Glog

Glenn Fleishman Interrogates the Past

technique

Design

Closing in on a print date

It’s allergy season in Seattle, which has unfortunately knocked me out at times, delaying some of the work on the book, keepsake, and other projects. Nonetheless, things are moving forward, and I’ve made decisions and am proceeding towards a final design, binding choices, and the rest.

  • The keepsake. I’ve decided on what it will be: a setting of Walt Whitman’s “A Font of Type,” a poem from 1888 that has a lot of resonance in his life, as he started work at age 13 apprenticing as a typesetter. I created a design, but after consultation with my mentor, am reworking it entirely from a small poster into a folio, or a folded sheet. The book design is a gating item at the moment, to get plates made for printing, which will push the keepsake design finalization and printing back into late May or possibly into June.

paper

My second project this year

I just completed the third pass on a broadside, a fancy word for a poster, that’s a tribute to The Incomparable, a podcast network I’ve been part of since the founding of the flagship eponymous show. It now has many podcasts in the network, and we’re mostly professional amateurs: shows are produced with high quality and a lot of care, but the money that comes in mostly de minimis — we cover editing and some other expenses, but it’s not a living.

The broadside involves multiple printing techniques and elements:

  • The background was printed using a pressure plate, a sort of reverse stencil placed under the paper during its impression against a large solid block that was inked on press. This created a white space for the zeppelin, and the little pointed rays around it.
  • That pass used a split fountain, in which two different ink colors