Resist

Sometimes it is a great time to be a letterpress printer. Printing has obviously played an important role in protesting in newspapers, books, and posters. The Trump elections offered us a number (actually you could probably say invinite) of opportunities.

Our involvement with the resistance group Indivisible gave us ample opportunities to print postcards and protest march signs that Indivisible supporters could use. Nowadays, the cost of stamps, even for postcards, has gone up so high that it is hard to justify.

During Trump’s first term, we got involved with a political group called “Indivisible.” We printed a couple dozen different cards, which we would send to all of the United States Senators, Republicans and Democrats alike. Did it do any good? To us, it did.

We were moved by the story of Otto and Irene Hampel, a German couple who the WWII Nazis executed for making a series of hand-drawn postcards that they would drop on staircases for people to pick up. Here is one of the surviving cards.

Starting in 2025, we’ve worked to up our game a bit. Here are a few of the early ones. We print at least 300 of the two cards each month to start. We give them to all attendees at the monthly 302United meetings and have started giving them to participants at marches.

We are currently reworking the Auschwitz card to refer to the El Salvador terrorism confinement center, CECOT.

Another one that has gotten some legs is “Resist.” Jill did a hand-rolled piece she called “Trees.” I took it and added the word Resist, based on the concept of “resisting amidst the chaos.”

Cutting the “wood type,” or you might say “book board type,” using our laser cutter allowed us to work on our largest iron hand press and 26” x 40” paper. The image below shows the 25” x 38” press bed type.

We’ve reworked the typographic mark a couple of times, trying to balance the readability and the image of chaos, to side just a touch on the readability.

We’ve made the typographic mark into a banner we use when participating in political marches.

The Delaware Eats Houston World Tour 1985

We were recently reminded of one of those weekends you do early in life but often cannot find time for later. The recent passing of Bernie Herman, husband of Becky (former student and our best friend couple), and Bruce Bigatelle, husband of a teaching colleague, Martha, at the University of Delaware, two of the group, made it obvious that I need to record this story for posterity.

Jill and I were sitting in Chi-Chi's, our then-favorite Mexican restaurant. It would still be if it were still in business. Something in our conversation got around to red-eye flights. I told Jill, "Wouldn't it be fun if we just bought 8 tickets to Houston for the weekend and paid for everyone's food, eating at our favorite Houston places." Jill was always up for fun. We got home that night and looked up red-eye flights in August to Houston for a 2-day weekend. $108 buck apiece, and I ordered 8.

A few days later, we got the tickets and put them in pairs in envelopes with the following explanation: You need to take the unopened envelope to a Mexican restaurant where you've ordered but have not received your food. You are to open the envelope and read the opening page. You'll have 30 seconds to accept or reject the offer.

Our offer: Fly with us to Houston, Texas, all expenses paid, where we will be housed at the Hacienda of Amelia and Cheryl. We'll eat dinner (you can order what you want from the menu) at places of Ray's choice: Fuddruckers, Tila's, Good Company, and Dirty's. After that, you are to never make a future negative comment about the way or what Ray eats.

When we got to Houston, we had T-shirts made for everyone to wear during lunch and dinner. We would always shoot a group portrait with a big cheese at the restaurant.

Do we have any of that photo? Nope. There was just one folded-up T-shirt to mark the day. And it was a couple of good days with the best of friends, doing what Ray likes about the best in the world: Eatin' Texas.

Liar, Liar.

The back of the card reads

“9,296 pages document 30,573 false or misleading claims by Donald Trump from his first day in office, 2017, to his final day on January 20, 2020, when Joe Biden was sworn in as the country’s next president. All that verbiage is 53" thick, weighs 52 pounds, and it started like this.

The dissolution of the Delaware College of Art & Design, to whom Lead Graffiti had donated 100s of design books over the past decade, brought an invitation to reclaim them. We found a few, which brought us another interesting find—a blank Coptic-stitched book with a spine about 36 inches wide bound by Ema Ishii Holdredge for her BFA show at the Corcoran School of Art in 2008. That book haunted us for several weeks, and we decided it was too audacious not to give it a Lead Graffiti shot. For a while, we pondered how to fill a several thousand-page book with content that made a serious point.

The notion of the presidential untruths came to mind, so maybe there was some documentation we could “borrow?” Sure enough, in a few Safari minutes, we found a downloadable PDF from The Washington Post that we could massage into a typographic form we could use. We were off. Ray undertook the ink-jet printing of the pages, folding and inserting the red cover-weight sheets for structural support, and gathering and punching the folds for sewing. Jill did 99.8% of the sewing. 

At a 302United gathering, we encouraged attendees to give the book a stroke. Shown at right is the head of the Delaware ACLU, who has excellent technique.”

Just do it!

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 two books (the second one shown above) 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. Including Lead Graffiti’s name in a day of talking about books is 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.