We will be having a new brainstorming session in person at Block Nite, Wednesday January 11th, 5:30 pm.

Ideas that were brought to the table in no particular order:

How? a bound book. Possibly a series of books. Small in size in order to use the recently purchased binders board.

Common Theme: Even if there is a series of books, we would like to have a common theme to tie the project together.

Common Size: We would have a common size for the series.

Theme Ideas: Collection of Fables / Encyclopedia of the World / Atlas of Secret Diseases / Marginalia / Six word stories /

Method Ideas: Shuffle book (where each separate book could be “read” in a random order with the others and be cohesive / Small Team Model (break into small teams to produce a book from each team) / Collaborative (do we want to print and respond?) / Should we all work on one book? / 2 people teams could work on a press sheet together, which would fold into 8 pages and then we can bind them all together /

So those are the current ideas and thoughts we discussed. Please contribute your ideas, feedback, questions, or inspiration below!

I was recently asked by the staff of the Northern Neck Food Bank to do a poster encouraging folks to grow kitchen gardens and share what they have harvest and learned with one another. This cabbage began to grow on my wood block as I started the poster design. After finishing the pencil drawing, I will ink it in to imitate the stark ink of the printing press. Then, my favorite part, the cutting, will begin. Slowly I will recreate the image of each of this plant’s intricate curves with my knife in wood. A daunting challenge!

Josef Beery

Spring has come to Virginia and Romanticism has come to the VABC. This month, we host a classic Virginia Foundation for the Humanities exhibit that used to travel to libraries and museums statewide in the age before digital exhibits, “William Wordsworth and the Age of English Romanticism.

Why consider the Romantics now? As you stroll the 23 panels, filled with poetry quotes, notebook jottings, paintings, manuscript images … you realize the Romantics, like we, lived in interesting times. Theirs was an age of revolution: new industrial and political modes were sweeping Europe and America, and with them new considerations of the human relationship to the world. The Romantics preferred strong emotion as an authentic source of experience, they elevated lives of ordinary people and subjects over aristocratic ones, and they argued for nature as the basis for our knowledge of the human condition.

And, yes, William Blake, artist, poet, visionary, and printer of his own handmade texts is considered one of the originators of the artist’s book. Honorary VABC member?

For further reading, peruse a hard-worn and mildew-bitten copy of Wordsworth’s Poetical Works (ed. Henry Reed, 1839) that we’ve set in the room.  It’s a rare book, and of course letterpressed, treat it right! If you want more Romantic writers the 20-year-old exhibit leaves out (being also an artifact of its age), flip through another book in the gallery where you can meet four female writers who helped shape Wordsworth’s poems and aesthetic: Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams, Joanna Baillie, and Dorothy Wordsworth. You can find them and others in a more recent collection, Romanticism: An Anthology (ed. Duncan Wu, 1994).

In short, we return to the Romantics because they inspire. So visit, look, read, and be inspired.

- Kevin McFadden

“I heard a thousand blended notes
While in a grove I sat reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What Man has made of Man.”

-excerpt from “Written in Early Spring” by William Wordsworth

Hear VABC member Angie Hogan read this poem

Brown has really been green for a long time. The University of Virginia’s Brown College, an undergraduate residential college, has invited renowned writers on environmental subjects to visit the college every semester for well over a decade. This program has given college students and community members an opportunity to meet and talk with inspiring writers and leaders who are working to define an environmental ethos appropriate to our 21st century society.

As part of this program, I have been teaching a class in letterpress for Brown students for the last four semesters. (I have had the great pleasure to be a Brown College Fellow since the mid 1990s). The class gives enthusiastic students the opportunity to spend intensive time with the actual words of these important writers. The act of setting them in type and holding them in one’s hand has become a rare and treasured experience in this day of the binary bit and the laser-printed pixel.

Students choose a poem or piece of prose by the visiting writer after reading and discussion. They complete the composition in metal type and the careful proofing process begins as I concentrate on finishing a woodcut to accompany the piece.

The class prints a small edition of the broadside on a high quality paper. After presenting it to the author for signing, the students sell the broadsides as a fundraiser to benefit a non-profit organization of the visiting writer’s choice.

This April the Brownies are working hard to finish up a broadside to honor the visit of Southern writer Janisse Ray. Ms. Ray will be sharing her writing and views on the environment and sustainability during her visit to the University on April 21 and April 22. On the 21st she will speak at Jefferson Hall on the West Range and on the 22nd she will speak at the Ivy Creek Natural Area. Both events are at 5:30 and are free and open to the public.

Brown College’s beautiful hand-crafted broadsides signed by the author will be on sale to benefit Ms. Ray’s selected non-profit for $20.

–Josef Beery

Cost: $500 (tuition is UVa Educational Benefit eligible), $450 for members

In this Intensive Bookbinding Certification course we will learn a series of bookbinding techniques. Starting with a simple pamphlet stitch binding, students will plan and create three small books with a final enclosure case. We will cover everything from the importance of paper and grain direction, cloth and board types, stitching techniques, bookbinding tools, planning and measuring, casing-in, and other bookmaking embellishments. By the end of the class, students will have a bookmaking vocabulary as well as the skills to create their own hand-bound book projects. VABC Certification for Bookbinding upon successful completion of the class.

Contact kmcfadden@virginia.edu to enroll.

March 31: Introduction to tools, paper, bookcloth, thread, folding, signatures
Pamphlet stitch (3 and 5-stitch)
Pamphlet binding with variations
April 7: Single-signature case binding with no spine piece (like Cerulean
Probabilities and After Love)
April 14: Case binding sewing on flange
April 28: Case making, joining binding with case
May  5: Enclosures: phase box and slip case
May 12: Finishing work session, sharing, evaluations

Kicked off by an inspiring talk by Dean Dass of the UVa Art Department, we each plan our own interpretation of this certificate of forgiveness for the sin we find most disturbing. Frank Riccio provides an amazing drawing for the back of each certificate. His take-off on a nineteenth-century bank note is filled with humor and scandal. We take turns cranking the Vandercook to impress its image on the backs of the hundreds of certificate pages we will produce. Then we each retire to our own creative corner to plan our individual works. Soon the press is booked night and day and scores of different colors of ink make their way one at a time to the rollers of the press. Antique moveable type, woodcut, linocut, photo plates, digital printing, and collage all are called upon to produce these incredible pages.

And then the final weeks spent in binding this edition of fifty books. One to go home with each contributor, one for deposit at UVa, and a rare few to be made available for public sale.

Addeane Caelleigh has designed a beautiful hardback certificate book binding and cutting, pasting, drilling, and foil stamping require the efforts of all participants.

To preview our book of indulgences and catch a glimpse of our feverish activity, view the slide show.

Then join us on Sunday afternoon, March 20, from noon to 3pm for an exhibit of the certificates and refreshments at the Artbox/VABC Gallery in the Ivy Square Shopping Center. A select few books will be available for purchase. The perfect artist’s book to add to your collection and celebrate the 2011 Virginia Festival of the Book.

–Josef Beery

The Pardoner, a seller of indulgences. Illustrated by Rockwell Kent for an edition of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

I had the very good fortune to visit the Papal Palace in Avignon with my wife Gay this summer. Among the amazing things on display were several papal indulgences. Not really familiar with the idea of an “indulgence,” I took a few photos to share with all of my friends back at the printing studio. Recently it had been suggested that for our next collaborative project the printers of the VABC create a “Book of Indulgences.” What Garrett has been calling our “Get Out Of Hell Coupons.”

With my ears open to the press group and my fingers to the keyboard, I was soon able to discover that it was the catholic church’s business as a publisher and retailer of indulgences that financed the first printing of the bible by J. Gutenberg. Rather than write these certificates out long hand, the church discovered the ease of having them set in moveable type with appropriate blanks to be filled in later by church officials. Gutenberg was printing these as early as 1452 according to the British Museum.

The British Museum writes:

“For the printer, indulgences could have meant cash, paid for by the Church, much needed during or after a capital intensive venture. For

An indulgence on display in the Papal Palace in Avignon.

the Church it meant a rationalisation of an otherwise labour-intensive bureaucratic procedure: thousands of identical letters of indulgence could be required at a single visit to a town. Compared with writing them out by hand, they could now be produced at much reduced cost. Printing provided an efficient solution to a bureaucratic problem. We do not know how many copies of [an] indulgence were printed. By the end of the century, one indulgence was said to have been printed in as many as 142,950 copies. The sale of the indulgences in the Middle Ages was satirised by Chaucer in ‘The Pardoner’s Tale,’ a pardoner being someone who sold indulgences.”

The printmakers of the VABC are not the first artists to contemplate playing creatively with

An official of the church selling indulgences.

a certificate. Saul Steinberg’s mid twentieth century drawings inspired by the idea of powerful, official certificates have now become iconic.

All this leads me to ponder the real value of the certificate of indulgence in modern society. Why is that we are attracted to the idea of actually receiving proof of an atonement? Is collective social guilt such a huge part of our everyday consciousness that the opportunity to reduce the pain by even a small amount is always attractive? So attractive that we are willing to cough up our hard-earned cash to buy a bit of goodness?

An early PRINTED indulgence from the Deutsches Museum.

A Saul Steinberg certificate.

Find out the views of the artists of the Virginia Arts of the Book Center when they publish their Book of Indulgences this March. There will be an exhibition of these certificates of indulgence (along with the traditional VABC gourmet reception) in our gallery space below the Artbox on Ivy Road on Sunday, March 20. Come and finish off the Virginia Festival of the Book with us. And of course, the Book of Indulgencees, hand bound in a very limited edition, will be for sale…for the benefit of our twenty first century printing presses!  – Josef Beery

A twenty-first century indulgence.