Seen in the Wild

Today Soren Bondrup-Nielsen and I participated in the annual Wolfville and Area Christmas Bird Count. We were looking for birds in a territory north-west of Canning, Nova Scotia. In all, we counted about 23 species during the day, most of which are found in Soren’s book, Winter Nature, which he co-authored with Merritt Gibson and which Gaspereau published last fall. (Merritt Gibson was also counting birds in another ‘block’ nearby.) It was a great day, but the count totals were lower than average.



I'm no good identifying gulls. One immature ring-billed gull had even Soren consulting the bird books.



Also spotted this week: A new sign erected in my neighbourhood. Ugh!



Andrew Steeves ¶ Printer & Publisher

Two Type Designers

Today Rod McDonald, one of this country’s foremost type designers, left the warm serenity of his basement studio at Lake Echo, Nova Scotia, and dropped down to the valley for a visit to the printshop and lunch at the local pub. Before ordering lunch, Rod and I lamented that the pub no longer uses the menus I designed for them several years ago using Rod’s Laurentian typeface; since they changed the menu, the food prices have gone up and the typographic quality has gone down.

We had a sort of typographer's lunch at this pub a few years ago with Rod, Glenn Goluska, Will Rueter, Gary Dunfield and myself. I remember how exasperated the waitress got trying to take drink orders while the bunch of us typophiles were having an animated discussion about how well Rod’s type worked on the menu. “He designed this typeface,” I said to the young woman, thinking this would explain everything. She answered with a blank stare. I guess she'd never thought about where letters came from before.



Rod’s been making letters for a living since the age of 14, when he started working as sign painter. He’s best known in Canada and around the world for his skillfully made digital type families: Cartier Book, his refinement and completion of a typeface begun by Carl Dair; Laurentian, his incredible Garamond-flavoured type originally developed for Maclean’s magazine; and Slate, a sans serif family which functions well in an astonishing range of applications.



Laurentian finds frequent use at Gaspereau Press. Originally designed as a magazine type, Laurentian has turned out to stand up quite well to general use as a text type. A few years ago, with encouragement from Robert Bringhurst and myself, Rod added a set of extended descenders and a more lyrical Q to the character set, additions which I think enriched the type. I've used it to set poetry books (Michael deBeyer's Change in a Razor Backed Season and Johanna Skibsrud's Late Nights with Wild Cowboys), complex works of philosophy (Jan Zwicky's Wisdom & Metaphor and the forthcoming Lyric Philosopy), journals (Parenthesis 15, Atlantic Geology and The Blomidon Naturalists Society Newsletter), and everything in between, from menus to templates for bronze casting. It's one of the sharpest tools in my typographic toolbox.

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On the way home I stopped and dug around in the university archives for a while. I ended up looking through a portfolio of sheets printed in Italy during the incunabula. One sheet I was looking over was printed in 1478 by the Venetian punchcutter and printer Nicolas Jenson. What a thrill to discover a small piece of fifteenth-century print heritage here in the small town where I live.



Two superb digital revivals of Jenson’s letterforms are Centaur and Adobe Jenson. Centaur, originally a metal type, works best printed letterpress, but Jenson is built to withstand the demands of modern papers and printing techniques.



So, a good day with type designers from both the fifteenth and the twenty-first centuries.

Andrew Steeves ¶ Printer & Publisher

Times New Roman – g

Here are two more magnifications I made of characters from the original 10 point metal version of Times New Roman, printed letterpress in a sample book produced by Mackay’s of Chatham. The first image shows the standard issue g and the other shows the rarely used 'long extender' g. Notice the differences between the lower bowls.

Andrew Steeves ¶ Printer & Publisher

Memorial Hall in Letterpress

The new Memorial Hall ornaments I designed earlier this month are getting their first real road test this week, and in letterpress at that. A client asked me to design and print a keepsake of an Emily Dickinson poem, and the ornaments were a good fit for the project. They will be printed in two colours with the text in black.




With photopolymer you execute your design on a computer and then use a high-resolution imagesetter to generate a negative, just as you would for making a plate for offset printing (except wrong-reading, emulsion down).

The text is set Garamont, Jim Rimmer’s digital revival of F.W. Goudy’s Monotype revival of Jean Jannon’s lively, baroque-flavoured, seventeenth-century type (which was mistakenly attributed to Claude Garamond and thus misnamed). When printing letterpress using photopolymer plates, I generally find that typefaces which were actually designed with letterpress printing in mind yield the best results.




This is what the plate looks like before printing. The image area (type) is raised and when mounted on a base and locked into the press it behaves more or less like metal type.




First I have a number of other short printing jobs to complete, like some more jackets for a reprint of Jan Zwicky’s Thirty-seven Small Songs & Thirteen Silences. This cover is printed on one of the great handmade sheets produced by our friends at Saint Armand in Montreal.

Andrew Steeves ¶ Printer & Publisher