so remarkable about seeing these unique sculptural objects? How do they illuminate my understanding of the story of the design of our printed alphabet? The key is in that word “sculptural.” Type emerged from the artist’s hand in three dimensions not on the two dimensional flat plane of a piece of paper!

In the late 1980s I had the great pleasure to work with Warren Chappell, a book and type designer who had actually worked in Germany cutting punches with another great type designer, Rudolf Koch. Warren impressed on me repeatedly that type is a sculptural object, that the making of it involved the crafting of shapes in steel, not just the drawing of the outline of a letter. When I spent time with Warren, drawings of letters were all the rage as digital type was just being born as a new printing technology.

So as I perused the cases of objects selected for display from the collections of the French Imprimerie, I finally grasped the nature of a letter as a three-dimensional object. Here it is, I can see it in all of its hefty glory! And I can see the impression it makes as it is stamped into brass to create a matrix. It is not just the picture of a letter; it, like the Roman letters inscribed in stone, has dimensional form.

Included in the exhibition are engraved copper plates made by the Imprimerie’s type designers to stand as records of the design of each letter. In these prints, along with the outlines of the letter, are engraved the lines of construction. These are the guide lines used by the artist in drawing these letters–perfect circles and lines of proportion. It is these guidelines that interest me. Since the Renaissance, artists have studied letters and attempted to describe the rational essence of their beauty by discovering the mathematical proportions at work in their creation. The fifteenth century calligrapher Felice Feliciano had written a treatise on the classical proportions of letters in 1463, the Alphabetum Romanum, appearing just eight years after Gutenberg’s Bible was printed in a font to imitate the calligraphic hand writing of the time. In 1525, Albrecht Dürer published his own rationalized instructions for constructing letter forms. And as recently as 1982, the artist and calligrapher David Lance Goines offered a new and detailed treatise on the construction of the roman alphabet.

But, as I walked through the exhibit, it became clear to me that try as we may to capture the beauty of a letter form with mathematical understanding, the letter form is still the product of the craftsman’s hand and eye working with a material which has its own contributions to make to the final form of the letter. Just as the Romans had discovered of the concept of entasis — that to make a column look truly vertical it must actually be cigar shaped — the slight bulge accommodating the light as it sneaks around the sides of the column and narrows it in the middle, the type cutters of the Renaissance understood the minute effects of line and curve as they filed and honed their letter forms.

I left the Grolier Club with a renewed since of awe for the craftsman who carefully crafted the lines and curves of each and every letter of type (with different designs for every point size created within a typeface). They listened not to the rational ideal of beauty found in following mathematical guides, but instead to the aesthetic sensibilities that they had mastered from working long hours with tools and materials. Through experience they had discovered the perfection of form required to create the perfect letter form.

Josef Beery has worked at Ten Flavors Studios in Charlottesville, Virginia as a publication designer for almost three decades. He is a cofounder of the Virginia Arts of the Book Center and an early organizer of the Virginia Festival of the Book. He shares observations on the fields of typography, printing, and books to promote discussion and interest in the activities of the VABC.