We will be providing Rives Lightweight paper cut to size of 8 1/4 wide x 8 inches.

1. This first template illustrates how your folio sheet should orient on the paper – so that you have an idea of how it fits with the final trim size of 8″ wide x 6″ high. Download/view the PDF template »

2. This comprehensive template illustrates the layout of the 3 folios which will comprise your theme signature. We will have working samples at the VABC starting next week. The first page would be one side of your first folio, the second page the back of that folio, then the third page would be the start of the next folio and so on. The gray areas are “live” printing areas. Please be mindful of the various margins, and especially the location of the title on the first page. The page numbers on the template are for your reference. Also note that page 6-7 can be a full spread if you like. If you have questions about the template feel free post below. Download the signature template »

CURRENT TEAMS and THEMES

Atlas of Secret Diseases
Team: Nancy Kober, Michael Swanberg, Lana Lambert, Dean Dass

Imaginary Body Parts
Team: Laura Pharis, Barbara Payne

Six word stories
Team: Addeane Caelleigh, Jnanam MacIsaac, Frank Riccio, Diane Ober [tentative, needs printer], Bonnie Bernstein

Terms of Venery
Team: Roger Williams, Lana Lambert, Melanie Lower

Manual of Cancelling Cliches
Team: Kevin McFadden, Jeff Pike

Love
Team: Dean Dass, Amanda Nelsen

Principal heads
Team: Dean Dass, Kristin Adolfson

Strange Adventures
Team: Dean Dass, Stacey Evans

Renewing Our Vowels
Team: Addeane Caelleigh, Diane Ober, Janet Eden

The Climate
Team: Dean Dass, Amanda Nelsen, Erica Goldfarb, Stacey Evans, Lotta Helleberg

Tragic Performance
Team: Josef Beery, Martha Mendenhall, Sian Richards, Jennifer Hoyt Tidwell, Kara McLane

Early Birds
Team: Rachel Singel, Garrett Queen

Prognostications
Team:

Phases of the Moon
Team:

Etc. (must include colophon or end note)
Team: Kristin Adolfson, Lindsey Mears, Bonnie Bernstein

Invasives – Matthew Gibson, Jennifer Billingsly

April 28 through June 2

Virginia Arts of the Book Center
2125 Ivy Road (Ivy Road Shopping Center)
6 Saturdays, 10:00 AM-12:00 Noon

Instructor: Josef Beery

Tuition: $500 (Member and Nonmember price, UVa Education Benefit Eligible)
VABC Members not using Education Benefit receive $50 discount ($450)

Contact kmcfadden@virginia.edu for inquiries and registration.

In this Design Certification Course students will receive a strong introduction to typography and design for print. The course will be held in the Virginia Arts of the Book Center, home to a letterpress printing laboratory with hundreds of cases of wood and metal type. The course will outline the history of printing, type design, and book production. Students will learn the basics of design for the printed page through hands on work. Students will use conventional page layout software on their own desktop computers to complete assignments in the design of posters, brochures, magazine articles, and books. At the completion of the course students will receive a certificate of mastery in “Design with Type.”

Schedule:

April 28 Hands-on exploration of typographic and printing history.

May 5 Introduction to the letter form and traditional type families. Assignment: Poster

May 12 Introduction to basic principles of type composition. Assignment: Brochure

May 19 Use of color and images in layout. Assignment: Magazine Article

May 26 Design of the book. Assignment: Booklet

June 2 Printing and binding techniques in the digital age.

Instructor:

The Japanese Woodblock Printing or Moku Hanga process is as beautiful as the prints it produces.  In an age of getting-it-done-yesterday-everything-all-the-time-prefabulousness, a process that lets you slow down and reconnect with natural materials and work with your hands is invaluable. It also offers the portability of any flat surface and does not require a press.  The process satisfies both the need for sculpting in three dimensions (block carving) and producing two dimensional imagery (printing).  In this two day workshop, students will learn how the Japanese pulled masterful prints using only a block of wood, a bit of rice paste, and a bit of pigment.  Students will learn carving techniques and a light history of Edo era printing on the first day.  After carving the block at home for a week, students will learn printing techniques on the second and last day.  Experience the beauty of this water based printing technique and take home your own hand carved block as well as an edition of sumi ink prints.
Contact: kmcfadden@virginia.edu for inquiries and registration

SPECS and GUIDELINES:

• Bound book of a number of 12-page signatures (note change!) on the theme of a pocket reference or almanac (no fewer than five signatures, not likely more than 12)
• Each signature will be a concept developed by a team of no fewer than two VABC members (3-5 would be nice, a mix of letter-folks and visual artists)
• You will elect which signature project you join by suggesting a heading or joining a team under a current heading (these we’ll post on the website with participants under them)
• Projects and teams selected by April 1
• Examples of projects: Atlas of Secret Diseases, Book of Hours, Directory of Printers’ Maladies, Catalogue of Cancelling Cliches, etc
• First page of the signature would be a “title page” which sets off the following 7 pages of signature
• Margins and page template will be provided for reference
• Common trim size and paper provided (paper will arrive in April)
• Authors’, artists’ names will not appear in the pages but on a table of contents which will be the first signature
• A binder’s group will oversee production of 50-60 copies
• Pages must not be added to in thickness beyond chine-colle widths (no pop-ups or glued in trinkets that would compromise closing book)
• Each participating artist will receive one copy

TIMELINE:

March 1 – establish published webpage where topics are listed and teams can link up; each team must have ONE certified letterpress printer

April 1 – establish teams and agree on overall project title which will allow other words to be used if needed (Album, Almanac, Cabinet, Catalogue, Circus, Companion, Lexicon, Magazine, Miscellany, Museum, Peepshow, Pocket Reference, Thesaurus, Variety Pack) (Give it a fictitious author? Dr. Higgenbaum’s Almanac of Exploding Wonders) (Give it a number “12” for 2012)

May 1 – Maquettes /storyboards / dummies of signatures produced and shared at meeting and production begins

Sept 1 – All printing complete

October 15 – binding complete

Nov 1 – computer scans of spreads complete

November 9 (tentative Raucous Auction date) – all work complete!

TEAMS and THEMES

Join one, or start a new one by commenting on the post below – we will add it to the list below. If you’d like to join a team here, please comment on this post and again, we’ll add it to the list:

Atlas of Secret Diseases
Team: Nancy Kober, Michael Swanberg, Lana Lambert, Dean Dass

Imaginary Body Parts
Team: Laura Pharis, Barbara Payne

Six word stories (???)
Team: Addeane Caelleigh, Jnanam MacIsaac, Frank Riccio, Diane Ober [tentative, needs printer]

Bestiary
Team: Roger Williams, Lana Lambert, Melanie Lower

Manual of Cancelling Cliches
Team: Kevin McFadden, Jeff Pike

Love
Team: Dean Dass, Amanda Nelsen

Principal heads
Team: Dean Dass, Kristin Adolfson

Strange Adventures
Team: Dean Dass, Stacey Evans

Renewing Our Vowels
Team: Addeane Caelleigh, Diane Ober, Janet Eden

The Climate
Team: Dean Dass, Amanda Nelsen, Erica Goldfarb, Stacey Evans, Lotta Helleberg

Tragic Performance
Team: Josef Beery, Martha Mendenhall, Sian Richards, Jennifer Hoyt Tidwell, Kara McLane

Early Birds
Team: Rachel Singel, Garrett Queen

Prognostications
Team:

Phases of the Moon
Team:

Etc. (must include colophon or end note)
Team: Kristin Adolfson, Lindsey Mears

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