Waltzing Presses

Between other jobs, there was more waltzing with presses today using pallet jacks, dollies and Burke Bars. The little 'Pearl' and a second Vandercook migrated northward in the building and took their new places. One more press to move into the letterpress studio. I can't wait to get the drywall finished so we can build shelves, clean up and get printing and handbinding out here again (and start on the next renovation project).

Andrew Steeves ¶ Printer & Publisher

Times New Roman

One of my least favorite typefaces for books is perhaps one of the most ubiquitous: Time New Roman. In fairness, there’s nothing particularly wrong with the design of this typeface, if you’re setting newspaper columns in 8 point type that is. It was used to good effect in a a number of books through the twentieth century, but many of the optional sorts that made it more friendly to book setting in its hot metal days are excluded from the digital versions that come with your computer: old-style figures, ligatures and alternate characters with longer descenders for g j p q y in the roman, as well as f in the italic.

A commercial typesetting job I’m working on this week employs Times New Roman, so I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit and tuning up my copies of the font. I pulled out a letterpress-printed sample book produced by the famous British printing house Mackay’s of Chatham and put both regular and extended characters under the microscope for closer examination. Both samples above show 10 point Times New Roman, one with a regular p and one with an extended descender p.





A number of years ago I moved over to a flatscreen monitor. Well, my monitor died this week, so Gary climbed up into the loft and hauled down an old monitor to get me by while we source (and save for) a new flatscreen. What a pig! How did we ever manage to give up so much desk space before? This retro look is not sitting well with me. Notice the Times New Roman samples under the microscope.





In between things, Gary and I continue to renovate the new letterpress area. We took Jack’s Albion Press for a walk today and settled it in a new location. Tomorrow there’s some hammer drilling to do and then we can put up the drywall and hang the door. And there's another vandercook to move yet, and a C&P which will need to be broken down to get through the door from the back shop.

Andrew Steeves ¶ Printer & Publisher

Letters & Books

I skipped out of the shop an hour early today and stopped in to see my friends at the Esther Clarke Wright Archives at Acadia University. They had an interesting brass telescope on display. I of course noticed the lettering.



The archivist showed me what seems to be a Latin copy of Hartmann Schedel’s Nuremberg Chronicle, printed by Anton Koberger in 1493. This famous piece of incunabula was hidden in plain site for many decades in an odd collection of rarities assembled by William Inglis Morse and donated to Acadia between 1926 and 1931 (other parts of his library went to Dalhousie and Harvard). This book, a history of the world, is famous for its integration of text and illustration. It has over 1800 woodcuts, some extending across page spreads. This copy seems poorly printed at times compared to other sheets from the incunabula period that I have seen, and hand colouring infrequent. If you’d like to see high-resolution images of pages from a fully coloured copy, click here.



Once the special collections room was closed for the evening, I went to the general stacks and found this nice endpaper in a copy of Jack Shadbolt’s Mind’s I; Poems &: Drawings, published by M&S in 1973. I’d guess by the style that it was drawn by M&S house designer Frank Newfield, not Shadbolt.



I made a stop on the way home at my neighbourhood antiquarian bookseller’s, The Odd Book. I took the opportunity to extol the virtues of the understated text and jacket design of a copy of Donald Creighton’s Canada’s First Century, 1867–1967, published by Macmillan of Canada in 1976. Even in a small town, it is possible to find examples of both old and beautiful design if you know where to look and what you are looking for.

Memorial Hall Borders

In October, I travelled to Fredericton, New Brunswick, for Ross Leckie’s Sixth Annual Poetry Weekend at the University of New Brunswick – or Leckiefest as I’m want to call it. Founded largely by accident, it’s the world’s most down-to-earth and dead-simple literary festival. Readers ranged from Leckie’s promising creative writing students to Griffin Prize winner A.F. Moritz. I met a pile of interesting writers. It was the first time I’d heard Sue Sinclair, Kevin Connolly or Zach Wells read, for example, or met Arc magazine’s Anita Lahey. I wasn't reading, but Gaspereau authors Michael deBeyer and Ross Leckie read, and Halifax poet Matt Robinson read from a letterpress-printed broadsheet he commissioned me to design and print for him. Gaspereau’s long-time proofreader, Christina McRae, was there too, reading from her new book published by Wolsak and Wynn. I can’t say enough good about this folksy little event.

One of the great things about Leckiefest is the venue. The readings were held in Memorial Hall on the campus of the University of New Brunswick. Built in 1924 to honour the 35 UNB Alumni who died in the First World War, Memorial Hall was originally designed as a science building. When my architect friend John Leroux heard that I would be spending the day in Memorial Hall, he raved about it and emphasized that I must check out the stained glass windows. (John, author of Building New Brunswick: An Architectural History, is a bit of an expert on New Brunswick’s built heritage.) And John was absolutely right. It’s an astonishing space. And the stained glass windows inspired me to design a new suite of typographic ornaments. John graciously went back to take some detail photos of the windows for me. This week, I completed a trail version of the font. No doubt I'll use these ornaments in some forthcoming Gaspereau projects.

Also this week, Gary and I, and my son Adam, knocked down some walls in the printshop in order to dedicate more room to letterpress printing. In this renovated space we will install two Vandercook proofing presses, an 1833 Albion press and perhaps a Chandler & Price or Pearl platen press or two, as well as type drawers and the composing stone. Gathering these tools together from various corners of the shop where they are presently dispersed will effectively create a quiet, well-lit letterpress studio – a better place for printing and perhaps eventually for teaching as well.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER