Baroque Printing

                 The Iota Printshop is hosting a concert Friday March 18th by the chamber music group 'Alphabet Baroque Club'…which may not seem like a letterpress-related event. And it isn't. But there's a history here, and not just the one that goes back centuries.  It's that the violinist Maria Caswell is an old friend of my family's. And that for fifty years I've had a fascination with the early baroque composers.  Then there's the history of this ensemble: when they began practicing together they decided to work their way through the early Baroque composers from A to Z. When they had performances, they stayed with the idea and called themselves the ABC (Alphabet Baroque Club). They use original instruments of the era to retain the sonorities of the time.

When they had a venue cancel for March  18th, I had this feeling: our printshop is teeming with ABCs… our presses are over a hundred years old and one of them is in the lineage of the Fifteenth century printers…we adhere to the old one-letter-at-a-time method invented by Gutenberg…our printing is like chamber work, usually passed amongst less than a hundred people, rather than published in the thousands … & it felt to me like: this is Resonant! This has to happen, not just because I know Maria or I have this old interest in early Baroque.

These instruments, these tonalities…they will vibrate amongst our old presses and wooden alphabets…and echo our own fascination with an older practice of art that was intimate & beautiful.

Michael Myers Exhibit

Join North Bay Letterpress Arts this coming weekend, November 14-15 from noon-5pm for a rare showing of the work of the brilliant 1970s artist/illustrator Michael Myers.

The event will take place at Iota Press, 925d Gravenstein Hwy. South, Sebastopol, CA, and will feature over 40 prints recently made from Myers' original linoleum blocks, which will also be part of the exhibit. The carving has to be seen to appreciate its extreme virtuosity.

Myers worked with Holbrook Teter and others in a radical printing group called Zephyrus Image, which started in San Francisco in the early 1970s, moved to the hills north of Healdsburg, and ended when Myers was tragically killed in an accident in 1982. Most of his work was created in combination with letterpress printing of poems, posters, & politically sharp ephemera.

New Member of Crew

I’ve always admired and wished I could work with a handpress. I’ve seen beautiful examples; some, like this one in Antwerp’s Plantin Museum, dating back to 1600.  They’re the kind first invented by Gutenberg, evolved from a wine press, with a way of sliding the work on a track under the platen where the downward force of screw or toggle makes an impression.

Last month I got a letter from Dennis Renault, who has printed on such a press for nearly fifty years, and had decided our shop would be a good new home for it. It meaning: an Ostrander Seymour 1200 lb. iron handpress. Dennis had taken such excellent care of it and was so generous with the price that I took him up on it.

After much effort , the press was disassembled, loaded & reassembled at the shop.  With a week of study and tinkering, we were able to pull some good quality proofs.  The beauty & power of the press  coupled to an effortless quiet printing is sweet. And there’s something too about the directness of its action: it’s a press.

Now it’s the thing that wakes me up at 5am thinking about inking, & fretting about friskets. Or imagining what I should compose on it…every press imparts its own influences on a printer. Although this one was built in the 1890s, its motions,  methods, and aura take one back 500 years.

The music of the shop just added a string bass.

Many thanks to Richard Burg, Paul Lewis & Tiana Krahn for the disassembly, loading & reassembly.  And most of all to  Dennis Renault… for giving us the opportunity and guidance throughout.

not blogging

Welcome to the intermittent posts and archives of the NBLA. We intend to use this format to experiment with ways of keeping in touch with other alphabetically inclined people. Sometimes there are events at the printshop that we just can't stop being pleased about unless we write them up and put some photos with. And sometimes we have been obsessed with an aesthetic argument about book art, or have discovered a new way of printing inside out…and we'll use this page as a forum. Maybe you'll disagree and post some post-modern  comments; or maybe you'll rush to your own shop to steal our ideas. Beam eye guest.

Ink discovered

In a once bucolic setting amongst the beehives, a gusher of ink has altered the lives of threes of people. The Ink Rush began in August 2015 and has continued unabated by common sense nor tiny wasps. Stay tuned.