Special Projects > Love and Reproduction

Object #4: Happy Holidays!

Stop! This blog entry will make much more sense if you have received and seen mail art object #4.

Object Notes:

This month's delivery should contain one holiday card, one newsletter about books, moveable type, and damn lies, and a bookmark.

I used three different types of printing to make the holiday card. The front text was printed with a Prixel Press. I knew I wanted to use moveable type, and I thought I was going to have to book time at a letterpress shop, but then my Prixel Press arrived! Which I forgot I ordered! It's a Christmas miracle! The Prixel Press is really cool, but requires careful inking to get things just right. (It's kind of hard to explain how it works so I suggest going to their website.) The graphics on the front are screenprinted in silver and light blue, and the back is printed on an ink jet printer. The paper is Stonhenge, which is my default screenprinting paper unless I need something special.

The family newsletter is formatted in photoshop and printed on a laser printer. It's the holiday season, GOTTA HAVE A NEWSLETTER. I have never sent one (I don't usually send cards), and could not resist adding a picture of my daughter's cat Olive. I don't usually call her my grandkitty, but it seemed funny. She has a sibling Roman, but I only had room for one picture and I am currently nursing a grudge against him so he's outta the will (and the newsletter). I used Gills Sans typeface, which sometimes makes it look like I did not add a space at the end of a sentence. It is especially noticeable with an "A", but that space is there. BELIEVE IT.

The bookmarks are made from card misprints (and there was a lot until I figured out how to ink the type correctly) and old/failed prints. I save a lot of stuff to make collages but never use them because collage isn't really my thing. So I end up making a lot of bookmarks. Let me know if you need more. I gotta stamp! That says "mail art extra"! Because I am a weirdo! So I stamped it! Sorry for the overuse of exclamation points.

Research Notes:

Here are some of the more useful things I read and watched about moveable type.

https://www.openculture.com/2019/07/jikji.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/27/arts/has-history-been-too-generous-to-gutenberg.html

https://lithub.com/so-gutenberg-didnt-actually-invent-the-printing-press/ This is a very good summary of the history of moveable type in Asia.

The Machine That Made Us - This is a fun doc, but says not one thing about what happened before Gutenberg. It's got Stephen Fry in it though, and he's adorable.