Ace Jet 170

"The little typographical adventure…"

That’s how William Morris pitched his, long-time pondered printing enterprise some time after 1888. Finally tipped over the edge by an inspiring lecture to the Arts and Crafts Exhibition in November that year, our hairy faced friend gathered around him a crack team; a finely-tuned, hand-crafted group – a punchcutter, a papermaker, an ink-maker, an engraver and a master printer were invited to join the fanatical craftsman at the Kelmscott Press.

52 works in 66 volumes were produced with the Kelmscott Chaucer being generally considered their masterpiece. Morris himself designed the types, title page, borders, frames and 26 initial words while his Pre-Raphaelite comrade Edward Burne-Jones produced 87 pencil illustrations, that were translated into line and engraved ready for print.

Whether it killed him or kept him alive I don’t know enough to say but Chaucer was issued in June 1896 after a two year slog and Morris died the following October.

In 1975 a facsimile copy of the Kelmscott Chaucer was produced by the Basilisk Press, following production methods that mirrored, as closely as was possible, that of the original A-Team (K-Team, actually). This time it took three years with the original volume being accompanied by a second that reproduced, for the first time, Edward Burne-Jones’ pencil sketches. 'Reproducing the Kelmscott Chaucer' is an article in The Penrose Annual from 1976. It tells of the troubles encountered by the new team: the impracticalities of using hand-made paper in the quantity required, the challenge of printing onto paper with a deckled edge, the difficulties of matting the ink and even the dangers of boredom during such a painstaking and laborious task.

During the early to mid-seventies phototypesetting was becoming standard. While they reproduced Chaucer using letterpress, the volume of drawings was produced using litho and the best phototypesetting available. That’s a huge but understandable leap from one method to the other, in craft and result. The Basilisk team went to super-human lengths to reproduce Chaucer with a spirit and effort worthy of Morris.

Now, of course, the gap between the techniques of the arty-crafty Morris and contemporary production methods is even greater. All the more admirable then that a few finely-tuned, hand-crafted individuals endeavour to keep the art of letterpress alive and relevant today.

The Penrose Annual 1976 Volume 69

For most of my Penrose Annual collecting career, to date, I've concentrated on the 60s. But I've come to realise the following decade has lots to offer. As phototypesetting took hold, memories of letterpress-as-standard still prevailed and also the 70s witnessed some amazing designers at work in various graphic arts.

Paul Piech had began to publish from his private press in 1959, his wood and linocuts full of purpose and protest. Follow that link, from his name, and you'll see what I mean. For this edition of Penrose, he cut motifs to illustrate an article on Caxton as well as being the focus of a piece by Kenneth Hardacre.

Tom Eckersley was in his sixties by now but his poster work was still breaking ground. There's plenty of supporting evidence in this edition to prove that.

A superb piece on the Kelmscott Chaucer gives background on the original and goes on to describe the production of a facsimile copy of the Morris/Burne-Jones masterpiece. I'm going to do a separate post about that.

David Gentleman's here, thanks to Mel Calman who wrote the article which is illustrated with finished work alongside examples of Gentleman's design developments.

As is standard with Penrose, there's a ton of other stuff including an article on the reproduction of old maps and graphic design from Canada – and then the usual technical developments of the day.

I've uploaded more highlights to Flickr.

Sensations of London

Three things converged recently…

We went to London to start with. Haven’t been for ages and it was so good to be back, wandering around the city. Hope to be there again in the summer.

Then I began to read the book I’d been given at Christmas, Helene Hanff’s 84, Charing Cross Road. It’s a lovely book…well, books really. The volume – the one I have – is made up of the original 84 – a collection of correspondences between Hanff in New York and her antiquarian book dealer at Marks & Co Ltd, at the title’s address – and her follow up, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, an account of her first visit to London, a city she spent years longing to see.

Both are fabulous to read. The first follows a touching and ultimately tragic friendship between the author and the staff of the bookshop. It’s funny and super-charming and a bit sad. In The Duchess, we accompany Hanff, at a mature stage of her life, on her adventure in and around the city. Her fascination for London soon becomes infectious as you experience a view of the city that only a visitor can have.

That’s two things…and neither are the point of this post. The third thing, and the point, is this: Buildings of London, published by Artifice, is another wanderer’s view of London. Roger FitzGerald is an architect at one of the country’s top firms ADP. Working in London, he clearly has a love for it that, though different to Hanff’s in nature, is at least on a similar scale; it’s clear from the pages of his book, that FitzGerald shares a fascination for the city.

The architect’s eye is obviously at work here but what struck me is how it takes the compositions of paint and collage – FitzGerald uses fragments of printed matter in amongst his brushwork – beyond physical structures and into the realm of ambience; they capture the sensation of each place. Paintings of places we visited just a few weeks ago, take me back there. In paintings of others places, I felt a sense of what it must actually be like. They made me want to be there.

Just like Helene Hanff’s book did.

 

You can get a copy of Buildings of London from you know where.

Clan Wars

If you go down to the woods today…then make your way through the trees…and pop out the other side (just like the Ancient Clan O'Neill probably did around the middle of the thirteenth century) you might find yourself (if you happen to be near Cookstown, County Tyrone) at Tullaghoge Fort. 

I've been working as an interpretive designer now for nearly two years. It's been great. Revealing. I've learned all about Irish history and have some grasp of the whole Northern Irish 'situation', something that we can all have an opinion on but can't understand, in a fair and balanced way, unless we have some insight into its origins. Tullaghoge played no small role in Ireland's story – a fascinating story of intrigue, general sneakiness and skulduggery – the stuff of legends.

If there's an overriding thing I've learned over the last two years it's how certain forgotten, hidden or just carelessly misplaced episodes in our collective past can hold their own against the most thrilling works of fiction. In many ways, the job of the interpretive designer is to present these episodes as such – as thrilling works. That's how we approached the Tullaghoge story; a story of conflict, conquest, betrayal and, well, more conflict.

Enter the fabulous work of Will Freeborn. When we looked for an illustrator to help us tell the Tullaghoge story, we didn't want to commission technically accurate historic reconstructions, we wanted to capture a sense of drama…that sense of legend…a ghostly dream-like peek into a sensory past. The illustrations Wil gave us are mean, moody and messy.

The project involves much more than these illustration. It's a whole outdoor visitor experience with landscape architecture and sculptural interventions. Our hope is that it'll feel like a story book brought to life. Not 'Disney-fied' though, it's gritty and, probably, quite mudding – this is, after all, Northern Ireland. By the spring, it should all be finished and I can show you the whole thing.

Illumination

According to our go to guy, our trusted fount of all known knowledge, the word ‘illustration’ comes from the latin word ‘illustra’tio’ or ‘illu’stro’ meaning ‘enlighten’ or ‘irradiate’ – ‘irradiate’ meaning ‘illuminate (something) by or as if by shining light on it’.

Thought as much.

Since I became an interpretive designer – since February 2014 – I have commissioned more illustration than I have during the rest of my long, roller-coastering career. I've worked with visualisers before, to capture concepts, but not so much illustrators, to capture stories. As interpretive designers though, a large part of our remit is to bring stories to life – to shine a light on them. To, as the godfather of this discipline put it, 'make the remote, coherent'.

And boy, what a tool illustration is – what a pleasure it is to commission illustration and what a joy it is to see the work of amazingly talented artists. With illustration we can visualise the impossible to see; the legends and maybe-truths. The romantic I-hope-it-happeneds or the horrific how-awful-that-must-have-beens.

With illustration we can capture not just scenes beyond our time and vision but imagined emotions – we can fulfil the primary directive of interpretation, to paraphrase Tilden, we can, 'relate what is being displayed or described to something within the personality or experience of the visitor'.

We can compress and combine ideas – illustration is an extremely pliable tool. But that's not all, illustrators can add more than just their ability to render a scene in a technically acceptable way – they can do it in style – with their own style.

These pieces are by a local illustrator, Sam Hunter. I've had the pleasure of working with Sam a few times since I moved to Belfast but over that last year Sam's done loads for us. And he's done it with a startling panache, a 'flamboyant confidence of style or manner' (seeing as we're using definitions a bit here).

His linework astonishes me. Each piece is more than fit for purpose and more than answers the brief well, they delight. They also baffle me. How does he do it? Sam's illustrations display such flare (such 'flamboyant confidence of style or manner'). How come those squiggly, scribbly lines work so well? It's alchemy to me. Delightful alchemy.

We're using these on outdoor graphic panels that will be installed at points along Ireland's Wild Atlantic Way. The illustrations will bring local legends or unique episodes in history to life. One shows how children used to stilt-walk across a shallow causeway to school everyday; another is about an evil, poisonously spinned wart hog that, it is said, would emerge from the sea with murderous intent; another depicts a town's worst fishing disaster, which happened when a storm was summoned by a rather unneighbourly sorceress.

I could go on but maybe you see my point. Illustration may be one of the simplest tools for interpretation – the discipline is, after all, 'an art which combines many arts' – but it's also one of the most accessible and, perhaps, most powerful thanks to how varied styles can be (we can choose what best suits each opportunity) and how pliable the end piece can be (we can make it do what we want it to do). The key to all this, of course, is the skill and flare of the illustrator.