Monthly Archives: September 2015

Sep 18 2015
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Letterpress Appreciation Day

0.918 or, Live a Good Story

photo

Ask any letterpress printer about the number 0.918 and if that printer is worth his or her salt, they should give you a hearty smile and a twinkle of the eye. It is an important number in their craft: 0.918 inches is the standard height of type. From the base of the type to the printable surface, no matter if it’s metal type so small you need to set it with tweezers or a piece of wood type so large you can fit only one character at a time into the press, all of it measures the same 0.918 inches in height.

I’m a printer and a lot of the folks who read this blog are printers and book artists. This is because we know each other (sometimes only by name) and we support each other (sometimes without ever meeting). We are a tight knit bunch, book artists and printers. And today is a big day for the printers. It is September 18, 9/18, the closest iteration of 0.918 we get on the calendar. It is Letterpress Appreciation Day.

Printshops around the globe will be celebrating, and if they’re not, they should be. Convivio Bookworks is sponsoring Letterpress Appreciation Day at the Jaffe Center for Book Arts, as we do each year. We bought the center 50 pounds of popcorn kernels for the event and for a film festival that ran all this week on the run up to Letterpress Appreciation Day. So today, I plan on eating popcorn, printing if I’m lucky, and remembering all the great printers I have known and the ones I have never met but whose work has influenced and informed my own through example and the power of good timeless design. The ones I have known have all been real characters, which, when you think about it, is the essence of any good printshop and of any good story. Make the story you live a good one.

 

Image: This year’s Letterpress Appreciation Day message of positivity reads “Live a Good Story.” It was set in historic wood and metal types by JCBA student Charles Pratt and we’ll teach folks to print it themselves on the center’s 1890 Wesel Iron Handpress, just as my friends David Wolfe and Glenn House taught me so many years ago. Thanks Charles. Thanks David. Thanks Glenn.

 

Sep 13 2015
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Rosh Hashanah

A Sweet Year Ahead

Taglach

Tonight’s setting sun brings a new year in the Jewish calendar. It is Rosh Hashanah. It begins with the sounding of the shofar, a hollowed out ram’s horn, which gives the day another common name: the Feast of Trumpets. The celebration of the new year concludes ten days from now with solemn Yom Kippur; these are the high holidays/holydays of the Jewish calendar.

What I know of Rosh Hashanah is little, but what I love best are the simple things. Years ago at this time of year, at one of the local bakeries near to where my family lives, we would find pie tins full of honey-dipped balls of fried dough mixed with cherries and chopped nuts: Teiglach is its name, we found, and it was part of the Rosh Hashanah celebration, but we would bring it home each year because it reminded us of the struffoli we would make for Christmas. Teiglach provided an early autumn precursor of our delicious honeyed Italian yuletide dessert. And one September not long ago, Seth and I and the rest of my family got to share a Rosh Hashanah celebration with our niece’s family. There was homemade challah bread, round to symbolize the circle of the year, and there were apples dipped in honey, to symbolize a sweet year ahead.

There was much more, I know. There were prayers, and there were pressed linens, and there were more elaborate things to eat on the table. But it is the bread and the apples and the honey that I remember best. The simple things. Happy new year: Shanah Tovah.

Image: Recipe for Taglach (which seems to me for sure like a variant spelling of Teiglach) from Pearl Silberg’s handwritten recipe book, which I made facsimile copies of some years back at the request of her daughter Rita. She was giving the books to her own children, Pearl’s grandkids. I couldn’t resist making myself a copy, too.

 

 

Sep 08 2015
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Nativity of Mary

Our Lady of the Grapes

Today, a reprint of last year’s chapter for the Nativity of Mary. I know of some folks in Switzerland who will be “driving down” their livestock today, down to the valleys, and the animals will be wearing bells and flowers. As for Seth & me, the coffee is on, and there are Canadian blueberries for breakfast.

Böttcher,_Christian_Eduard_-_Setting_out_for_the_grape_harvest,_Oberwesel-on-Rhine_-_1867

Now we are well into September and in places where there are vineyards, the grapes are ripening on the vines, speaking of great alchemical potential: crushed and barreled and left to ferment, activating natural yeasts and sugars, the next wines are about to be made.

The timing of today’s feast––at the start of the grape harvest––is, to me at least, interesting. Nine months ago we celebrated the solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, and today, we celebrate the Nativity of Mary. The Church celebrates the deaths of saints (don’t you love when I tell you all those gruesome tales of how saints met their ends?) but in the case of Mary and John the Baptist, also their births. And tradition tells us that Mary was born on this day in Jerusalem to St. Ann and St. Joachim.

Italians like to eat blueberries for this day, a day important to all Marias and Mariettas… and there are many in my family. The blue of the berry is a reference to the traditional color of Mary’s cloak. Lights are illuminated in windows, especially in the rural areas, and bonfires are not uncommon on this night. Across the Alps, in Austria, it is time to bring the sheep and cattle down from the mountains and into the valleys: winter is fast approaching, and the Nativity of Mary on the 8th of September is known there as “Drive Down Day” in honor of this custom of moving the animals, often with some pomp and ceremony.

In France, though, there is this nice connection between the Nativity of Mary and wine: winemakers refer to the day as “Our Lady of the Grape Harvest,” bringing their best grapes to church for blessing. Across France you will find bunches of grapes placed in the hands of statues of Mary on this day. I like this connection between Mary, a goddess of sorts, and wine, especially as we ponder the bread and wine that is central to each church Mass, but central also to any good meal in places throughout Europe. These two elements can easily be a meal unto themselves (“a jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou”), should that be all you have, and you’d walk away sated and probably quite happy.

Image: Setting Out for the Grape Harvest by Christian Eduard Böttcher. Oil on canvas, 1867, [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.

 

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