When Winter Fringes Every Bough

Winter’s around the corner, so I took a little time out from a demanding week to print a little broadside of one of Henry Thoreau’s poems on leftover ends of some green St. Armand handmade paper we had kicking around. When you’re tired out and working too fast, slipping a little joyful play between other responsibilities, obvious blunders sometimes slips past you unnoticed – until you’re home by the wood stove, that is. I snorted when I saw the kerning problem between the A and V in ‘David’. You could drive a bus through that gap! Well, whatever. Henry won’t mind. The poem is “When Winter Fringes Every Bough” and you can find a version of it online at the web site of the Walden Woods Project (which is a very worthwhile project, indeed).

Speaking of Thoreau, Gary Dunfield made the first 50 sheets of handmade paper for the jackets of our long-overdue letterpress edition of Thoreau’s essay Walking. We hope to have some copies of the paperback version in circulation before Christmas (given that the title pages state that it was published in 2008).

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Andrew's Printshop Review 2

Out in the printshop and bindery, we were mostly working on commercial jobs this week. One of our more interesting clients is the Blomidon Naturalists Society. We design and print their quarterly newsletter, which includes reports on all sorts of local birds, animals and plants as well as on the society’s various meetings and field trips. I’ve tried to to bring an early 20th century Curwen Press look to the publication, complete with original oak-leaf ornaments designed by Wolfville calligrapher Jack McMaster. This picture shows a signature from the newsletter moving through the Smyth sewing machine in preparation for perfect binding.















When Gary wasn’t busy casebinding more copies of Wesley Bates’ In Black & White, filling book orders or tinkering with grumpy sewing machines and folders, he found some time to carry out a few more paper-making experiments. We’re developing a method of making sheets which allows us to control the exact amount of pulp that goes into each sheet. Last night Gary completely turned our working theory on its head and, with some hastily-built test gear, pulled some very good sheets.















And me? With the spring selling season bearing down upon us, I’ve mostly been chained to my desk this week, typesetting and editing. Our spring catalogue is now out to film and headed to press. This year’s catalogue features a detail from an early wood engraving by Wesley Bates which we also used on this year’s edition of the Gaspereau T-shirt and plan to silk screen on some boxes for a special US marketing campaign we’re undertaking next month.















I did manage to escape the computer for a few mornings this week, and completed the printing of the coloured drop capitals on the letterpress edition of Thoreau’s Walking. Gary and I have decided to build pine boxes to house the 26 lettered copies of the deluxe edition of this book, in homage to the pine box which Thoreau is said to have built to house his notebooks and journals. You can find more information about this book on our website.

Andrew's Printshop Review

Things are getting busy in the printshop again after a bit of a break over the Christmas holiday. As usual, there are many different projects at many different stages, but my main focus at the moment is on designing the guts of new poetry books by Tonja Gunvaldsen Klaassen and Carmine Starnino, and the jacket for Robert Bringhurst’s Selected Poems. Kate and I are also trying to get the spring catalogue to press – which is several weeks overdue on my account. I’ve been distracted with both commercial design jobs and the production of two letterpress books.

















This week I started to print the green ‘spot’ colour on our forthcoming letterpress book, Walking, an essay by Henry David Thoreau. The printing of the text is complete, and after I print all the drop capitals and such I’ll be ready to print Wesley Bate’s three engravings from the blocks. The paper is a wonderful German sheet called Biblio. The green is PMS 443, a selection inspired by Rockwell Kent.

















Speaking of letterpress books, the printing of Don McKay’s The Muskwa Assemblage is complete, but we’re still trying to find time to make the paper for the jacket. More accurately, as I told Don, we’re still trying to find time to make the equipment we need to make the paper for his jackets. I’ll include some pictures of our papermaking process in a forthcoming post. In the meantime, Don was good enough to send us some cotton fibre to help make the paper for his book jackets – an old pair of his own blue jeans.