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.
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.
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.
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