Lead Graffiti's first self-designed wood type

Lead Graffiti purchased a Boss LS-1420 laser cutter to produce some of our wood types. We’ve taken a first run at a typeface I’ve been calling “Shahn Torn.” The image shows the typeface in the middle of the image with a spacing text showing on the laptop to the right. The typeface will be introduced in a book being produced for a book swap held by Upper Chesapeake Book Arts in October 2023.

Jill has suggested “Reacshahn,” which I like.

The incentive to start the typeface came with purchasing a Ben Shahn poster from 1968. That was the year I started taking my undergraduate design courses at Louisiana Tech University.

The image below gives you an idea of how the two faces connect visually. Mine are a little more “goofy” at times. You’ll notice the “H,” which has a torn paper element. The original idea was to do the whole typeface with those torn edges, but more recently, I have found a happy medium with just making some letters like that.

UCBA Meander Book workshop / July 2023

⬆ During the summer of 2023 Lead Graffiti ran our Meander Book workshop with fellow Upper Chesapeake Book Arts members. The unifying idea was to start all statements with “In my humble opinion…” but use the text message letters IMHO (a lot of bang for the buck, so to speak), and then finish the statement. The image above shows the finished broadside that will be folded and torn to produce a hard-back accordion book.

This was the first time we allowed people who wanted to just design the page digitally and then have photopolymer plates made. This created a new wrinkle which allowed us to print one of the pages upside down mistakenly (it made sense when we positioned it for the first color). We won’t say which one.

Several members opted to hand set their page with wood & metal type, and a couple of people did a hybrid version combining handset with photopolymer. Thinking 2 heads are better than 1 a number of people chose to work in teams, while others decided to go it commando style.

Pages in the photo have been rotated to make the readability better.

The lines and contributors were

In Our Humble Opinion “a little kindness will not kill u” - Rebecca Johnson Melvin, Doris Miklitz
IMHO 2 beers are better than 1 - Anne Hessel
IMHO Brussels Sprouts R 144 - Carol Maurer
It has never been more important to defend copyright - Mark & Cynthia Batty
IMHO humble opinions have gone the way of album covers - Ray Nichols
IMHO there’s nothing cooler than breathing under water - Caroline Coolidge Brown
IMHO that’s not my type - Deborah Arnold & RD Burton
IMHO dancing is an underrated form of therapy - Betsy Molina Mortenson
IMHO it is perfectly normal to keep company with a dozen cats - Deb Mackie
IMHO every which way is symmetrical - Martha Carothers, Bruce Bigatel
IMHO type is more fun to play with than to spel wiht! - Jill Cypher
IMHO life is too short to not sing out Loud! - Stephanie Isenberg
IMHO this page iz outta order - Monique Benesvy, Chuck Dressner
IMHO books are magical - Michelle Tilford

We allowed a month for the design and production of the lockups or preparation for plates. We made one order for the plates and glued them up to on oak blocks bring their height to the required 0.918” for printing. Our July meeting was devoted to printing and assembling the covers.

Doris Miklitz and Jill Cypher formed the color committee and came up with the Salmon and Steel Blue ink combo.

Our August meeting will be spent taking the group through the folding and tearing steps to assemble 3 books for each participant.

A video of the UCBA "Opposites" book

This is from the flutter-bound “Opposites” book that was a collaboration with 14 members of Upper Chesapeake Book Arts, each producing a spread.

We produced the type treatment using Apple’s Keynote, allowing us to utilize its “fly-in” transition, which we overlayed over the page-turning video.

We are collecting roughly 20-second statements from each collaborator, which we weave into the video. It should be fun.

MISDRUK, APHA & Lead Graffiti

This is a story that should likely share between Lead Graffiti and APHA. But it is much easier to put these long stories with many photos on Lead Graffiti’s website.

Ray is a member of the programming committee of the Chesapeake Chapter of the American Printing History Association. As part of sharing that responsibility, he engaged one of Lead Graffiti’s favorite letterpress printers, Jan-Willem van de Looij (which seems to be pronounced like “Louie”), who is from The Netherlands. We have a strong connection with a former letterpress printer, H.N. Werkman, and the link to the country strengthened.

⬆ Jan-Willem van der Looij of Misdruk in The Netherlands.

⬆ Jan-Willem demonstrating his incredible Johannisberg Schnellpresse (maximum papersize 110 x 74 cm) from 1906. I might have to think about getting new pants, but then I don’t tend to shop in stores that have that kind of pants. I did do a letterpress spread that used the same pattern.

⬆ Ray’s spread in a collaborative book by 14 Upper Chesapeake Book Arts members.

⬆ This was the result of his printing demo. The last line of the broadside is “you don’t need.”

Misdruk’s story :

Misdruk starting with small-offset printing assisting my dad with his leaflets on beekeeping. Later on I did some screenprinting ending up in letterpress printing for the last 26 years as a hobby in our garage.

Becoming a bad printer didn’t take up much time for me I have to admit... I probably always was:-) I have been connected with printing all of my life in one way or another. Starting with small-offset printing assisting my dad with his leaflets on beekeeping. Later on I did some screenprinting ending up in letterpress printing for the last 26 years as a hobby in our garage. I always had a fascination for aspects in production that went wrong. When I visited print-factories in the past I discovered that I was always looking in the recycle bins. The misprints I found in there intriguied me. For me these ‘bad’ prints carried an extra dimension: some sort of disobedience to the printer and graphic designer or so. In the professional world these misprints are always discarded whilst being of an exiting beauty I think. Some 8 years ago I saw the light and I quit my professional career and I started with my “Mizdruk” printshop in Eindhoven, Holland. Mizdruk means misprint in Dutch. Here started my adventure into the world of imperfect beauty in print. At first I thought I was the only one in the world having this weird kind of interest in misprints. Later on I discovered that there were more lovers and likers of printed shit. Well let’s call it Bad Printing. Fortunately this interest is not limited to Europe nor The United States but also the Southern Americas and Australia are getting more and more involved. 4 years ago this resulted in the founding of “The School of Bad Printing” together with Ro Barragán and Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. We have just started this venture and there is much more to come. I just moved all my gear from Eindhoven to my new premises in Aarle-Rixtel a cute small village nearby. Time for a new chapter in my Bad Printing experiments.

Below are a few Misdruk samples we’ve collected over the past half-dozen years.

⬆ Misdruk is made up of 3 letterpress printers on 3 different continents.

Jan-Willem van der Looij, The Netherlands, Europe / Instagram
Ro Barrigán, South America / Instagram
Amos Kennedy, Detroit, North America / Instagram

Try Misdruk’s website.

Try his Instagram site. Recently including a visit from Amos Kennedy.

The image above is by Amos Kennedy.

Looking forword for a foreward for "X-ing a Paragrab," a book idea

It is hard to be a letterpress printer and not have a soft spot in your heart for Edgar Allan Poe.

Poe wrote what we believe was his next-to-last published work before his death, a story entitled “X-ing a Paragrab.” The story is about two warring midwestern newspapers, where one owner sabotages the other by stealing all of his metal type. So, to produce his newspaper, the robbed editor replaces the missing o’s with x’s. Ah, a perfect letterpress story.

We want to reprint the story “just because.”

Usually, if you print a text, there is nothing you can do with the text except print it as it was written. You can’t edit someone’s copyrighted work. A while back, I read an article about reprinting existing texts, and it said that doing this in a way that attracts buyers is to write a NEW foreword that puts some new spin on the story.

So, that is why we printed the poster at the top of the page—to find someone who will write a new foreword for our version of “X-ing the Paragrab,” but in a way that highly reflects our creative attitude and style.

For instance, could you get away with a foreword that said, “Neverm re?” Or maybe “Nevermxre.”

We are sending 30 copies of this broadside to various Poe enthusiasts, museums, & significant universities with a good English department reputation. We need a new twist on Poe and “X-ing the Paragrab. To some extent, the person is going to need to get our attention. We’ll pick someone sometime in early 2026.

The story of the broadside.

We had picked up a copy of a book entitled—— at a Delaware Bibliophiles Auction. I think I had gotten it either as one of several in a lot, where the critical book was another, or I had gotten it off the raffle table, where you could trade raffle tickets for books you might have wanted but didn’t want to pay for.

A few years later, I was in the studio and grabbed something to look at while taking a printing break. I just opened it to the page with the illustration of the raven standing on a skull; I don’t remember ever seeing it before, or didn’t think of it as a raven, and had never noticed the skull—an excellent place to start. We took the last stanza of “The Raven” and printed the last line once. The next to last line twice while mixing the letters and repeated back up the stanza. Here’s the text for you to read.

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted—nevermore!

Now let’s see what happens.

NOTE: We started this project with the utmost enthusiasm, but things clearly interfered.

Black History Is White History

Category : broadside 
Paper: White / Somerset Textured white 300 gsm, Black / French 140#, adhered to an unknown adhesive-backed sheet we’ve had for 20 years, Color / Canson Red & Royal Blue.
Type : hand-set wood type (black), photopolymer (white & credit line)
Runs : 13 (6 for black, 7 for white with credit line)
Edition : 12
Press: Vandercook Universal III for all runs

Black History Month was the original impetus for an Afternoon Diversion project. We’ve begun quietly posting Afternoon Diversion printing times on our studio calendar on our website. It works about as well, generally, as you would think. Originally intended to attract students who want to try letterpress, we treat them as Vandercook (sometimes an iron hand press) workshops. Melissa, a former student with letterpress experience, didn’t surprise me by jumping on board.

I (Ray) have become obsessed with using a 10-line Antique Extra Bold wood type we recently bought from the Mike Denker Collection. This project started as a vague (we love it when they start like that and turn into something cool) idea after reading Elie Mystal’s book entitled, Allow Me to Retort, which has somewhat shattered my feelings toward my pre-college education which is adding to the troubling news of the conservative attempt to severely limit subjects that can be taught, most notably in Florida.

The book, which explains the constitution and its history from the view of a Black provocateur, has significantly altered my white picture of the U.S. Constitution and the merit of our country’s founders.

I think I learn things in “whole block” pieces, bricks of information that may build a wall, but the bricks and the wall tend to be “separate but equal” things. I came out of Elie’s book with the uncomfortable feeling that I had been living that my history was mine and their history was theirs when all of the blocks should have built an “our history” wall.

Hence, BLACK HISTORY IS WHITE HISTORY.

I mentioned the “vague idea” earlier. I had no idea how this would fit together, if it would fit together at all. Black ink on white paper (✔). White ink on black paper (✔). Both are saying essentially the same thing. As a printing technicality, the two inks didn’t work the same on the two papers. The black ink is solid & opaque (✔). The white is transparent (✔). No way those will work on the same color paper (✔). Printing multiple times will disrupt the reading clarity (✔). Repeat the words to drive the idea home (✔). Spend twice as much on paper (✔). Make placing the terms difficult, so you ruin a lot of sheets (✔). Now we are talking. And we’ve dragged a new HTML character ✔✔✔✔✔ into our options. I must figure out how to merge the 2 sheets (✔). Hmmm. Collage (✔). Tear the white & black paper in half (✔). Add some color (✔). Red (✔). Blue (✔). The tearing fits rather nicely as a design element (✔).

This was the first broadside I’d put together, and it has some problems right in the middle where you would hopefully see the black “is” and a white “is” better. I’ll work on getting those to work together better in the rest of the prints. Now, how do I get the broadside to Elie Mystal?

AIGA / Philadelphia FEEDBACK broadside

I love juxtaposing the lock-up and the broadside on these kinds of projects. I didn’t make it square for Instagram, so I’m throwing it in here so you can see the entire width of both images.

A great comment on Instagram from the BookLab at the University of Maryland was, “That lockup is sorcery.” We like that. We will send them one of our Poe broadsides as a gift. AIGA took all of the others of the AIGA ones.

Locking up the text / dots took about 6 hours. Here are the oak dowels that we cut to 0.918.

The first step was locking up and hand rolling “FEEDBACK.”

Then the experimental trick (as often as possible, we like to try to do something with letterpress that we’ve never done) was with the dots and lines of text.

There was no easy way to do the type and the dots in 2 separate runs and keep them in registration without taking a week or so, even if you could do it then. So, we just locked the dots (which are oak dowels that have been cut as close as we could to 0.918” on our lead saw) with an n-space between it and the text. Then we would put the press on “trip,” and “ink” the type / dots with a double run of ink using our Vandercook Universal III. Then we would lift the rollers and hand roll the dots (right overtop of the ink for the text) with GOLD (this is different gold ink than the standard stuff people buy). Then we would put the press back on ink and print the sheet.

Here are a few of the hand-rolled Bs.

Mia Culbertson was with us on the first day, so she wasn’t in the finished job photo.

Dunya Mikhail poem "Pronouns"

Printed : March 3, 2023
Edition : 50
Paper : French Paper 100# Kraft Speckletone
Production : printed from photopolymer & rope
Runs : 4 (poetry text, leaves, rope, copyright / credit text)

Amid recent politically charged discussions of pronouns, this was a great idea for a broadside.

The broadsides were printed for Casey Smith in support of the 2023 Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here. to be given out as an attendee gift at a talk related to Dunya Mikhail’s poetry at a reading at the Pyramid Arts Center on Saturday, March 4.

The printing timing was pretty tight, given that we had trouble getting the printing plates and had to reorder and have them resent. The first set of prints was lost in transit by UPS. Then after an offer from Boxcar Press to remake and resend the plates, both sets arrived the day before the talk. As a result, we had only one day to print the job.

A couple of experimenting & printing moments in the project are worth mentioning.

• The leaves were taken from a poster we had done for the Winterthur Museum & Library for one of their Terrific Tuesday sessions. These sessions are for kids aged 3 to 10; this was Fantastic Flora. We brought Beech leaves that the kids printed. We kept a couple of samples and scanned one to create the photopolymer leaf.

• The intention was to start printing the leaves as a single, flat color. Jill suggested we hand roll them to give a sense of degradation. That resulted in much more visually interesting leaves.

• We initially bought rope from Home Depot that was too soft. When printed, it flattened out too much and didn’t give the idea of rope almost at all. We returned to Home Depot and bought the same rope we had used for a piece we had done while taking sailing classes for Delaware’s tall ship, the Kalmar Nickel.

• The hardest part of the project was trying to match the vertical spacing for the English and Arabic lines. We received the Arabic as a .pdf file. One problem with the file was that the black was a CMYK black and needed to be 100% black. It took a couple of hours to figure out how to change the color in Illustrator, even though we had done that hundreds of times. Adjusting the line spacing so the two poems would match exactly was a second problem.

• The fact that Arabic reads right-to-left, and English reads left-to-right. allowed us to gently weave the two blocks of type together, which was fun to position logically.

etaoin shrdlu

When typesetting on a Linotype, the operator often made a mistake that was easier to reset the line versus correct the mats (individual character matrices). They would often drag their finger down. the leftmost 2 columns on the keyboard to type “etaoin shrdlu.” This told the person locking up the page to PULL that line (shown in red above) out of the text and close the lines. The line was accidentally not pulled, resulting in the mistake printed above.

Looking at the problem lines, you can see that the characters at the start of both lines are correct. They are just in the wrong order.

You can see by the image below how easy it is to simply drag your finger down those left two rows of keys.

Seven Fun Facts about the Linotype

1. As a youth in Germany, Ottmar Mergenthaler was apprenticed to his uncle, a watchmaker. “Above all, watchmaking taught me precision he later wrote. The Linotype has been described as similar to a watch. Every piece moves in perfect harmony with the other pieces to form an intricate whole — like clockwork.

2. The first Linotype operator was a woman. Julia Camp, a speedy typist, operated the keyboard when Ottmar Mergenthaler demonstrated his prototype machine to investors at his Baltimore shop in 1884.

3. The Friedenwald Company of Baltimore was the first book printer in the world to install a Linotype. Mergenthaler had consulted with its manager while building his machine.

4. Are local printers funded the Ottmar Mergenthaler School of Printing in 1923. It became part of the Baltimore public school system and combined with two other schools in 1953 to form Mergenthaler Vocational Technical High  School, known as MERVO. It still exist today.

5. Newspaper composing rooms filled with Linotypes were extremely loud and fast-paced. It was common for deaf people to be employed as Linotype operators because they weren't bothered by all the commotion.

6. The Linotype starred in a Twilight Zone episode, “Printer’s Devil.” A failing newspaper publisher sells his soul to the devil, who goes to work for the paper as a Linotype operator and reporter. He types stories on the Linotype, then later, in the day, the events in the stories occur, allowing the newspaper to scoop the competition. One day, the publisher reads off the Linotype that his girlfriend (who spurned the devil’s advances) was gravely injured in a car accident. Can he use the Linotype to type a scenario that will save her life?

7. End of the Line (otype): Phototypesetting, or “cold type,” first appeared in the 1960s. It used a photographic process to generate columns of type on scrolls of photo paper. Phototypesetting machines, which fit more easily in the offices, and were soon enhanced by computers, replaced the Linotype by the 1980s. But their reign was short. By the end of the 20th century, computer-aided phototypesetting was replaced by fully digital systems that produced entire pages. How long will it be before this technology, too, is replaced?