tiistai 7. helmikuuta 2012

Little documentary about printing and bookbinding.

































I'm mostly spending my time (days and nights) in this classroom dealing with these miniature letters and the letterpress machine. To print a text you need to find letters one by one from their boxes and place them correctly (upside down and vertically flipped, b looks like d, d looks like b et cetera), then you have to place it on the machine, spill some ink over it and hope the outcome is desired. (Sometimes I hope it would function like that, but really it takes couple of attempts to get the pressure and the amount of ink right.) When you are done printing, you have to clean the letters and sort them back to their boxes, carefully so that you will find them next time you need them. 30 pages of this! (20+ prints/page) Sometimes I think it's slightly insane.

Suomeks, kun puhun sitäkin kieltä:
Lähes huijaamatta, istun ympärivuorokautisesti kirjanladontaluokassa musteiden ja pienten metallikirjasimien kanssa tehden kandiani. Koko prosessiin menee aika valtavasti aikaa, mutta lopputuloksesta näyttäisi tulevan aika mässy. Fonttikoko on 6 (sama kokoasteikko kuin tekstinkäsittelyohjelmissa, jossa times new roman 12 on se basicfontti. Eli puolet pienempi. Yay!), ei helpota, eikä nopeuta hommaa lainkaan.

Kun oon niin innostunut tästä painohommasta, oon ehtinyt jo unohtaa senkin, että tosiaan, tähän prosessiin kuuluu myös sisällöntuontato-osuus. Välillä onni potkii, kun sisältö on pudonnut päästä ulos miltei itsestään.

(Kirjasinten nurinperisyys on aiheuttanut myös innostuksen opetella kirjoittamaan käsin nurinperin. Siitä myöhemmin.)

Cheers,
Heta

2 kommenttia:

  1. that's so cool!! but I don't think I would have the patience to do that..impressive :) I have to ask; why do you have to do all that work (yourself)? I haven't read your previous posts about this, but is it a "book-printing assignment thing" or what's the history behind all this :p

    VastaaPoista
  2. thank you! :)

    I started with a mere interest on combining word and image, and through many experiments it led to this: making a whole book with mostly text in it.

    Doing all the work makes the outcome even more valuable for me. I could print it digital, but it has completely different feeling to it. I have really not posted any facts about my BA before, so you couldn't have known.

    We have a bookbinding course where I learned the techniques and after that I desided I want to do it this way.

    Glad you are liking it. :)

    VastaaPoista