A View of Nancy Loeber's Books

All of the work discussed in this post may be viewed at Nancy Loeber's website or on her Instagram feed, @nancyloeber.

Multimedia woodcut by Nancy Loeber.

Nancy Loeber and I met at the Center for Book Arts in 2001. We found ourselves working side by side one afternoon and when I asked Nancy what she did, she said she made “gouache paintings.” It was an unusual answer that happened to fit a problem I was having with one of my books. I was in the midst of producing ten manuscript copies of a geometric alphabet, in which the letters were drawn in pencil, watercolor, and India ink. The resulting outlines were then filled-in with black gouache. The drawing part came naturally to me but I was struggling to stay within the lines with my paint brush. When I asked Nancy if she was able to paint within the lines, her response was so self-assured that I was soon delivering batches of drawings for her to paint. By 2003 Nancy was cranking a Vandercook at my job printing business and, until 2018, she worked for me off and on in a variety of capacities. Without her help many of my most ambitious books would not have been made. 

            As I’ve gotten to know Nancy, I’ve learned how unsatisfactory an answer “gouache painting” was for what she does as an artist. Her work defies categorization. She draws, paints, collages, sculpts, writes, sews, knits, crochets, quilts, makes stop motion animations, binds books, and, of course, she prints. She undoubtedly does other things besides. Watching her work from day to day, year to year is constantly surprising. At any given moment Nancy might be making reduction woodcuts, a series of quilts or patchwork collars, or a pair of conjoined stuffed animals. What unifies Nancy’s work is her inimitable sensibility. Displayed next to each other, the siloed categories into which her works would normally be placed disappear. 

A quilt in progress, a collar, and a conjoined pair of bunny rabbits.

Despite Nancy’s training as a printer and bookbinder it took her a while before she published her first editioned book, Nine Ladies, in 2014. Since then, she has published seven additional letterpress-printed books and two indigo-printed zines, as well as many stand-alone prints. All but one of Nancy’s books deal with portraiture as their primary imagery, but it is the changes and developments between her books that makes surveying her overall output illuminating.

Nine Ladies is a deceptively simple book composed of woodcut portraits. The “ladies” rise up from the bottom of the page, or hover in the middle, or are hemmed in by blocks of color. Most wear inscrutable expressions. Some are ghostly, others stare straight at you with a disarming frankness. While paging through the book, it is hard not to feel like you’ve met one of these women before. From the printing perspective, the portraits evoke a painterly quality, down to the smallest details. More than one woman’s eyeball required printing four colors, others needed just one. All are equally evocative. 

 

Color woodcut from Nine Ladies.

Gouache painting of woman in the previous image.

 

Color woodcut from Nine Ladies.

Love Song, 2015, doubles down on the color printing in Nine Ladies, pushing it further than seemed possible. The portraits are stunning in the minutiae of their detail and in Nancy’s unexpected and brilliant color choices. Love Song also introduced three elements that were not present in Nine Ladies: a dedication, “to William/and all the sinners;” a text, the poem, “Annunciation,” by Marie Howe; and deliberate pacing achieved by the use of a small, ornamental image that acts as a pause between sections of portraits. Though ostensibly similar to Nine Ladies—it’s a book of nine woodcut portraits—Love Song is considerably more complex.

 

Color woodcuts from Love Song.

All except one of Nancy’s books since Love Song have featured a text, and the texts she chooses are further expressions of her sensibility. In 2016 she produced an edition of George Green’s poem, “Lord Byron’s Foot,” a hilarious romp through Byron’s biography that focuses on the poet’s lame foot as a means of knocking him down a peg. The portraits here are in service to the text and the book’s layout is the first of Nancy’s to use the two-page spread to advantage, text on verso, image on facing recto. The interplay between the two is the most traditional in any of her books but, as with anything Nancy makes, tradition is merely a starting point from which she departs on her own, unique trajectory. 

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Nancy’s drawing style is the inclusion of collage elements. Some of the woodcuts in Love Song and “Lord Byron’s Foot” feature women with ornamental shapes in their hair, like wreaths or dots, that allude to this style but don’t quite capture it. In 2017, Nancy published four books—Brother Sister, Sticks, Drugs & Feelings, and Land Shark—each of which explored new ground. Together they began to blur the barrier between Nancy’s drawing and printing styles, pointing her in the direction that she continues to explore today. 

 

Two spreads from Lord Byron's Foot.

 

Brother Sister is comprised of six woodcut portraits, printed in three pairs on unbound bifolia: a sister and a brother, two brothers, two sisters. Nancy wrote the text, which beautifully captures both teenage life in the late 70s/early 80s and the mixture of love, resentment, and concern between siblings.  

 

 

Page spread from Brother Sister.

Land Shark and Drugs & Feelings were both printed by indigo, allowing for photographic reproduction of Nancy’s collages and drawings. Land Shark is purely visual, using cuttings from a coloring book as material for collages, while Drugs & Feelings combines Nancy’s poems from the 1990s with her mixed-media portraits of six women. The sheets in Drugs & Feelings are unbound and folded in quarters. The poems are haunting, drug-fueled rambles that are enlarged from their typewritten originals. The exaggerated size of the type adds to the strangeness and slight menace of the texts. They are hard to read but impossible to ignore. Interleaved within these are the six portraits, all striking in their combination of precise draughtsmanship and collage. 

Multimedia drawing of Vanessa Bell from Drugs & Feelings.

 

In her edition of George Saunders’ story, “Sticks,” Nancy brought this approach to portraiture into her letterpress books for the first time. The three woodcut portraits in Sticks are as vivid as ever, and each is festooned, embellished, completed (choose your verb) with collaged elements that create a telescoping effect. The combination of woodcut and collage gives a heightened dimensionality to the prints that takes them into another category altogether. 

 

Page spread from Sticks.

 

The books Nancy has made since Sticks continue to draw on her diverse array of talents. In her edition of Jane Bowles’ story, “A Stick of Green Candy,” 2019, Nancy continued her mixed-media printmaking approach by using woodcut, collage, found imagery, and gouache.

 

Page spread with multimedia woodcut from A Stick of Green Candy.

 

Page spread with gouache-colored pigment print collage from A Stick of Green Candy.

 

Nancy illustrated her edition of Bowles’ story, “Andrew,” 2021, with prints, sculpture, and found objects. “Andrew” tells the story of a young, emotionally-stunted soldier who feels “as though his face were made of marble,” and who falls in love with another soldier who, among other things, likes sparklers. The book features a series of multi-media prints and is housed in a partitioned box that holds twelve sparklers and two hand puppets constructed from crocheted linen and cast, marble-like plaster.

 

Multimedia print and box from Andrew.

One of the aspects of Nancy’s books that I find most interesting is how closely aligned her artwork is with the poems and stories she chooses to print. The texts by George Green, Jane Bowles, and George Saunders all embody a similar sense of adjacency as Nancy’s art. They are serious, meticulously crafted, and slightly (or significantly) off-center. 

This quality continues in her two most recent books, Radical Tenderness Manifesto by Dani D’Emilia and Daniel B. Chávez, and This Person by Miranda July. The images in the Manifesto are inspired by stills from Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, but Nancy has replaced the lethal ends of the weapons with brightly colored balls. The portraits in This Person are placed within a subtle ombré of color and garlanded with ribbons. 

Two spreads from Radical Tenderness Manifesto.

 

 

Spread and binding from This Person.

 

Considering the intimate comingling of textual and visual content in Nancy's books, I sometimes wish she would be more adventurous with her typography. But when I step back and look at the unique body of work she has produced, I would hate to think of her changing anything at all. What makes Nancy's books (and quilts, and pillows, and bunny rabbits) so wonderful is that they grow out of a personal vision that cannot be contained. This is abundantly obvious when I've seen her cutting woodblocks—her focus and determination is remarkable. The books that she makes with that focus might fall within the community of artists' books but they are unlike anything else you will find there.

Corn: From Farm to Table in Woodcuts

Huebert, Ian. Corn: From Farm to Table in Woodcuts. Iowa City: The Picture Press, 2023. Printed from the original blocks, handset type, and Linotype by Ian Huebert, and bound by him in an edition of 44 copies. 48 pages, 7 x 8 inches. $240. Available from The Picture Press.

There is also a scroll edition, printed in six copies, available for $2,800. It is not treated here as I do not own a copy, but it is pictured at the end of this post.

I was a picky eater as a kid, and, like many of my kind, I was most picky when it came to vegetables. My revulsion was nearly universal. Texture, smell, taste, you name it—if you put a vegetable in front of me, I could find a reason to dislike it. Green peas made me gag. The smell of Brussels sprouts gave me a headache. Limp, oiled lettuce leaves made me cringe. Onions, raw or cooked, made me gag (raw) or squirm (cooked). Mushrooms or Swiss chard—don’t get me started.

            Processed and packaged veggies were no more appealing than natural ones. At a young age I became adept with a fork, maneuvering it in such a way that each forkful would come up free of offending parties. I could eat an entire chicken pot pie without ingesting a single pea or carrot. But far from being a proud exhibition of skill, this method of eating was a highly stressful endeavor. Wait! Was that a pea? Did I just eat a f@#king pea?! Cue the gag reflex.

            Social situations only increased the drama. When friends had birthday parties at McDonald’s I would endure weeks of anticipatory anxiety. McDonald’s French fries were too soggy—even watching people eat them made me wince—and I would turn away in horror from the fungi-like clusters of onions on their burgers as I tried to scrape them off with a ketchup packet. It was a fool’s errand. Scrape as I might, the “beef” patties and buns were permeated with the stink of that vile root.

            So, I wasn’t easy to please at the dinner table. Despite my obstinacy there were certain vegetables that I ate with gusto. What unified them was not their flavor, texture or appearance, but that they were all eaten with copious amounts of butter: mashed potatoes, artichokes, asparagus, and corn. Artichokes and corn had the added benefit of being fun to eat: artichokes for their intricacy, corn for its ease. Corn also involved a process—shucking—and paraphernalia—little corncob-shaped handles—both of which I loved. Once the corn hit the table, I’d skewer a cob with my handles, slice off a huge slab of butter, and watch it melt away to nothing as I slathered it back and forth across the rotating cob. Then, in my best Mickey and Donald impression, I’d greedily eat from left to right in even rows until every kernel was gone. Inspections were still required—a single suspicious kernel and the cob would be tossed back onto the platter like an ulcered fish into a pond—but for the most part, corn was a feel-good veggie that, so long as it was neither canned nor creamed, brought me rare moments of gastronomic joy.

            When we would visit my mother’s family in Indiana and Ohio, I saw a different side of corn. The small country roads we drove on were surrounded by fields of tall stalks, arrayed like hair plugs in an otherwise bald landscape. The air smelled like manure and chemicals; new acrid smells that were enchanting in their difference. As we drove, I’d excitedly point out crop dusters spraying the fields while my parents frantically rolled up the windows. I’d cram my face against the glass to watch the dusters turn and dive. I didn’t realize at the time, or even until I read the afterword to Ian Huebert’s book, Corn: From Farm to Table in Woodcuts, that the corn I saw in the Midwest was not the corn I was eating back home. Midwestern corn is less sweet than it is utilitarian. It is fed to livestock, shipped overseas, or processed into the gasoline additive ethanol.

            On my childhood trips I found the corn landscape unmodulated and boring. Huebert describes a more nuanced terrain. “There are other things out here besides corn. Endless sky and popsicle sunsets, the clouds passing overhead are our mountain ranges that carry thunder, shared with migrating Sandhill Cranes, songbirds, and butterflies. Below, rivers flanked by cottonwoods and honey locust give shelter to deer and woodland creatures. There are towns, cities, and all kinds of people living in them, and there are troubles and joys and connections that transcend an inventory of the individual parts. But it all takes place near a cornfield.”

            Huebert goes on to describe his personal relationship with, and the global repercussions of our country’s massive corn infrastructure. He gives a sense of the enormity of the industry by saying, “there really is no good way to see the entire thing at once….About 90 million acres, or 57,600 square miles of land, was planted with corn in the United States in 2023…” There may be people in the Midwest for whom 57,600 square miles conjures a recognizable area. But I would imagine that for most of us comprehending such a number is equivalent to grasping that the universe is infinite—it just makes our brains hurt. It’s too vast, too complex, too out of scale with our human lives. As with other kinds of complex data, the intricate system that Huebert describes is better understood through imagery, which he provides in a series of dynamic and haunting woodcuts that make up the real text of his book.

 

            The block book or woodcut novel is a centuries-old medium. According to the Library of Congress website, Western block "book printing emerged in the 15th century and was used to produce Bible tales and moral stories for a semi-literate population in much the same fashion as stained glass windows in churches depicted stories from the life of Christ and the saints. Block book printing originally was thought to be the precursor to printing with movable type, but more recent research has indicated that these scarce books were created in the same period that Gutenberg introduced printing to Western Europe.” Whatever the motivation behind their making, many early block books are also beautiful works of art that are able to explicate complex textual content, such as the Book of Revelation, through visual imagery. (Take a look at LC’s Apocalypsis Sancti Johannis.)

            Corn follows in the tradition of these block books but is more closely allied with the woodcut novels produced by artists like Franz Masereel and Lynd Ward. Unlike Masereel and Ward, who produced psychological and romantic dramas couched within interbellum political and social movements, Huebert’s Corn deals with the humanitarian and ecological impacts of rapacious greed and consumption. It does this, as the title suggests, by telling the story of corn farming, from planting to table to gas tank. It is an especially American story, one that is rooted in the people and landscape among which Huebert was raised. His is a landscape that weaves through our national identity, whether we’ve been to the Great Plains or not—from wagon trains and the Kansas slave wars to The Grapes of Wrath and Little House on the Prairie.

 

            Corn opens with a series of images that capture both the human and corporate side of farming. On the cover and title page is a small vignette of an irrigation system trailing into the distance, set beneath one of the mountain-like clouds Huebert describes in his afterword. The half title that simply reads “CORN” in widely-spaced Neuland is followed, as is proper for a woodcut story, by a visual half title, a block that captures the nighttime quiet of a moonlit corn field. The corn is drawn at human scale, a few stalks that feel more like a garden plot than an industrial site. As we enter the story, we turn to a full-page block of a man holding a pyramid of corn kernels in his hands. In the background is his family, their farmhouse, and a barn/grain bin that looks distinctly industrial. The farmer is wearing a cap with an M shaped logo on it. This shape is echoed by the top edge of the block and it repeats throughout the book. It is not a logo of any real company, but it works to frame the larger story—corn is big business. To drive this home, these human-scale images are followed by ones of corn fields being planted, irrigated, and sprayed with pesticides.

 

            These opening scenes introduce Huebert’s captivating method of image making, one that combines shifts in perspective and scale with a montage approach to storytelling. The planting/pesticide image that comes after the farmer uses these techniques to convey the human and industrial scales of planting while also capturing a couple of butterflies in midflight. The image is menacing, dramatic, beautiful, abstract, and realistic. It captures the many contradictions inherent in industrial farming and it does so with a concise eloquence that words would struggle to match.

 

            After the section on planting, spraying, and harvesting the corn, the story turns to the many uses to which corn is put. In one image, a truck filled to overflowing with corn is barreling straight at us, set above a scene in which a dwarfed image of the same truck travels through the sweep of the farmscape, both heading toward two cows in the foreground. The next image shows a cow in a contorted, vertical posture, held aloft above a livestock truck. Steam sprays out of the cow's nostrils as it’s injected from all sides with menacing syringes. The juxtaposition of the terrified animal above the calm, idling truck is another instance of cognitive dissonance that Huebert is able to capture in his blocks: It’s just business. This image segues into the world of the industrial slaughterhouse, one in which knife-wielding men in masks are lined up like so many carcasses above them. In the following block one of these workers is grabbed by an ICE agent. It is not just the cows who are at risk.

 

            As we come to the end of the story, there are images that deal with the ethanol industry, a quiet winter scene of a family buying and eating steak at their table, and an enormous tanker ship being filled for export. In the lower half of the final full-page block, the tanker ship crosses the open ocean, with the moon rising or setting in the distance. The smoke from the ship zigzags into the sky and merges into the financial chart in the picture plane above. The chart is being inspected on an iPad by THE CAPITALIST, a suited man seated before a glass of wine and a steak, his knife raised, ready to slice. The story then closes with a vignette of a gas pump nozzle. 

 

            Unlike many other woodcut stories, Corn features Huebert's previously-referenced afterword. It is a lovely coda to an already gripping story. It continues where that tanker ship left off: “All of this affects the other things that are here: the sunsets, migratory birds, and clouds that grumble overhead. It affects elsewhere, too. Why a fish can die in the Gulf of Mexico due to nitrogen applied on a cornfield in Iowa says something about the state of our creeks and rivers.” This sentiment is echoed in the book’s final vignette, a catfish. 

 

I first met Huebert when he was an MFA student at the University of Iowa Center for the Book. From the outset it was clear that he had a singular talent. He usually chooses to expend that talent on prints and posters, all of which are beautiful. Corn is one of the rare opportunities to see him tackle a broader subject. I could say a lot more about this book, but it only costs $240 (yes, only $240!). Buy a copy and enjoy it for yourself.

 

Or, for $2,800 you can buy one of the six scroll versions, pictured below.

 

"Tints" and "7 Color Contrasts with Risography" (with some thoughts on craft and printing)

Treble, Philip. Tints. Bishop Burton: Muttons & Nuts, 2024. Printed by Philip Treble on Mohawk Superfine paper in an edition of 20 copies. 130 x 200 mm. Out of Print.

Fossey, Polly. 7 Color Contrasts with Risography. New York: Polly Fossey, 2024. Printed by Polly Fossey on a Risograph in an edition of 50 copies. 32 pages, 20 x 24 cm. Available from Printed Matter for $50

When I entered tenth grade geometry and found myself completely flummoxed, it shredded my last vestige of academic confidence. Throughout my scholastic "career," math had been the only class in which I consistently received good marks. If I couldn’t do well in geometry, I saw no real reason to continue the charade. I would strike out in the world like some Dickensian scamp, working long hours in a sooty factory while playing The Smiths on loop on my Walkman.

            After a couple of weeks of worry, I began to notice that none of my classmates were doing well either. It was then a short step to laying the blame on our hapless teacher, Sister Eileen. Once I diagnosed the problem, I realized that during each class, Sister Eileen was trying, and failing, to regurgitate a chapter from the textbook, and that her homework assignments were the exercises at the end of each chapter. From that point forward, I spent the class time reading the textbook and doing the homework, trying my best to drown out the good Sister’s endless prattling. My grades went up and the factory work was put on hold. At the time I thought I had just found a way of getting by, but what I had actually done was discover the first method of learning that worked for me. I could not learn in a classroom environment, but with a book in hand a world of knowledge was available for the taking.  

            A couple of years later I walked into a letterpress printshop and fell inexorably in love. Alongside the new and exciting experience of working with my hands, there was a seemingly endless supply of manuals and textbooks from which I could learn more about my chosen craft. Since then, a substantial amount of my book collecting has centered on instructional manuals: how to print, how to design books, how to draw letterforms, how to work with color, etc.; as well as histories of these various subjects. The manuals that I most enjoy are those that deal with colors. How to mix them, how they will look when printed, what will happen to them when they’re laid on top of one another. Like geometry, I have learned a lot about craft from reading books.

The practical meaning of the word “craft” within the book arts has evolved over the 130 years or so since the term “arts and crafts” was coined. For the British Arts & Crafts Movement, handcrafts were seen as an alternative to the poor production methods of industrial manufacturing. People like T J Cobden-Sanderson and William Morris thought of craft as an ideal, one that fused the humanizing satisfaction of working with one’s hands with the promise that the resulting object would be better made than the dreck issuing from the factories. To endeavor in craft was therefore to strive for a more perfect object. For many of the ensuing generations of printers and book artists, that striving for perfection took on a different flavor, one that was marked by the friction between the goal and its foregone unattainability. In the space between, the practice of craft was its own reward.

During my apprenticeship, I learned equally from my teachers, from the books they recommended, and from the endless repetition of printing. Both teachers and books recited the same mantra: the only goal of letterpress worth pursuing is perfection. It took me a while to correlate this goal with the high consumption of alcohol within the printing community. It turns out that the pursuit of printed perfection usually results in disappointment and self-recrimination. This flagellation appealed to me at the time. I saw it as the chosen burden of the craftsperson, hefted upon one’s shoulders like a cast iron cross. Since then, my conception of craft has thankfully become more fluid, but that original idea of craft-as-perfection is still the ingrained dogma that I carry with me and, occasionally, try to unlearn.

The dramatic rise in letterpress printing during the last quarter century has also been a rebuke to a dehumanizing techno-culture. But rather than reacting to the poorly made objects of industrialism, the twenty-first century enthusiasm for letterpress has flourished, in part, in response to the neutered perfection of the digital “object,” or interface. For the majority of practitioners, the soul-enriching qualities of craft are no longer rooted in the desire for perfection but in the pursuit of the imperfect. The pocked and cracked surface of wood letters, the time-worn edges of old foundry type, the texture of uneven inking. These, for many printers, are a much-needed restorative for our digitally-desensitized souls.

The recent explosion of the Risograph reminds me of this century’s letterpress craze. Both camps are partially inspired by the quest for an alternative to digital perfection. But whereas letterpress imperfection resides in the physical conditions of the tools, materials, and talents available to the printer, the Risograph is a machine whose imperfection is endemic to its design. (Don’t worry! This is not a dreary screed against Riso, I promise.) Pondering the differences between these approaches to book arts, and the products their adherents produce, is edifying.

The problem (and it is not really a problem if they’re enjoying themselves) with the imperfect-and-loving-it letterpress movement is that most of the work I see produced in this vein does not make for very good reading. The work is not about books so much as it is about printing. And although I love printing, I am really only interested in it if it eventually results in a book. Risograph artists, on the other hand, are similarly drawn to imperfection, but the main product of their ecstatic love for their medium is books. And these books are, along with technologies like 3D printing, exemplars of a still-evolving ontology: the digitally-borne craft object. Risograph artists, like the British Private Presses before them, are offering a less commercial, aesthetically elevated alternative to the printing technology of their day. The specifics may be different but the goals are similar. When I made this connection, my head nearly exploded. 

 

These are some of the many thoughts that were provoked by my recent acquisition of two color printing manuals, one printed letterpress, the other by Risograph. The content of both manuals seems simple enough: they demonstrate what colors look like when printed. But for anyone who has ever tried to print a color that they see in their mind, the value of manuals such as these is inestimable. They provide a starting point, an introduction to the interaction of colors that might save days of frustrating experiment. (I used to love such frustrations. I love them less so now.) My favorite historical example of this kind of manual is J. F. Earhart’s 1892 magnum opus, The Color Printer. In it, Earhart shows hundreds of examples of colors printed in mixture, adjacence, and overlay. He then includes a lengthy section of specimen book-style examples of how these various color treatments look when used in real-life settings. 

 

Earhart's color palette, The Color Printer.

 

Eight of the 160 samples of mixed colors in The Color Printer.

 

Adjacent and overlaid color in The Color Printer.

 

Each of the two manuals treated here, Tints by Philip Treble and 7 Color Contrasts with Risography by Polly Fossey, remind me of sections of The Color Printer, though, of course, neither is as comprehensive as Earhart’s masterpiece. Tints deals with the area of printing perfectionism that I value most: color consistency. The object of the book is stated in its brief introduction, “I think the only way to get an accurate and repeatable tint from transparent white and a base colour, is to actually print them with inks mixed by weight. This book is a visual guide showing ratios of base colour to white, weighed out using digital scales.” It then lists the precise weights of white and base color used to produce the gradated color scales that follow. 

 

Two spreads from Tints.

The colors themselves are printed in grids of 36pt em quads, which is my equivalent of receiving a love letter. Grids make me weak-kneed in almost any circumstance; once you add color, I’m a goner. (Whether this makes me a biased reviewer or not is for you to decide.) Anyway, the printing in the book is excellent, and the mixing weights and color specimens are helpful in the establishment of a value scale for any color. But after eight pages of samples the book ends, which is so frustrating that I want to peel back the pastedown to see if there are additional pages hidden somewhere in the binding.

To make matters more frustrating, Treble only printed twenty copies of the book. Now, I hate it as much as the next printer when people tell me how many copies to print, but for a practical manual I can see no justification for such a small edition (other than the large number of press runs the book requires). Tints is a single signature that is bound in an attractive case. Fine. But could there not have been (or still be) a larger edition that is sewn pamphlet-style into wrappers? A hundred copies? Fifty? Something that will allow this already out of print book to fulfill its higher purpose of helping fellow printers? Even a downloadable pdf on the Mutton & Nuts website would be a valuable resource. I feel very lucky to have gotten a copy of Tints. I want others to be able to feel the same fortune in the future.

Polly Fossey’s 7 Color Contrasts with Risography also deals with the appearance of tints and mixtures of colors, but it does so in the vein of a more traditional color theory manual. The book details the basic theory behind seven types of contrast—hue, value, saturation, complements, temperature, extension, and simultaneous—and demonstrates how to achieve them using a palette of seven Riso inks. Fossey’s art practice focuses on “investigations of visual concepts…. STUDY= ART,” and 7 Color Contrasts grew out of her studies of color theory and Risography. The seven sections of the book give a primarily visual overview of established color theory, but what makes the book so wonderful is the beauty with which Fossey explores the concepts she is studying. Each of the technical sections, which are beautiful in their own right, is followed by at least one, and often multiple vibrant designs inspired by what she has learned. The book’s centerfold image is mesmerizing in a way that reminds me of my favorite Bridget Riley paintings. 

 

 

Throughout Fossey’s technical and artistic explorations, the Riso registration is surprisingly precise. There are bumps in the alignment to remind us that a human and a machine made this book together. The kinks haven’t quite been worked out, thankfully. If they had been, there would be no more need for us humans.

The only aspects of the book that I take issue with are its typography and its edition size (I know). The text is set in a monospaced typeface that is often proportionally too large for the page. Both the choice of the type and its size lends a somewhat clunky feel to the otherwise lovely pages. Not clunky enough to ruin the book, but enough to make me wish the typography was more balanced with the images. As for the edition size, I understand that many of the pages had to go through the Riso dozens of times. I would imagine that with the quality of the registration there were a lot of waste sheets. But, as with Tints, this book is a valuable resource that I believe deserves a wider audience. I hope that when it sells out Fossey will be willing to produce a second printing. 

 

Addendum: Another recent acquisition that deals with color is Eating Marmalade with a Spoon: Saturdays with Louise by Helen Quinn. The book tells the story of the two years Quinn spent assisting Louise Bourgeois when Quinn was in her twenties. Although not technically a color or printing manual, Quinn has created a novel take on the color wheel based on her conversations with, and impressions of, Louise Bourgeois. Eating Marmalade is a fun and lively book, available directly from Quinn for $35.

 

 

The Almighty Starshaped by Jen Farrell

Farrell, Jen. The Almighty Starshaped. Chicago: Starshaped Press, 2019. Printed by Jen Farrell on Mohawk Superfine paper in an edition of 100 copies. 5.25 x 7.25 inches, 48 pages. US $400.

The Almighty Starshaped may be purchased on the Starshaped Press website.

My favorite type specimens* use their ostensible motivation—advertisement—as a smokescreen for their actual purpose: to throw down a challenge to other designers, with as much brio and bravado as possible. Leave the numbers to the bean counters; bragging rights are the true currency of these books, which means they are often thoroughly impractical. They set an aspirational bar that for most designers remains either perpetually out of reach or too prohibitive to consider. For instance, of the thousands of practical, forgettable type specimens produced during the typographic era,** there is only one Manuale Tipografico (even if others use the name), only one Specimens of Chromatic Wood Type, Borders, etc. This is not to say that less daring specimens lack value, but that their value most often derives from their insight into industry. The virtuoso specimen, on the other hand, operates on many levels, some of which are more closely aligned with art than with commerce.

            What is interesting about metal type specimens produced in the post-typographic era is that the motivation behind the books has changed. As a consequence, the specimen books of the last fifty years have taken on a decidedly different character than their predecessors. In most cases the type itself is not for sale. Rather, it is the type collection and the ingenuity of the printer that are being advertised. Some of these books are produced as reference works for the press that owns the type, others as celebratory exercises in typography, still others as stalwart claimants to a tradition perceived to be under attack. As in the typographic era, very few recent specimens stray too far from the expected, using familiar texts from the nearly-dry well (I hope!) of interbellum typographic literature, and arranging them in handsomely restrained layouts.  

            By repeating the standard tropes and texts of earlier specimens, these books hasten, rather than staunch, the demise of the traditions they hope to save. Imagine if Bodoni or Page felt bound by the styles and conventions of the previous century. We wouldn’t even know their names. Which brings up another issue: one of the qualities that makes many of the great specimens great is that they displayed new typefaces produced by the foundry or designer who issued the specimen. This is no longer the case for metal type specimens. In the absence of new types, then, a specimen book that fails to present old types in new ways brings its own existence into question. Why bother?

 

A page from Phil Gallo's Found Poems, 1995.

A good example of work that escapes these pitfalls is that produced by Phil Gallo at his Hermetic Press. Gallo’s work comprises a series of conceptual and textual pieces that, when considered together, form a kind of accidental type specimen. They are set in historical typefaces, but they present familiar things in new ways; they give insight into the time and place in which Gallo works and they provoke us to reconsider our assumptions. Jen Farrell’s book, The Almighty Starshaped, reminds me of Gallo’s work, particularly his masterful Found Poems, in that the meta text of both books is the Printer, capital P, and her/his relationship to the world around them. 

 

The world around Farrell is the city of Chicago, and The Almighty Starshaped is nothing if not a tribute to her town. Modeled on the Moleskin-esque piece books kept by graffiti artists, The Almighty Starshaped quickly knocks the fine press reader off-kilter. The cover label is a hand-set “Hello my name is” sticker, similar to those used to tag paint-resistant surfaces with graffiti. Like many of those quick tags, the cover label is positioned at an angle, rather than parallel to the top edge of the book. The endpapers are printed black on gray, set in a brick-wall pattern that is interspersed with the book’s title in a variety of type styles. This is followed by a faux ex-libris, a half-title, a brief introduction, and then the first of four fold-out pages: a robust title page that comes at you with such swagger that it forces you to reappraise your abilities. Could I do that? The letters in the word, "shaped," are composed entirely of typographic ornaments that, together, evoke lettering styles seen in contemporary graffiti.

 

The title page is followed by sixteen one-page specimens printed on the rectos, as well as the three additional fold-outs. Many of the one-page settings are faced by a short setting on their opposing verso, creating a dialogue between the two. For instance, the setting, “Vote Starshaped Press for Mayor Everybody’s Doing It,” is faced by a lovely ornamental vignette stating “Early & Often.” The recto is inspired by the absurd number of candidates in a recent Chicago mayoral election, while the verso ties the recent event to the city’s storied history of political corruption. The Almighty Starshaped is full of these kinds of dialogues, unexpected bridges between old and new, that succeed in making Farrell’s remarkable collection of historic type and ornament feel fresh and relevant today.

 

Another quality that separates The Almighty Starshaped from many historical type specimens is its text. Even if we don’t consider the gibberish used by wood type manufacturers in their specimens, historical metal type specimens rarely made a textual contribution. Setting a variety of type styles and sizes in the same text—Cicero, perhaps?—allowed viewers to discern minute differences among typefaces. There was no need to make explicit references to the historical moment in which the specimen was produced—that was evident in the type designs themselves. When considering making a metal type specimen today it would be worth taking Farrell’s approach as instructive. Rather than each page representing a discreet design, disconnected form its neighbors, the pages in The Almighty Starshaped work together to create a textual narrative that is greater than the sum of its parts. Each page offers a vignette of life in Chicago that, in the aggregate, give a sense of what it is like to live in the city. This is not just a book of typographic pictures.

 

So, if brio and bravado are what you want from a specimen, look no further. With The Almighty Starshaped Farrell has earned her bragging rights. At a recent viewing of the book with several seasoned bibliophiles, Farrell had to repeatedly say, “No, it’s hand-set metal type,” as each page was turned. To which the typical response was “But how did you….” trailing off into silence.

When Farrell made The Almighty Starshaped, books were a relatively new form for her. Since then, she has produced what will certainly go down as one of the great specimens of our age, The City is My Religion. For more on that book, see Jill Gage’s insightful review in Parenthesis 41. But having gotten to know Jen a little bit over the years, there is something about The Almighty Starshaped that will always hold a special place on my shelves. It captures Farrell so well: it’s got a punk rock vibe, it throws a subtle finger to the establishment, and it exhibits an enormous, undeniable talent.

 

* As evidenced in my review of Jessica Spring’s One Liners, my “favorite type specimens” is an evolving category.

** For my purposes, the “typographic era” denotes the period in which new metal type production was a central part of the global printing industry, roughly 1450–1950.

An earlier version of this review first appeared in Parenthesis 37. Photos by Annie Schlechter.