Paste Paper workshop
Monday, May 19, 1 - 5 pm.
Click here for a description of the workshop. The image below is a participant example from a recent Lead Graffiti Paste Paper Workshop. It was achieved by working the colored paste to create an image and then folding the sheet in half to offset the image..
Click here to register for the workshop.
Printing slowly & patiently via letterpress
WELCOME TO LEAD GRAFFITI, a laboratory of sorts in Newark, Delaware, for all things letterpress—a place where you can do some serious experimenting, as well as creative & playful tinkering, with letterpress, typography, and bookmaking because :
WE BELIEVE we are part of a continuing story that passed through Johannes Gutenberg around 1450.
WE BELIEVE creative pursuits should be a higher priority regarding time spent and perceived value.
WE BELIEVE all people, especially kids, need the opportunity to experience “aha” moments and to learn the value of opposable thumbs.
WE BELIEVE in aggressively searching for the road less traveled.
WE BELIEVE in collaborating, and as much as we can, with kids.
WE BELIEVE in knowing how to read a ruler and doing math in your head.
WE BELIEVE in stockpiling “shelves” of ideas.
WE BELIEVE in working spontaneously and intuitively with those ideas.
Lead Graffiti put on a version of its H.N. Werkman letterpress workshop, celebrating National Print Day at the Frederick Book Art Center, in Frederick, MD. The local newspaper included a nice article on the workshop. You can read the article here.
Here are a couple of our favorite photos we took during the workshop.
Below is a typographic mark we promote to groups that write or send out 6” x 4” postcards to potential voters. If that works for you, you can have the group’s logo in full color and a printed note on the back. It is not printed via letterpress, but it could be if desired. Email us if you want to start a conversation and to find out the cost (which for full-color postcards is relatively cheap).
Solo Exhibition at the Frederick Book Arts Center
There is a two-month-long exhibition of Lead Graffiti’s work at the Frederick Book Arts Center in Frederick, MD, running from Saturday, March 1, through Saturday, May 3, which is Print Day. We will be at the FBAC for two days during the exhibition. First, there will be a talk on Saturday, April 5, at 2:00, surrounded by the exhibition, about our endeavors, our design and printing process, and hopefully, answers to many questions about the work from those in attendance. We are working on ideas for a Protest Poster Workshop for Print Day. More information will follow once we get the idea more solidified.
⬆ FBAC Executive Director Casey Smith illustrates his disillusionment with the ending of the 2-month Lead Graffiti exhibition..
Subscriptions to the Lead Graffiti maker space
We like people in the Lead Graffiti studio. We are also looking for financial help to keep Lead Graffiti going. We’ve fallen out of love working with clients who often want work that isn’t worth our time in our studio or a place in our portfolio. Also, we hate estimating the cost of a job. Please tell us what you need and the maximum you will pay to fulfill that need. We'll politely refuse if it isn’t enough. With that in mind, we’ve started offering “studio subscriptions” to people who might want to use Lead Graffiti as a letterpress “maker space” for their creative outlet. We also provide studio tours explicitly related to the medium of letterpress at least once every month. Check out our calendar for dates, or email us a date and an idea of what you want to do. And check out the details about “studio subscriptions.” Maybe some after-school program for your kids that seems to have a creative streak in them.
If you don’t see anything listed, email us with a couple of dates or times, and we’ll try to accommodate your schedule.
LETTERPRESS LIVE sessions in the planning:
We try to post instances when we can accurately schedule a “Letterpress Live session.” When we list it as a “Letterpress Live session,” we explain the project, and anyone can come and watch. There may be instances when we can let you participate in the printing. Please email us if you intend to join us.
When you missed our LETTERPRESS LIVE session on Monday, February 24th, this is what we were printing. The signage being implemented is shown in the photo above.
We ended up using an ink wash (ink diluted with mineral spirits) to print our 16” Onyx (cut from Linoleum blocks) on brown wrapping paper. It took us nearly four hours to do what you see above. We plan to hang these in the middle of the gallery at the Frederick Book Arts Center when hanging the show on February 26th & 27th. Wish us luck.
The “Letterpress Live” event on Friday, February 28, involved printing the numbers on our “Just the Ticket” project.
Indivisible protest
We wanted to participate in the Indivisible protest on President’s Day (March 17) at Rodney Square in Wilmington, DE. Zoe helped us make signs for each of us. It looks like Jill’s Guantanamo sign worked, as the government has scrapped most of its plans to hold detainees there. Jill’s sign reads, “Is Guantanamo America’s Auschwitz?”
Giveaway Zoo card for “Liar, Liar.”
The back of the card reads
“9,296 pages document 30,573 false or misleading claims by Donald Trump from his first day in office, 2017, to his final day on January 20, 2020, when Joe Biden was sworn in as the country’s next president. All that verbiage is 53" thick, weighs 52 pounds, and it started like this.
The dissolution of the Delaware College of Art & Design, to whom Lead Graffiti had donated 100s of design books over the past decade, brought an invitation to reclaim them. We found a few, which brought us another interesting find—a blank Coptic-stitched book with a spine about 36 inches wide bound by Ema Ishii Holdredge for her BFA show at the Corcoran School of Art in 2008. That book haunted us for several weeks, and we decided it was too audacious not to give it a Lead Graffiti shot. For a while, we pondered how to fill a several-thousand-page book with content that made a serious point.
The notion of the presidential untruths came to mind, so maybe there was some documentation we could “borrow?” Sure enough, in a few Safari minutes, we found a downloadable PDF from The Washington Post that we could massage into a typographic form we could use. We were off. Ray undertook the ink-jet printing of the pages, folding and inserting the red cover-weight sheets for structural support, and gathering and punching the folds for sewing. Jill did 99.8% of the sewing.
At a 302United gathering, we encouraged attendees to stroke the book. The head of the Delaware ACLU, shown at right, has excellent technique.
Newark Arts Alliance Solo Exhibition
Lead Graffiti is the subject of a solo exhibition at the Newark Arts Alliance from December 31 through January 18. We will exhibit work from our earliest days through work produced in the past 2 weeks. The exhibition is designed to group work by conceptual connections. While we fell in love with the letterpress process relatively quickly, we love its fluidity and the ability to constantly reinvent it. The gallery is open Tuesdays through Saturdays from 12 - 4 and Fridays until 8. An artist’s reception will be held on Friday, January 10, from 6 - 8 pm. We plan on being there starting at 4. Email us if you would like a tour, and we will post those times on our calendar as we establish them. Lead Graffiti offers workshops in its studio space in the Sandy Brae Industrial Park here in Newark on various processes relating to letterpress and bookmaking.
207 Louviers Drive, Newark, DE, is located on Papermill Road across from Bank of America and W.L. Gore.
Lead Graffiti was chosen as “the city’s favorite artist studio of 2024” in a poll by the Newark Post.
Our Vandercook Universal III rebirth
Many of you know our Vandercook Universal III, our main production press, has been down after an absolute and total motor and electronics breakdown. As of January 3, this problem has been fairly well corrected. We are up and running again with a new motor and new relays. Thanks to Orbit Electrical, our Uni III should run another 55 years. There are still a few things we would like fixed, but we can now print larger work up to 18” x 24”.
It is a CARD time of year. We just completed a holiday card workshop, and another (the one-sided POSTCARD version) was scheduled for the following week.
It all started with a surprise visit from one of my favorite students, Melissa, who was seriously involved with Raven Press at the University of Delaware. Granddaughter Zoe was also at the studio, and they played around, drawing with a set of pastels.
When Melissa (usually in California for her job) is in the studio, we almost always print something. She said her dad wanted “thank you” cards.
Here’s an instant Lead graffiti typographic experiment idea: We will make a folding thank you card and print it in black (already on our Vandercook SP15). Then, jazz them up with some pastel playfulness. The image above shows each of the final cards. Three hours. Bang. I love the electricity in that bottom one.
A future Afternoon Diversion idea: If someone wants to come over and help, I’d like to take a 20-foot length of paper, 22” wide, and print a sheet at least 20’ long by pulling the paper through one of our iron hand presses. There is no charge for the experience. I’d imagine you would need to commit to 5 hours. I’d even buy lunch to start things off.
We’ve been playing with a new base from which to print. We took Lead Graffiti’s “Shahn Torn” typeface with an Edgar Allan Poe quote to produce a broadside. We were also using some of our “ink pulls” that we’ve been collecting from the initial stage of cleaning the ink off of our Vandercook after a run. Here’s are 4 more that we especially liked.
Newark Arts Alliance “Printed Slowly & Patiently Via Letterpress”
Lead Graffiti, Newark, Delaware’s Art Studio of the Year, is having a solo show at the Newark Arts Alliance for the first 3 weeks of 2025. More details and dates will be forthcoming. The Exhibition Committee voted unanimously to have Lead Graffiti as the first exhibition of 2025 at the Newark Arts Alliance. 'Lead Graffiti: An Exhibition of Letterpress and Book Arts' will open to the public on Tuesday, December 31, and will continue during the regular open hours of the NAA location, with an evening reception on Friday, January 10th, from 6 to 8 pm.
APHA 2025 Calendar
The Chesapeake Chapter of the American Printing History Association prints an annual calendar, and this year, four of the 12 months for 2025 were printed at the Lead Graffiti studio. From left to right: January / Ray Nichols, August / Carol Maurer, October / Jill Cypher, and November / Casey Smith. These designs represent quite an excellent range of styles and tastes to egg things forward. It is fantastic to have creative talent circling you.
NAA “Visual Messages: Socially Engaged Art”
The Newark Arts Alliance is having an exhibition entitled “Visual Messages: Socially Engaged Art.” Lead Graffiti entered four pieces into the show, and all four were accepted: “Lies, Lies. Pants on Fire,” “No More War, No More Putin,” and “No Zombies Allowed.” A framed set of 12 political postcards was also accepted.
Jill led an excellent book-making workshop on constructing and binding a “concertina spine” book. The 13 Upper Chesapeake Book Arts Group members who attended seemed to have a good time, and the results looked professional.
If you live within a comfortable driving distance of Newark, Delaware, and are interested in making books (either with or without content), consider joining our group. We don’t have a membership fee, though there may be a small fee for materials when doing an event like this or making paste paper. We typically meet on the third Wednesday of the month from 6:30 to 8:30.
Below is the studio photo of the finished book. It takes my book-making breath.
Waldorf School of Philadelphia 8th-grade diplomas
Since 2012, we’ve had the privilege of printing the Waldorf School of Philadelphia 8th-grade diplomas. We’ve always described our experience as our favorite project for a client for money. No question. The students are always uniquely involved, asking questions and crowding close as almost always our favorite students. COVID had interrupted our direct involvement with the students, but they came to the Lead Graffiti studio this time. Each student and the teacher produce several sheets of paste paper and choose one to wrap their diploma. They also print the text for their diploma on our Vandercook SP15. Then, they handset their name in metal type and printed it onto their diplomas using our Albion iron hand press. It’s about as perfect a day as Lead Graffiti could dream of.
The Lead Graffiti Labyrinth
We built a labyrinth in the front yard of our home in Newark, Delaware. You can read the whole story on our blog. If you want to look up labyrinths.
Here is our labyrinth after the first snow of the season.
Lead Graffiti is happy to announce a new collaboration with long-time friend and book artist Anne Hessel. We’ve established a “buy” section of our website devoted to her interest in designing and sewing blank books and encaustic work. Anne will arrange her area over the next few weeks, so feel free to look it over, but expect changes.
A few years ago, we spent much time working with a fellow letterpress printer, Bill Roberts, of Bottle of Smoke Press in Dover, DE. Bill often produced “Cinderella stamps,” which he used as part of the promotion process for various books he printed.
We have a nice Rosbach perforator, which allows you to produce the old-school holes between stamps, but controlling them is a “process.” We’ve used the perforator to include holes in several projects we’ve produced over the years. But now, adding our Boss laser cutter allows us a very controllable way of producing the holes.
So, we took our newest wood-type design, Reacshahn, as an opportunity to produce Lead Graffiti’s first set of Cinderella stamps. We’d like to include information about the stamps and the project it represents, but we don’t want to clutter the card. An added problem was finding a glassine envelope (like stamp collectors use) that was a good size. Sometimes, trying to do a project that feels right in almost every way is a total pain. We think we may just do a Zoo card to include with the stamps. This would give us more space, control, and the chance to include some full-color production shots. We’ll try to jump on that.
Lead Graffiti’s 1st wood type
September (August?) First Friday Eve happened
We highlighted our “IMHO” book produced by Upper Chesapeake Book Arts, shown below). You can read a more thorough explanation and the list of contributors by clicking here.
I might take this opportunity to encourage you to look at our “Opposites” book, also done in collaboration with the UCBO, on our YouTube channel. You can click here to see it.
⬆ This photo shows Jill (paste paper) and Deborah Arnold’s (poetry) new book from Lead Graffiti entitled “bouquet.”
Lead Graffiti’s “bouquet”
Jill (paste paper) & Deborah Arnold's (poetry) book entitled “Bouquet” - 36 pages was our best-selling book at the Manhattan Fine Press book fair in late March. We think we sold 6. We are producing an extra book and enclosure for anyone who has or will buy the book to make it the deluxe edition. You can see a more thorough description by clicking here.
Workshops / check calendar & shop
Interested in a letterpress or bookmaking experience? Please email us.
A few examples of our work at Lead Graffiti.
⬆ Newark Arts Alliance “Abstract” exhibition.
The Lead Graffiti book, “How Ink Writes Poetry,” was accepted to the Newark Arts Alliance exhibition entitled “In the Abstract.” The call for entries stated, “Work in any medium that depicts the subject matter in an unconventional and nonrepresentational manner.” The pages are “Ink Pulls” that we create using our Vandercook Universal III. The exhibit was juried by Rebecca Howell.
The exhibition runs from January 31 to February 24, with the public opening on Friday, February 10, from 6 - 8. The exhibition location is at the Newark Arts Alliance, 276 E. Main Street, Suite 102, Newark, Delaware. Maybe we’ll see a few of you there. Be sure to introduce yourself if we don’t know each other.
“How Ink Write Poetry” has been purchased by the Library of Congress.
⬆ New Impressions 2022 juried exhibition Hamilton Wood Type Museum
Lead Graffiti’s broadside “Teleport” was chosen by the judges for the Hamilton Wood Type Museum’s “2022 New Impressions” exhibition. There will be an exhibition during the spring, and a printed exhibit catalog available soon after. Printed in May 2021, the poster below was an experiment inking bubblewrap on our 1868 Washington #5 iron hand press.
For more details about the process and tools, click here.
⬆ Clamshell boxes for members of the Anne Arundel Community College Printmaking Club
Made to enclose a set of student prints at the Adkins Arboretum Visitor’s Center in Ridgely, Maryland.
⬆ A 2-year AFTERNOON DIVERSION
January 6, 2020, happened. I pretty much instantly wanted to do a broadside.
I don’t like zombie movies, but sometime around January the following year, I watched “World War Z.” Z stands for zombies who climb walls. Saw a photo from inside through a broken window of the Capitol building looking at the Library of Congress (one of my favorite places on the planet. Melissa Lentz, an essential student from my teaching days, was taking a Covid break from Apple, where she worked. She came to the studio, and we printed the type in February 2021.
I played around with how to do the glass. CLICK HERE for an explanation on Instagram (9 images) of how that was accomplished. Melissa returned to the studio, and we finished the broadside on November 20, 2022.
Size : 14.25” (w) x 22.5” (h)
Runs : 3 (title, credits, broken glass)
Stock : Stonehenge
Fonts : various
Press : Vandercook Universal III
Printed : November 2022
⬆ American Printing History Association 2023 calendar pages
February (Jill / left) and April (Ray / right) are 2 of the pages from 14 letterpress printing members of the Chesapeake Chapter. The calendar is for sale which supports chapter events. The edition is 130 prints.
Jill’s is printed from hand-rolled photopolymer for the “F” and handset metal type for all of the text.
Ray’s is printed from photopolymer using scanned wood type from their collection. The plates of overlapping numbers are inked and then hand-pressed with bubble wrap to subtract ink to create a visual unevenness.
⬆ No more war. No more Putin.
Size : 14.25” (w) x 22.5” (h)
Runs : 18 (title, credit, lines 1-3, each line 4-18)
Stock : Somerset Textured White, 300gsm
Fonts : 72 point Empire, 12 point Blair
Press : Vandercook Universal III
Printed : March 2022
Signed & numbered in an edition of 20; the broadside below represents Ray’s adverse reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It also means a continuing complicated experiment with ghost printing. The broadside is available for $60 (shipping is free), 100% of which will support the Ukraine relief effort. See details in our shop under “broadsides.”
WE SENT THE INTERNATIONAL RELIEF TEAM $1200.
—————
Hello Ray,
Thank you for your generous gift supporting families during the crisis in Ukraine. We are grateful for your generosity and could not do this without you.
Your gift details:
Amount: $1,200.00
Payment Method: Visa Use SECURE PAYMENT button below for Credit Card, Debit Card, PayPal, or Venmo ending in . . . .
Date: 5/3/2022
Designation: Ukraine Crisis
⬆ An Alliteration Bordering on Chaos, Peppered with Ps & Clues.
Size : 12” (w) x 18” (h)
Runs : 11
Stock : French Paper
Fonts : wood border material substituting for text
Press : Vandercook Universal III
Edition : 65
Printed : September 2021
The project was dreamed up by Tony Guadagnolo, a letterpress friend. Tony loves wood borders and he cut this one with his laser cutter. He made 4 sets containing various groupings and variations of the pieces you see. The main design is that “double” you see in the top line. There were singles, doubles, triples, and quads. There were also a few corner versions. You can see 2 of those at the end of the 6th and last lines.
The project was to use the border material in some fashion and an alliteration which is an occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words.
We had a hard time figuring out what we could do, but once we got this idea, we were really happy with the results.
Here is information about the tongue twister courtesy of Mental Floss.
⬆ Somebody’s got a tight grip on Joe Manchin’s balls
Size : 14.25” (w) x 22.5” (h)
Runs : 2
Stock : French Construction Kraft, 100# cover
Fonts : various wood types from 4-line to 40-line
Press : Vandercook Universal III
Printed : February 2022
Signed & numbered in an edition of 20; this broadside is a reaction to our disappointment with the Democrat-but-Republican-leaning Joe Manchin. Printed in February 2022, it is for sale for $35. You can see details in our shop under “broadsides.”
⬆ First ONLINE Meander Book with Baylor University students’
Size : 16” (w) x 20” (h)
Runs : 2 custom mixed inks
Stock : Mohawk Superfine, 80# text
Fonts : various wood & metal fonts & printer’s ornaments
scanned from the Lead Graffiti collection
Press : Vandercook Universal III & Vandercook SP15
Edition : 70
Printed : September 2021
The colorful and typographically energetic results of the FIRST ONLINE OFFERING of our MEANDER BOOK workshop with a BAYLOR UNIVERSITY sophomore-level ART 3330 typography class. Students designed their pages and bound their no-sew-no-glue books in Waco, Texas. Via Zoom meetings, Lead Graffiti provided a design critique, composed and locked up the individual pages, and printed the text block in Newark, Delaware.