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Tour de Lead Graffiti 2012
S T A G E 1 3 :
Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux > Le Cap d'Agde / 217 km

the project | clamshell | title page | descriptions | colophon | postcards | composite

Prologue | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | Rest | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | Rest | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20

2011 edition | 2013 edition (coming)

In 3 word:
Well-timed lunge.

. . .

Start time today: 6:19 am

Completed: 8:41 pm

Time today: 15 hours : 22 minutes

Time to date: 232 hours : 32 minutes

Runs: 5 (sequence: red, handrolled greys, handrolled Bastille red & blue, handrolled fireworks orange 7 yellow, dark red)

Runs to date: 75

370 > 8 00 pixel wide enlargement

The day's story

Description: Winning a stage of the Tour de France is a career-making moment for any professional bike rider. André Greipel of Lotto-Belisol Team won his third of this Tour with an incredibly well-timed lunge at the finish line to edge out 3-stage winner Peter Sagan.The differences in the two lunges at the line were probably no more than 1/10th of a second apart and that made all the difference.

We were rooting for Michael Morkov who won the 'most combative' award for the day for being a leader in a breakaway for about 95% of the day, but got swallowed up by the peloton. We misspelled his name in an earlier poster (Markov) and we were going to print his name using the largest "O" we have in our wood type collection which is about 8" tall. We really hope he wins a stage so we can get closure on that typo.

There were some nice challanges near the end of the race, one by a Lead Graffiti favorite, Alexandre Vinokourov, riding in his last Tour. But after a valient effort the peloton won out.

Bill Roberts of Bottle of Smoke Press, a letterpress shop in Dover, Delaware, and longtime letterpress friend joined us again this year for the Bastille Day stage with a couple of bottles of red wine to mellow out our printing day. Bill wanted to drip red wine on the piece and we weren't so sure about it. Maybe we'll rethink that today.

Just for the record, the hardest lockup was the name of Greipel's team which took 6 tries to get it in the right spot.

General classification leaders & favorites

Yellow Jersey / Bradley Wiggins of Sky Procycling: 59:32:32

     Christopher Froome: +02:05
     Vincenzo Nibali: +02:23
     Cadel Evans: +03:19
     Jurgen Van Den Broeck: + 04:48
     André Greipel: +1:18:32 (79th place)

Printing details

Signatures: Ray Nichols, Jill Cypher, Tray Nichols, and Bill Roberts

Size: 14.75" x 22.5"

Stock: Somerset Textured White 300 gsm

Main typography: 12 line Agency Gothic Outline, 12 line Stymie Bold Condensed

Production notes: handset wood & metal type. The stage / signature block was preprinted using photopolymer plates.

Press: Vandercook Universal III

Three of today's photos

Lockup: This is for the 'Bastille Day lunge" for the handrolled red & blue. We really love figuring out the architecture for printing things on a diagonal, especially when they need to match another diagonal.

Art: Jill loves shooting things in the trash cans. We use blue shop towels and they can get pretty saturated.

Scene: Ray printing the composite print and Bill Roberts taking them off the Vandercook Universal III. After 70+ runs the paper is getting pretty beat up and noticeably heavier with all of the ink. We use a slipsheet between the prints as they can get pretty juicy after only a couple of impressions, especially handrolled layers, and today we had three of those. Typically we will use some cornstarch after every other print once we get to this point in the Tour de Lead Graffiti project.