Mail!

It was an exciting day in the mail room here at Monkey-Rope Press.

Not only is French Paper the preferred paper source for our prints and illustrative dallyings, they are practically neighbors: shipments to Chicago are almost guaranteed to arrive next-day. Local, high-quality paper with fast delivery? We can't ask for anything better! Newly on the agenda for tomorrow: building a first-draft mockette.

Secondly, a collection of books. I just finished reading The Wave which was edge-of-your-seat exciting, but less directly applicable as research for my book project than I'd hoped. Next on the list, Sailing Alone Around the World and Single-Handed Sailing.

Last but not least, an unexpected and wonderful gift from Colorado:

In June of this year, I contributed three prints to the "Pressed" show at the Denver Pavillions, organized by the inspired printers and designers at Matter. The organizers of the show sent the above print as a thank-you. Count me charmed and delighted!

Found: Letterpress Ephemera

Monkey-Rope Press is back in business after a 10-day-long holiday travel hiatus. Before heading south to Austin, Texas to spend time with family, I stopped in St Louis for a long weekend to visit more family and friends. A highlight of the trip was an evening spent at the City Museum, a 10-story former shoe factory in down town St Louis that was converted in 1997 into a surreal spectacle of a playground. It is not a museum where one walks through with silent reverence: the space is built of the city, pieced together from architectural salvage and abandoned ephemera, and the purpose of the space is play instead of contemplation. Used rebar is repurposed into climbing tubes, deep-fry pans pave the bathroom like bricks, and the walls of the cafe next to a coat check room are lined with old magnesium letterpress plates.

A sample detail of the wall

 Found wood type at the coat check/letterpress room's entrance 

Now that I have returned from out-of-town holiday adventures and have proven myself a true glutton in the face of home-made cookies, I am pleased to be back in the studio facing my work. The Queer History print series is taking a back seat for a few weeks so that I can focus more intently on the book project, in hopes of getting demonstrable progress made in time for an early-March grant deadline. Today I order paper to build my first draft mock-up, and continue to research and sketch sample pages. Off to work!

Adventure Research

Monkey-Rope Press operations were pleasantly cloistered inside for most of the weekend, with a seasonally appropriate but still impressive blizzard hitting Chicago with brutal force on Sunday. I spent hours over the weekend at my desk, drawing and testing and re-testing character designs for the book project with only drudging progress. In a moment of particularly focused frustration and distraction, I checked the weather report online: not only were there winter storm advisories (no surprise there), but there were also flood advisories. With 50mph winds, the waves in Lake Michigan peaked at 20 feet high near the beach and higher deeper in the lake. It hit me: an important scene in the book I am working on occurs in a storm on the ocean. Time for a field trip to the lake!

The waves crashed loudly, but they were only barely audible over the whir of the wind. The snow kicked up by the gusts were intermittently blinding, and if it says anything about the chaos of the storm I only felt safe getting as close to the lake as I did in the picture above. It was powerful and beautiful. Best research ever!

Printing Process

After a festive day at Renegade yesterday, I spent an early snowy morning at the studio finishing the first half of the Christine Jorgensen diptych. 

First I trimmed the block on the studio's table saw. This is a wonderfully lazy method: without a saw I could have carved out the extra several square inches on the block, but why put my finger joints through that when better tools are available? 

Next, I locked the block into the bed of the press. A few pieces of chipboard are cut to match the dimensions of the linoleum block and packed in underneath, to bring the surface of the linoleum to type high (that is, the height where the rollers will hit the block). The carved block is kept in place with long blocks of wood (called furniture) and a quoin, which can be expanded to snugly lock in the furniture and the block by rotating the quoin key.

Then I mixed the ink. For consistency throughout the full run of this project, I kept the ink mixture as simple as possible so I can closely match it again in the future. I bought a can of purple ink and mixed it half and half with opaque white. 

After inking up the press, I pulled a first proof on scrap paper. This is always an exciting moment for me as a printer, to finally see the result of all the hours of carving labor hunched over at my desk.

But that isn't to say that the carving is done, or that the block is ready to print! The first proof is on the left, and the final print is on the right. I saw from the spotty, lightly textured first proof that I needed to add more chipboard under the block to raise it up high enough for even contact with the inked rollers. I also err on the side of leaving too much not carved, so that I can cut more away once I see how the block prints. Looking at the proof I decided that I did not like the wimpy-looking "electric" movement out of the microphone, so I improvised some more cuts for a more balanced & bold look.

Then all that was left was to print the full edition. I printed 60 for a final edited edition of 50, giving room for me to take out of the run any prints that were under-inked, gunky or imbalanced in some way.

And there she is!

Block finished!

The Christine Jorgensen block is complete! Check in early next week for the first finished print of the history series collaboration with writeyourprincipal.com.