This is an interesting piece, printed slowly and patiently via letterpress by a friend, Greg Robison. The point is that you might like to essentially be a letterpress printer to produce something similar for some event you are involved with. You don’t have to be an excellent letterpress printer, but just good enough to hang in there with most others who are likely a lot better than you. You only need a good idea and enough technical skill to pull it off.

Looking back on my career (mainly as a teacher), it has been a driving force to be a creative person who is seen as a creative person by creative people. I often build into the project some element that would be extreme when compared to others doing “similar” work. Here are a few without much trouble, except to make sure I have a photograph to illustrate them.

• Taking two New York field trips each semester would get 80 students into almost all important shows or talks, adding an equivalent creative experience to at least one additional class or maybe even two.

• From the first moment Apple Computer started weaving itself into the visual production of ideas, there was a clear need to teach our students to use the computer, especially in the design world, which was the world we worked in. We taught the maximum number of creative classes that the BFA degree allowed. Honestly, there was no way I would drop any creative-focused classes. Also, there was no way to increase anyone’s teaching load among the small number of faculty we had.

• As the highest-ranking faculty member, increasing my teaching load was more manageable, and no one would be the wiser. It’s worth mentioning that the students would also not be wiser. So, I took on teaching InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator to all of our sophomore juniors and seniors. I can no longer remember all of the details. Still, it added about 4 hours a week to all of those students’ class load, which probably went relatively unnoticed given the stressful workload they were already doing.

• At some time during the middle 1980s, it also became clear that one of the things that I felt helped VC at the University of Delaware versus the School of Visual Arts (a seriously major competition for our students as they had the best faculty on the planet and they were already in New York where I wanted my students to work) was a “sense of family.” How about a class where every student in VC (sophomores, juniors, and seniors)? We started offering a class on Thursday nights where everyone met. All 80 of our students. It ended up moving to Friday afternoon when we called them Friday Sessions. I had met twice with the dean of Arts and Sciences about the legality of manipulating our class structure. I was assured that I would be okay if I didn’t violate any rules and didn’t generate a noticeable number of complaints. So, how do you catch up to other schools with more money, likely better faculty, and access to more resources? I don’t know, but I can try to close the gap.

So, we just had an exhibition at the Newark Arts Alliance. We included 77 pieces in the show. Too many? It’s probably too many for a reasonable person to go through. But is someone going to have a show there with more? I doubt it. Does it make our show better? I don’t know, but I don’t think it hurt anyone who looked and read and thought about what they were looking at.

So, back to the piece at the top of this blog post. One of the many wonderful things Jill and I love about letterpress is the ability to produce, often without an immense amount of work. This lovely keepsake says to people who have been involved with us, “Thank you for being involved.” Letterpress does that automatically and magically. It is like the sentiment was “carved” in stone. And you can do it for others and not just yourself.

We did these two books for a friend who offered a tour of his incredible collection of Victorian books and memorabilia as an auction prize to the Center for the Book in New York. The winner would attend Newark, Delaware, for the grand tour—afterward, a nice, slow, talkative dinner at one of Newark’s best Main Street restaurants. We produced a book keepsake twice to thank you for being included in dinners. One for each person attending, which we would all sign. A nice way to say thank you to our host. It’s nice to include Lead Graffiti’s name in a day of talking about books. A friendly reminder to the auction winners of a good day with good new friends and great books.

People Were Close revisited

Bernie Herman, Professor of American Material Culture Studies and Art History, passed away on December 30, 2024. Bernie and his wife Becky were Jill’s and my best friend couple. Bernie and Ray were both professors of AMCS at the University of Delaware. Thinking of Bernie brought to mind a couple of especially fun projects we worked on together with students.

Click to read a thorough description of the book “People Were Close.”

"Ink Pulls:" the hows and whys

We’ve been doing INK PULLS for a while without taking the time to explain how and why we make them.

It is often nice to print on paper stock that is not just a solid color, white or otherwise. This can add an amount of complexity to an image, emphasize the presence of a foreground/background dimension, impact readability (which we love to do), and, when you are selling them, offer the buyer more options or variations in making their decision.

Below is a carousel of images from early November 2024, when we printed a series of about 40 broadsides using our recently designed “Shahn Torn” typeface. Using our laser cutter, we’ve cut the Edgar Allan Poe quote out of a sheet of clear acrylic for the piece. We removed the typographic elements; the background was inked and printed on ink pulls. So, essentially, there is some difference in how we inked the acrylic, but honestly, we tend to do it the same way, and the ink pulls make up the background.

Remember that the part we are talking about here is the “background” of the print. The text and the black around the text are essentially the same, except that it is hand-rolled. which results in some variation.

Typically, when printing from a letterpress cylinder press like a Vandercook, the first step in cleaning the rollers between runs is to remove as much of the ink left over as quickly as possible. Once you’ve gotten rid of 80% of it, you can get around to “really cleaning” the rollers. On Vanderrcooks, there is a doctor blade you can engage, which will scrape much of the ink off, but doing so ruined the ink drum on our Vandercook SP15, and it cost us $150 (and that was 15 years ago) to get the gouges milled out of the surface. So, we don’t like engaging that doctor blade.

To start the cleaning process, we would often squirt some solvent on the rollers and then run some scrap paper “through the rollers” to quickly remove the bulk of the ink.

The image below shows a 2024 holiday card we printed as a 2-color rainbow roll and the first ink pulled through the press after we added solvent to the rollers. In this instance, you can see the purple on the left of the press and the yellow on the right for simultaneously printing the rainbow roll.

As we were doing ink pulls after almost every color we printed, we discovered that we could often get a more interesting “transfer” of ink depending on “how” we squirted the solvent, how much we squirted, squirting directly on top of the roller and letting it “stream” over the rollers (gives you those fingers), squirting a pool of solvent directly on the paper next to the rollers, sometimes the speed we pulled the paper through changed things along with stopping and starting the pull-through.

On the first pull, you’ll have a relatively heavy amount of ink on BOTH sides of the sheet. If you want to use the sheet as a background for a print, you’ll have to decide which side to use and essentially give up the other side. So we started sandwiching two sheets together, running them through, and that kept the backside FAIRLY clean while providing us with two sheets each time. And as it turned out, those two sheets would almost always look different. The ink pull is the “top” sheet in the image above. The bottom sheet typically has a more linear feel as it doesn’t get the solvent directly squirted. We would generally run four to five per thorough cleaning. You have 8-10 sheets total. Typically, we would get 4 to 6, which we were interested in keeping.

You also have to keep in mind that if you want a background for future broadsides generally you need to run thicker paper through. That doest start to add up in paper costs over time.

Here are two books produced by Lead Graffiti that have been made with sheets of ink pulls.

Early on, we purchased an eBay auction of 48-point Onyx. When we received it, the package had come apart inside, and metal type was everywhere. Ray carefully pulled it out, placing it into a large galley. Afterward, he printed it as a broadside entitled “How Type Writes Poetry.” Continuing with the idea that letterpress stuff has its own kind of poetry, we used ink pulls to illustrate “How Ink Writes Poetry.”

For “Fire from the Clouds,” we were trying to illustrate the stormy weather from Ben Franklin's story of flying the kit in a rain storm. We would use fairly uncontrollable ink pulls, using white ink on the press and black paper.

Go back up and look at the top image of the Henri Matisse quote. On one of their First Friday openings, we did a letterpress demonstration at The Contemporary Museum in Wilmington, Delaware. We had three lockups of quotes by artists the museum-goer could pick from, and a pre-trimmed stack of a couple of hundred ink pulls they could choose as the background for their print. We were printing black ink to automatically get some contrast to the ink pull using a Nolan table-top proofing press to do a print every 45-90 seconds or so when we were swamped. Getting everyone in line who wanted to print Matisse significantly sped things up.

Most of the ink pulls you see from our run up and down, typically because of the scale of the “overprint,” In the instance of the Matisse quote, we were cutting two pulls out of each sheet to keep from eating up our inventory. So you’ll notice on that one that the ink seems to be running left to right,

Holiday folding card workshop

Mother, daughter, brother, & wife holiday card workshop in November 2024. Nice effort. It was an interesting choice of color that we thought worked quite well.

Newark Arts Alliance “Visual Messages: Socially Engaged Art” exhibition, October 6 - November 22, 2024

The Newark Arts Alliance sponsored an exhibition entitled “Visual Messages: Socially Engaged Art,” which ran from October to November 22, 2024. Lead Graffiti entered four pieces into the show, and all four were accepted: “Lies, Lies. Pants on Fire,” “No More War, No More Putin,” and “No Zombies Allowed.” A framed set of 12 political postcards was also accepted.

Once the show ends and we can get our “Lies, Lies” book back, we’ll add an additional 2,000 pages to complete the lies President Trump made during his first term. In the end, the book will be approximately 9,200 pages with a spine near 50”.

Waldorf School of Philadelphia diplomas

Since 2012, we’ve had the privilege of printing the Waldorf School of Philadelphia 8th-grade diplomas. We’ve always described our experience as our favorite project for a client for money. No question. The students are always uniquely involved, asking questions and crowding close as almost always our favorite students. COVID had interrupted our direct involvement with the students, but they came to the Lead Graffiti studio this time. Each student and the teacher produce several sheets of paste paper and choose one to wrap their diploma. They also print the text for their diploma on our Vandercook SP15. Then, they handset their name in metal type and printed it onto their diplomas using our Albion iron hand press. It’s about as perfect a day as Lead Graffiti could dream of.

Concertina Spine book workshop

Jill led an excellent book-making workshop on constructing and binding a “concertina spine” book. The 13 Upper Chesapeake Book Arts Group members who attended seemed to have a good time, and the results looked professional.

If you live within comfortable driving distance of Newark, Delaware, and are interested in making books (either with or without content), consider joining our group. We don’t have a membership fee, though there may be a small fee for materials when doing an event like this or making paste paper. We typically meet on the third Wednesday of the month from 6:30 to 8:30. Email us to double-check.

New broadside series using "ink pulls" and laser-cut typography with acrylic sheet using "Shahn Torn"

We’ve been playing with a new base from which to print. We produced a broadside using Lead Graffiti’s “Shahn Torn” typeface and an Edgar Allan Poe quote. We were also using some of our “ink pulls” that we’ve been collecting from the initial stage of cleaning the ink off of our Vandercook after a run. Here are four more that we especially liked.

I love the intrusion into readability on the third one.

⬇ Below shows an image of me working on the bed of our #5 Washington iron hand press, looking at one of the ink pulls, figuring out which way to turn it to best interact with the type.

⬇ This image shows me aligning the pull to the type before printing.

⬇ Below is a large image of #3 above so you can see the impact of the ink pull with the inking.

“Liar, Liar. Pants on fire.” A new book.

At least as of Tuesday, September 17, 2024, this hasn’t been written very carefully.

The photo above was taken at the end of our first day of Coptic stitching. The photo below was 2 days later.

We are Jill Cypher and Ray Nichols, and we operate Lead Graffiti, a letterpress lab and bookmaking studio in Newark, Delaware. We constantly seek connections between our creative letterpress and bookwork and how our work is conceptually conceived. In recent years, we’ve been moving more into bookwork, but it is often hard to find a way to make the book’s content and physical form both join together and oppose each other simultaneously. We love typography and like to play with bending the normal rules of both readability and understandability.

Early this past summer, the nearby Delaware College of Art & Design shuttered its doors. Over the past decade or so, we have donated hundreds of books related to design, typography, art, and creative problem-solving for the use of its students. Meegs Johnson, the final librarian at DCAD, offered to open the library and let us take any books we wanted, and we selected about 30.

Just before leaving DCAD with our new shelf of books, Meegs mentioned an unusual book she had in her office that she thought we, as bookmakers, would appreciate. She showed us an 8.5” x 5.5” book with a startlingly wide 30” spine sewn with a Coptic stitch. This physically massive object lay like an uncoiled snake in her window.

Astounded at the piece, we talked for a few minutes about its possible provenance and purpose, then collected our box of books and drove back to our studio. For the next couple of days, the book fermented in Ray’s head. What would be a good reason to use this book form as a point of departure for a new project? When we looked at the book initially, we hardly peeked at the inside. We knew most pages looked blank, like pages retrieved from the trash or recycling bin at a large office of some sort. The first several pages had text, but it was clearly not a single cohesive story.

That curious volume haunted Ray such that before the end of the week, we called Meegs back. We asked to see the book again and, if possible, borrow it for a few days to examine it more thoroughly and take photos. We had been so caught up in the physical mass of the book that we had not studied the contents or construction details. Instead of a temporary loan, Meegs was happy to find a new home for it.

We mentioned our excitement and curiosity about this book to our friend Casey Smith, a former DCAD faculty member. Casey said he had originally donated it to the DCAD library and knew about the book’s maker.

Ema Ishii Holdredge, one of Casey’s BFA students, made the book originally when he taught at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC. Ema made the book for her BFA degree show at the Corcoran in 2008. She went on to get an MFA at Cranbrook in 2010. Casey said Ema had given it to him because she was moving and didn’t have space for the 30-pound art object. We aren’t sure if the book had some alternative intention to just being what it is.

Generally, the book is blank, initially seeming to be assembled from random sheets of folded white copier paper. Looking closer, we noticed sheets of various color stock are tucked at intervals inside the signatures and bound. We liked the visual punctuation that the colors gave to the book's overall appearance.

With Lead Graffiti having been voted as the Favorite Newark, Delaware Artist of 2024 in a recent citizen poll, we have been looking for ways to prove that the recognition is deserved.

Now a new influence enters this story. The Newark Arts Alliance announced an exhibition of social cause work entitled “Visual Messages: Socially Engaged Art.” 

Hmmm.

What if we borrow the idea of the gigantically spined coptic stitch book but fill it with some type of significant social commentary?

As committed Democrats who operate a letterpress studio, we have taken many opportunities to produce politically motivated broadsides and postcards. But we haven’t done so in our bookwork. As committed book artists, we are also part of Upper Chesapeake Book Arts, a group of artists who like to explore the nature and the making of various kinds of books. 

So, how can we make a book that is visually and SOCIALLY ENGAGED? And make it about a relevant topic that has considerable volume? And produce it in 6 weeks?

Hmmm.

Trumps Lies. 

Maybe name it “Liar, liar, pants on fire.”

It turns out we can quote—not exactly an article, but a Washington Post listing of—30,000+ lies from then-President Donald Trump from January 20, 2017, to January 19, 2021. Our first issue was whether the list would supply a book with enough pages to fit our original intent. That turns out not to be a problem.

So here is our book. And we invited others to add to their bookmaking résumés to help us with the bookbinding process. 

Special thanks to Ema Ishii Holdredge for her original killer stepping stone artist book. Thanks for the recording, fact checking and posting of the lies goes to the Washington Post. The conceptual connection for this book is by Ray Nichols & Jill Cypher. Many binding thanks go to Carol Maurer, Anne Hessel, Rebecca Johnson Melvin, ….

AND SO THE LIES BEGIN.

Lead Graffiti Labyrinth

How does an idea like this get started?

Jill likes birds and wanted to fill our front yard with plants that attract and feed birds. Blueberry bushes were a significant choice. She wanted them randomly placed. Random set me onto the math of such a system. Our friend Carol mentioned that she had designed and built a labyrinth for the Delaware Art Museum, and things started to fall together.

Most labyrinths have a symmetrical structure with the circle divided into quarters, which position the turnarounds required to make the walking path work. Hmmm. Random turnarounds, and we were off to the races. Here is our first drawing showing the general idea.

We’ve finally spray painted our idea for a labyrinth in our front yard. The labyrinth kept getting bigger and bigger as we adjusted the number of the circuits and their width to accommodate our electric lawn mower (22” wide + an additional 1.5” on each side). The idea is only to mow the walking area and let the outlines grow reasonably wild. We didn’t want to make it too small. We found out this weekend that the University of Delaware had one, so we tried that one out. We think ours will feel less like you just bought one and way more hand-made.

We settled on outlining the circuits with 3” concrete half-spheres spaced 6” apart. A new element to making the dots (and we ordered an additional 40 molds so we can make 72 at a time) is that we are just going to insert a nail before they dry, which we hope will keep them pretty well locked in place when the ground freezes and thaws. We will let the grass grow around the dots, which we figure we may have to weed wack a bit to keep things from going too wild.

Our first calculations list the number of concrete dots required at around 1,700. While that seemed reasonable, when we started actually making the dots, 1,700 turned out to be a pretty large number.

We want to letterpress a small chapbook that people can take that explains the history of labyrinths and our motive for wanting to build one.

We have to dig up that ground cover to the lower left.

⬆ Photo above shows the silicon “pinch bowls” we bought at THE CONTAINER STORE. each will provide a half-sphere that we refer to as “dots.” These will outline the circuits.

⬇ Photo below shows the bowls after they’ve been filled with concrete and with a heavily galvanized 3D nail set in the center of the bottom. The nail should help keep the dots in position with rain and freezing ground.

Here is a short video of us pouring the concrete dots.

And a video showing the adding in the nails after about 30 minutes to let the quick-dry concrete set up a bit.

A timelapse video of us placing dots on the labyrinth.

Then, we wanted to move that 1,230-pound rock to the labyrinth’s center. We thought some walkers, having gotten halfway through, might want to sit and think about things, so we were happy to oblige.

To start the process, Ray and Jill levered the rock onto two 12’ 4x4s

Then, Ray and their 12-year-old granddaughter moved the rock, the first leg of the 35” path, to the labyrinth’s center.

You might ask why we didn’t just get somebody with a tractor to move it for us. So, let’s do the math. Is it more fun to pay someone you don’t know $250 to bring a machine over, pick the rock up, and set it perfectly vented in the middle of a 6’ circle or move it yourself with your wife and granddaughter? 2 + 2 = 4. Easy peasy.

Below is a timelapse of Jill and me moving the rock to the center. It requires more effort to get it centered and rotate the desired amount. We used metal pipes, the material of choice when moving letterpress equipment. Done! Now, we need to determine the exact placement of all the turnarounds and plant the blueberry bushes we bought.

And an impromptu VC’88 class reunion at the rock. Left to right: Terre Nichols, Andy Geroski, and Ray Nichols.

The photo below shows the first 5 blueberry bushes that were planted at the points where the “walker” made either a 90° or 180° turn.