Something that struck me about Meg’s poetry was the repeating themes of small perspectives and remolding oneself through shattering. For instance, in “Astrohorologist”, Meg talks about the vastness and ancient age of space, talking about a “supernova that exploded 931 years before you were born” and a nebula that “outlives all concepts of measurement”. Later, in “Settler”, she emphasizes her “fissure of vision, a pinhole cavity” when observing snowflakes falling.
The idea of remolding and shattering caught my interest as well, especially when she describes parts of herself being “scrubbed stone down to the frothy marrow” only to then be “worried into genesis”. In Meg’s poetry, the format “collides and rives apart”, breaking apart the words to reform their structures and meanings in how they were put together. This is best illustrated in her allusion to the geode in “Tíbrá”, a mineral that has to be smashed apart to reveal the quartz inside.
For Alan Loney, printer of Electio Editions, the process of composition is the master of all other elements of printing, determining the form and the content of each piece through the restrictions and capabilities of the equipment and the materials on hand. There’s little to no distinction between the act of writing and the act of designing the piece in the letterpress, and maybe that’s why Loney mostly published his own poetry, or works that he made himself involved in, as “[the] form of the poem and the form of the book overlap, intersect, interfere, overlay each other in the pleasure of the work, and the layers or degrees of openness required for that to happen have not in [his] experience come easily, nor can they be taken for granted, but none of [his] work now takes place without them” (Poetics 74). And Loney’s style is fairly distinctive, harmonizing the written word with the visual display in a “superbly integrated performance” (Campbell). The subject of his poetry mostly focuses on the senses, delving into the details of what is seen, hear, and felt by the poem, echoed through the paintings and images he pairs with the poetry. Yet the style of his poetry and the images included in his books are always in simple colors, figures, and fonts. While he veers away from the idea of an ‘artist book’, Loney still considers artistic and imaginative ways to merge the words, the image, and the form of the page together to create a holistic piece that reflects his all-encompassing process.
[Images source: Kelm Scott Bookshop]Samples of books printed by Alan Loney’s Electio Editions. Notice the two page spreads and the simple images.
I was amazed at how he could take the simplest pictures, fonts, and poems and merge them together into something aesthetically beautiful. Loney shows that things don’t need to be complex in order to be pleasing, and that was certainly the consideration I took when creating my own spreads in imitation of his style. Imitating his technical considerations and parts of his style, I created my pieces on two-page spreads and used only the fonts he’d use in his books (Perpetua, Centaur, or Castellar, mostly). Since Loney also had an interesting in Greek words and letters, I translated my titles into Greek as well, and considered some symbolism that I discovered in the process for the images. Then, I printed these pieces out on a manila-colored stationary and added my own simple drawings, meaning my spreads would have to be unique pieces, something that unintentionally fits with Schlesinger’s comment on in his interview with Loney that “Letterpress has an intrinsic resistance to identical reproduction” (87). So, while my inspiration came from Loney’s craft, there is a sense that one can never completely replicate another work, even if that work is your own.
[Image Source: Isabel Sicree] Spread inspired by Alan Loney.
[Image Source: Isabel Sicree] Spread inspired by Alan Loney.
Works Cited
“Alan Loney: Electio Editions,” A Poetics of the Press, edited by Kyle Schlesinger, Cuneiform Press & Ugly Duckling Press, 2021, pp. 68-95.
In his interview for the book, A Poetics of the Press, Alan Loney, of the small press Electio Editions, found that “there’s always at least a ‘little imagination’ in the practice of craft skills, and there’s always at least a little dollop of self-expression in design” (84). For Loney, the process of printing affects writing at all stages of the writing process, not just when bringing the final piece to the press. Just as I discovered at Meshwork, the idea in the artist’s mind is not always what can be composed on the letterpress, but Loney insists that this effect runs deeper than most writers would consider, down to the size of the paper the manuscript or poem is drafted on. On the other hand, Loney tends to veer away from the explosive expressiveness that other small press publishers experiment with, even to the point where he corrects those who classify his books as “artist books”, as he draws a clear distinction between them and the “press book” his work falls under. Loney may use a small number of font types, but the way his printing focuses more on the text is through an intimate understanding of the effects of form on content and vice versa.
And that was what I found was the most interesting part of the interview: how Loney sees the printer/writer as not just an artist or a writer, but a maker, “one [that] puts things together, bit by bit, discontinuously, like any child making something out of Lego” (77). The composition itself is in the foreground, setting up the playing field for the form and content of the piece that come later. I read this as the physical act of creating coaching and corralling the writing and structure of the piece into the shape it ultimately becomes, making knowing the end result before starting virtually impossible. With this in mind, every small press book is a surprise, making the possibilities of what can be created endless, not just in creating an artist’s book, but in the subtler books, such as the books Loney creates, as well.
Works Cited:
“Alan Loney: Electio Editions,” 2012. A Poetics of the Press, edited by Kyle Schlesinger, Cuneiform Press & Ugly Duckling Press, 2021, pp. 68-95.
My first impulse upon stepping into Haylee Ebersole’s print shop, Meshwork Press in Wilkinsburg, was to run my hands along the printed cards and feel the depth of the printing done by the letterpress. I cannot say that this was a unique impulse—I run my hands over almost everything I want to work with, from a new laptop, to just flipping through all the pages of a notebook before I even begin to write. And, for many people, this ability to physically touch the pressed letters is what is so attractive about letterpress work.
However, for me, the most exciting part of this excursion at Meshwork Press was the process of typesetting, transforming an idea in your head onto the page. Though I had some idea of what to expect, I hadn’t expected how much I would have to compromise in order to get my idea to work. We were supposed to keep our typeset simple, but I quickly realized that I probably had a different idea of what was simple than what Haylee had intended. My partner and I settled on an idea fairly quickly, making a card that said “Hot & Spicy” with peppers and leaves bordering the words, but actually getting that idea to work meant we had to compromise with our choices. We had to ditch several pieces we wanted to incorporate, replace our ampersand with a slightly larger one, and work around the spacing and placement of the peppers constantly. For a moment, I was worried that it wouldn’t hold together, that we’d have to start over.
Though we managed to get our print to hold together, I have to wonder if the frustration of getting it to work, or having to start over, is actually supposed to be part of the process of typesetting. Submitting to the limitations of your physical press, or the amount of furniture you have available, leads to unique changes in the design of the printed piece. With a computer that can do so many different things, we rarely have to compromise with artistic designs—what we picture in our minds is what appears on the page—but letterpress limitations force us to constantly change and adapt our ideas to make them work. It’s like the typesetting is forcing you to try new things. And maybe that’s why some small presses hold onto letterpress—it really is a kind of art.
What struck me the most about the film, Pressing On, was that all of those garages, workshops, and sheds where these letterpress publishers kept and operated their equipment looked a lot like my father’s various storage spaces. Drawers spilling over with tools, tables covered with boxes of barely labeled materials, and a fine layer of oil and grease covering everything, my father’s workspace paints a picture of a man who doesn’t like to get rid of anything. My older brothers liked to joke that the Ark of the Covenant is buried in the back of our garage. And, at first, that’s what the letterpress publishers look like: kleptomaniacs. However, this film shows that these letter presses, while often being discovered in someone’s basement or garage or in the deep recesses of storage, are so much more than just idle pieces of equipment in the hands of prospective publisher. They are artist’s tools, and these chaotic workshops are really more like artist garrets than storage units.
And that might be what’s really lost by separating artistic designers from the very physical printing process that comes with working with a letterpress. The best thing about chaotic spaces is that you never know what you’re going to find there, what’s going to inspire you. The space in which an artist works affects what is being created. As a writer, I know that I have found inspiration not in the ordinary places of the world (such as the white-walled classrooms that populate many campuses), but in the extraordinary places. The physical printing on letterpress practically begs for an artist recreate the extraordinary onto the page itself, providing scores of material for inspiration while leaving plenty of room for creative enterprise. Nothing exists in a vacuum, so why should book design be created outside the context of the print shop?
On the other hand, removing the designer from the physical process of printing seems to allow cheaper, faster production, that could ultimately lead to a wider audience than what could be achieved with the highly specified works created on a letterpress. But does everything have to be about cost? The film pointed out that Hatch Show Print posters are still remembered today for the impact they made on advertising, creating stunning visuals. There are some things that have more value than what can be labeled with a price tag.
So, in the end, I understand why the letterpress publishers collect these presses and equipment, just as I understand why my father cannot just toss aside what he has accumulated over the years. Everything has its value, and the space itself is an expression of that value, even if the Ark of the Covenant isn’t hidden in the back.
Author and artist Ulises Carrión sought for “authors to be more attuned to the book’s materiality and impact on meaning” as well as “demand for a breakdown of the system that privileged writing as intellectual labor and denigrated the physical aspect of book production” (Borsuk 141). Just as Carrión would have admired, my nameless accordion book of angels breaks the standard mold of the book, presenting itself as more of a visual book than the mere textual book that Carrión was so disappointed in. Still, I kept some of the traditional aspects of the book when constructing my work, giving it both a front and back cover. As a visual book, my accordion book is composed mostly of images, showcasing the angels and the pages themselves as works of visual art.
[Photo taken by Isabel Sicree] My accordion book of angels, standing open upon the wings.
Though I mostly used basic materials for constructing the book, the images of the angels came from a postcard book I had owned for a number of years. Interestingly, I tore the pages out of another quasi-book to construct my own bookwork. After all, would a book created to be torn apart and sent all over the world not be considered some kind of alternate book type? These postcards reflect a part of my own past in the meaning of the book, both as a kind of scrapbook portrayal in the placement of the images, and as a display of my faith through the angels themselves. In a sense, my book becomes a prayer book, sending messages to heaven upon the reflection of the reader. Just as Amaranth Borsuk says, “books are always a negotiation, a performance, an event: even a Dickens novel remains inert until a reader opens it up, engaging its language and imaginative world” (Borsuk 147). The material nature of this book entices a reflective reader to find his or her own engagement with the images. Just as the postcards remain mostly blank on the back to allow personal messages to be written, so too does my book remain mostly blank on the backside, leaving space for letters and writing to be added.
In this way, my desired reader would be a contemplative person, someone who peers into the images and faces on the pages and forms his or her own conclusions. I deliberately try to evoke this response from my reader through the irregular shape of the pages of my book. I cut the folded pages to resemble angel wings, and these pages stick out beyond the cover and the images fastened upon them, implying something beyond the mold of the typical book. Likewise, the sparse text that I include in my book also suggests something beyond the book itself, as the poetic prayers speak of angels and saints at night time watching over us, making the mostly black covers of the book resemble the idea of a Bible or a prayer book. Still, the text acts as an accent to the visual nature of the book, allowing each image to converse with the reader instead.
Works Cited
Borsuk, Amaranth. The Book. Cambridge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2018.
Marking Time: Her Days by April Katz, like so many other artist’s books, especially those found published by the Women’s Studio Workshop, integrates the constructive creativity of sculpture into the literary world of books. Just as Amaranth Borsuk explains in The Book, artist books “disrupt our treatment of the book as a transparent container for literary and aesthetic ‘content’ and engage its material form in the work’s meaning”, so does this artist’s book use its three-way-binding form to reminisce upon the past generations that left notebooks behind (Borsuk 113). However, Katz also disrupts the idea of a book through the way she evokes the non-literary book medium of the calendar and the datebook, incorporating the square blocks from calendars into a poetic discourse. The spiral binding of the datebook is tripled in Katz’s artist book, making the pages open from not only the left, but the right and top as well, with the pages alternating which way they must be flipped, perhaps paying homage to the various datebook forms all at the same time. She also uses thin and clear paper, letting the images and words from the pages fade in and out of view no matter which page the reader is currently reading. This thin paper reminded me of carbon paper, making the office imagery throughout the book, such as the rotary dial phone and the office chair, remarkably vibrant, indicative of an age long gone by to my generation.
And time is vitally important to Katz’s book, just as the title suggests, through its passing and how it is preserved, especially in how Katz preserves the memory of her mother. Maybe that is why Katz uses the triple spiral binding: to show the implicit three periods of time as the past, present, and the future cannot remain linear in Katz’s literary world. In the end, once everything is scheduled and planned just as her mother had with her datebook, only the routine becomes relevant.
Works Cited
Borsuk, Amaranth. The Book. Cambridge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2018.
Jake Syersak’s chapbook Impressions in the Language of a Lantern’s Wick emphasizes a sense of collaboration in art through both the simplistic presentation of his poetry and the humble form of the chapbook itself. On the outside of the book, Syersak’s title is etched in a personalized touch, gashing throughout the word “Language” as if language is only able to be expressed through the form of art.
[Photo Source: Isabel Sicree. The cover of Jake Syersak’s chapbook.]
Upon opening the chapbook, nothing could have been further from my mind when I saw the tiny font of the text, the rudimentary formatting of the text, and the wide-open spaces throughout the pages. The absence of text seemed to suggest more than the text itself, until I read the book. Throughout his poetry, Syersak emphasizes the unexpected collaboration of artist and viewer, both in the words of his poems and his replacement of every “and” with the ampersand, “&”. Notably, Syersak tells his reader to “let a solo conversation drip like a faucet all morning into more novel avowals of what a drain wills” (16). He also gives several examples of people drawing over notable art pieces, contributing to something that everyone else has seen as finished. Through his text, Syersak gives meaning to the blankness of his pages, as if he, too, is inviting his reader to color over his poetry. (Since I was borrowing the book, I refrained from such impulses.) Absence is merely an invitation to collaborate and create over top and alongside that which drives your impulses. So maybe that is why, early on in his book, Syersak insists that “there remains a love of remains, of a vital need for holes” (2). As if to illustrate his point, the chapbook is stab bound with bright red thread, drawing the eye to the holes it makes in a poetry book filled with “holes” in the text. I think Syersak would both approve of and encourage the reader who exploited these holes to create new art and meaning.
[Photo Source: Isabel Sicree. The inside of Syersak’s chapbook. Note the red thread binding and the open space on the pages.]
Works Cited
Syersak, Jake. Impressions in the Language of a Lantern’s Wick. Ghost Proposal, 2016.
There’s something satisfying in working with your hands after a long day or week of working with, what feels like, exclusively your mind. And there’s something hypnotizing about watching someone else work with their hands as well, as I discovered when watching a YouTube time-lapse video on bookbinding over this past weekend [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9P07WAbYHs]. Though our class has so far worked exclusively with paperback books, I found the techniques I observed in this video to be illuminating for my own work on my own Japanese Stab Binding Books, as well as how to adapt my earlier understandings of stitching and paper folding to this new art.
Something that always stuck out to me about stitching and paper folding is the mathematical art of symmetry. The Basic Japanese Stab Binding technique expresses a simple symmetrical pattern achieved through symmetrical action in stitching. The repetitive and reversible patterns made it easy to adapt the technique to other designs, whether in stitching or in the shape of paper. As I stitched the binding of my book, all I could think about how this basic stitching would resemble the combined graphs of the sine and cosine functions with the holes as the critical points. I guess the trigonometric functions stuck with me better than I thought.
Still, my high school experience with kirigami, or, as I like to call it, the art of making paper snowflakes, allowed me to see the potential modifications I could take with paper shape. Though folding a 45 degree angle against the grain is frustrating, I managed to rip enough sheets to make my triangular book, stitched together with the basic stab binding. Finding the symmetrical points to make the holes took an extra step of thinking, as a pleated triangle isn’t really a thing, but I managed without too much difficultly. It only occurred afterwards that I could have used a ruler.
[Photo: Isabel Sicree.] The bookbinding techniques used for these three projects all exemplify the symmetrical process of both the paper folding and the stitching, as well as its adaptability.
The methodical nature of paper folding and stitching makes it easy for me to blissfully lose myself in the repetition, but it also makes alternative stitch patterns easy to identify and recreate for me. It’s comforting to know that I can change the paper type and shape, the number of holes, and the stitching pattern itself and still be able to make an adequate book binding.
Jorge Luis Borges’ “On the Cult of Books” analyzes how the idea of the book has changed from being a mere substitute for dialogue to being regarded as sacred thing in of itself (359). As an avid reader and an older sister, I have read many books both silently to myself and out loud to an audience, and the experience of reading a passage of Borges’ article both silently and out loud made me recall many looked over differences between the two actions.
For one, reading silently is much faster, something that St. Augustine also realized in his observances of St. Ambrose’s silent reading that, “[if] his time were used up in that way (reading aloud), he would get through fewer books than he wished” (Borges 360). Silent readers do not have to spend time vocalizing every word they read, or even bother with proper pronunciation of unfamiliar names or words originating from other languages (something I personally struggled with). Reading aloud is also more exhausting, wearing down the voice (Borges 360) and taking more energy to convey the meaning properly beyond what the reader personally can understand.
However, silent reading really is strange because oral language must by necessity come first, and the act of reading silently is like a conscious effort to sever the written word from the spoken word that writing was supposed to be supporting. Without spoken word, the written word would not exist, yet the written word seems to now exist without being spoken.
Almost any well-written book can be read aloud given the right circumstances, and some I would dare say should be read aloud. In her Atlantic article “In Praise of the Lost, Intimate Art of Reading Aloud”, Chloe Angyal explains how reading aloud made her relationship with her boyfriend more intimate [https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/10/in-praise-of-the-lost-intimate-art-of-reading-aloud/263436/]. Within my own family, a family where everyone reads and the walls are covered with books, reading aloud was a kind of bonding experience within the family. When one of us would get too excited about what we were reading, we would dart from room to room so we could read the passage aloud with anyone we could find. Reading aloud really is a way of sharing a love of reading with those you love.
EL 230: Small Press Publishing 
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