Dunya Mikhail poem "Pronouns"

Printed : March 3, 2023
Edition : 50
Paper : French Paper 100# Kraft Speckletone
Production : printed from photopolymer & rope
Runs : 4 (poetry text, leaves, rope, copyright / credit text)

Amid recent politically charged discussions of pronouns, this was a great idea for a broadside.

The broadsides were printed for Casey Smith in support of the 2023 Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here. to be given out as an attendee gift at a talk related to Dunya Mikhail’s poetry at a reading at the Pyramid Arts Center on Saturday, March 4.

The printing timing was pretty tight, given that we had trouble getting the printing plates and had to reorder and have them resent. The first set of prints was lost in transit by UPS. Then after an offer from Boxcar Press to remake and resend the plates, both sets arrived the day before the talk. As a result, we had only one day to print the job.

A couple of experimenting & printing moments in the project are worth mentioning.

• The leaves were taken from a poster we had done for the Winterthur Museum & Library for one of their Terrific Tuesday sessions. These sessions are for kids aged 3 to 10; this was Fantastic Flora. We brought Beech leaves that the kids printed. We kept a couple of samples and scanned one to create the photopolymer leaf.

• The intention was to start printing the leaves as a single, flat color. Jill suggested we hand roll them to give a sense of degradation. That resulted in much more visually interesting leaves.

• We initially bought rope from Home Depot that was too soft. When printed, it flattened out too much and didn’t give the idea of rope almost at all. We returned to Home Depot and bought the same rope we had used for a piece we had done while taking sailing classes for Delaware’s tall ship, the Kalmar Nickel.

• The hardest part of the project was trying to match the vertical spacing for the English and Arabic lines. We received the Arabic as a .pdf file. One problem with the file was that the black was a CMYK black and needed to be 100% black. It took a couple of hours to figure out how to change the color in Illustrator, even though we had done that hundreds of times. Adjusting the line spacing so the two poems would match exactly was a second problem.

• The fact that Arabic reads right-to-left, and English reads left-to-right. allowed us to gently weave the two blocks of type together, which was fun to position logically.

Broadside : I Will Never Forgive or Forget the January 6 Assault on Democracy

This project changed dramatically from the first stage which was done in February and early March 2022.

Farther down you will see the final poster which uses the same image of the broken glass, but it is printed from the laser-cut Plexiglas. The text was also changed after I saw the movie “World War Z.” The image of the zombies climbing the city walls was startlingly similar to the mob going up the steps to the capital.

⬆ At Lead Graffiti, we wanted to create a broadside stating our opposition to “the big lie” and a group of so-called American patriots.

What a trying 15-hour day we had at Lead Graffiti to get this one image so we could post it on January 6. There are still a few bugs to work out of the process before printing an edition (and then we are thinking 10). We’ve done a fair amount of printing on our iron hand presses, but never such a sizeable corner-to-corner image. The grey paper we chose has a strong woven texture which adds some visual detail to the large flat areas.

January 6 is undoubtedly a tricky subject. We’re trying to combine paying homage to its historical significance while finding the experimental letterpress discovery we seek with a dash or 2 of typographic playfulness.

A lot of the brain fun was searching for a meaningful visual that we could pull from the avalanche of available imagery. And to marry that image with words and typography that would capture the essence of what happened and how we felt. I debated for a while, saying “my voting rights” instead of “democracy.”

Hand-cutting a full-size sheet of book board to create the broken glass pane was more satisfying and meditative than just plugging into a laser cutter—just one of the things that pushed us toward the craftsmanship of letterpress and away from the computer.

The image below shows the inked plate showing the white ink on the upper surface while the cut-away areas are left un-linked.

Just for the experience we may try to re-cut the plate, but this time using a laser cutter and working with a sheet of 1/8” thick Plexiglas.

⬆ The finished broadside was printed with Melissa Lentz. Printing was started in February 2022 and finished in November 2022.

Paper : French
Type : hand-set wood and metal type
Broken glass : laser-cut 1/8” Plexiglas
Runs : 3 (hand-rolled large wood type, credit line, broken glass)
Edition : 20
Press : Vandercook Universal III for all runs

Copyright : Paramount Pictures

⬆ Still from the movie “World War Z” showing the similarity between the zombies and the invading horde on January 6, 2021.

⬆ Shows us printing the image of the broken glass over the text. The ink is Opaque White printed relatively lightly to mimic the transparency of the glass while still showing the shattering.

"No to war. No to Putin." broadside

Printed in March 2022, this broadside was conceived in response to several requests for letterpress printers to publish a “NO WAR” poster. We wanted to make an extra effort in support of Ukraine and, at the same time, add a new experience to our interest in experimental letterpress.

The poster is printed ENTIRELY from hand-rolled, hand-set metal type.

The heading and credit line hand-rolled in warm red and grey made up run 1. Run 2 was the first three lines of the main text printed in black. Lines 1 & 3 were set aside. Line 2 was as it stood as line 4 and reprinted WITHOUT reinking, so the visual tone is a dark grey. Then the last of the 4 sentences in the line was pulled out and moved to become the first sentence of line 5 and reprinted again without reinking. This step was repeated an additional 12 times until the type ran off the bottom of the broadside. It took roughly 45 minutes to print each poster.

The poster is for sale for $60, 100% of which will go to Ukraine Relief. Please help us support the best cause on the planet right now, except perhaps the defeat of Republicans in the upcoming elections.

A statistic : As the entire poster is done at one time, we could just print until we got the 20 posters we thought we needed. We ruined 22 in the process. One of those was on the LAST line of the poster when I forgot to move the line down and overprinted the next to last line.

size : 14.25" x 22.5"
stock : Somerset Textured White 300 gsm
runs : 17
edition : approximately 25

Heere bigynneth Chaucers Tale of Thopas

THE PROJECT : This year The William Morris Society celebrates 125 years since the publication of the Kelmscott Chaucer, the crowning glory of William Morris’s book printing venture.

The society invited a variety of letterpress printers to participate in a collaborative project to highlight the various tales involved in Chaucer’s tales. We gladly agreed. Each printer got to choose tales they wanted to use as the basis to create a poster. The collective work will form of the basis of an exhibition that will be hosted by the Society and on their website.

We’ve had a metal cut of the knight image for a couple of years. You see it printed original size in the lower right of our poster below.

If you would like an Adobe Illustrator file of the image (16” x 11”), click here.

If you would like to see what the other contributions were, click here.

If you want a digital Illustrator copy of the Knight, click here to download it free of charge.

re IllustratorA key part of the Society’s celebrations will be a new interpretation of key extracts from the Kelmscott Chaucer, created by contemporary letterpress printers and artists. This work will form of the basis of an exhibition that will be hosted by the Society and on their website.

As a participant Lead Graffiti received a complete set of the pieces.

On our poster we wanted the type to have an aged feeling to it. We often handrail type to get it to have a more “painterly” feel. This time we worked backwards.

Using our Vandercook Universal III we would ink the type and then lift the inking rollers. Using the small bubble bubblewrap we would lay a sheet over the text (not the headlines) and apply a pretty fair amount of pressure over all of it. We would then lift the bubblewrap which would randomly remove ink giving it a mottled look with a nice sense of age.

You can see how our “aged” type looks below. Bubblewrap use #442.

Printed : September 2021

Client : The Kelmscott Society, London, UK

Size : 17.75” x 24”

Type : Satanic, Melior

Runs : 4 (& bubblewrap extractions)

Paper : ?

Press : Vandercook

Edition : 65

pleaseteleport.me broadside

Lead Graffiti’s “Teleport” broadside was selected by the jurors of the 2022 New Impressions exhibition being held at the Hamilton Wood Type Museum during the spring of 2022. There will also be a catalog published of the approximately 40 project included in the exhibit.

A curator approached us to produce a broadside to promote a series of temporary public artworks to be shown in Baltimore, Maryland, during the summer of 2021. He provided the visual promotion of the word “TELEPORT” starting with the first line being “T”, the second being “TE” and so on until the whole word showed and then go back in the other direction.

We had been wanting to do a large broadside using our Washington #5 iron hand press which supports a printing size of 25” x 38” (essentially a newspaper spread). We built a wooden chase for the press and set up a registration system that attached to the chase instead of the normal use of the tympan. The printing worked like a dream and achieved the final size of 25” x 38”, the size of the parent sheet of the Fabriano Onyx we were using.

⬆ Above is a close-up of the texture we got from the bubblewrap. The type was inked from bubblewrap and after the type was finished we overprinted additional bubblewrap.

⬆ These show the bubblewrap which has been wrapped around pieces of 3/4” corrugated cardboard after the printing had finish.

Here are a few photos of the setup and printing.

⬆ Manually positioning the type to establish the layout of the whole poster. This was a slightly scary moment as we would likely not know we were wrong until after 2 more complicated runs. You can see with the full poster above (which has no trimming on the sheet size) that we hit it on the money.

⬆ Finishing the lock up of the first run. With the number of “T”s and “E”s retired we could only do 4 of the required 16 lines of text when we were printing the longer lines that fell in the middle of the poster.

The chaos at breakdown..

⬆ After the 7th and final run the studio was in complete chaos. Just for the record this is not a set up photograph.

Printed : May 2021

Client : Joe del Pesco, Director of the Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco

Size : 26” x 40”

Type : 15 line Gill Sans wood type, 10 line gothic wood type, 18 point Melior metal type

Runs : 7 (only so many Ts and Es)

     4 for type (lines

     2 for texture (bubblewrap)

     1 for URL and credit line

Paper : Fabriano Onyx

Press : Washington #5 iron hand press

Edition : 65

Poetry broadsides : Beat poets for Special Collections at the University of Delaware Library

These two 11" x 14" 3-color broadsides were printed slowly & patiently via letterpress by Lead Graffiti for the University of Delaware Library, Museums, and Press. The occasion was the exhibition "Beat Visions and the Counterculture," March 2020. Ted Joans (red), copyright of the Estate of Ted Joans, courtesy of Laura Corsiglia, and Bob Kaufman (blue), initially published in Cranial Guitar: Selected Poems (1996), reprinted courtesy of Coffee House Press.

Special Collections at the University of Delaware Library has been a fantastic client. They have allowed us incredible flexibility to extend our craft, and some genuinely inspirational subjects pulled from their collection and exhibitions. 
Broadsides were printed using photopolymer plates on an automatic Vandercook Universal III

BLM #1 : "Black Lives Matter. A lot." broadside

THESE MAGNIFICENT PROTEST MARCHES feel like a change-for-a-massively-positive tipping point. Lead Graffiti wants to help the cause.

HAND-INKED ON PAPER, Lead Graffiti printed 50 of these broadsides working with our orphan wood type collection. Titled FOR GEORGE AND OTHERS, we want to sell them for $25 each and give 100% to the BLACK LIVES MATTER cause. We will send you the poster, we will pay for shipping (continental US + AK and HI), and we will add our donation equal to the cost of shipping to the total we give BLM.

I (Ray) spent most of my early life in Louisiana, and I’d like to SEE RACISM AND POLICE BRUTALITY DISAPPEAR. I had a family member that was a cop. Once I asked him why he joined the force, he said, “I like to push people around.” Those exact scary words.

EVERY TIME I see videos of police wading through a crowd, wielding a club, firing anything, I relive that chilling statement. I’m ready to see police brutality done. DONE. PERIOD. I hate being 74 and not being at those protests in Washington, DC. I can’t wait to go there to see in person that fabulously painted technicolor BLACK LIVES MATTER on the street.

FOR GEORGE AND OTHERS is 18” x 24”, printed on French Construction 100# cover stock, signed by the artists and numbered. Choose background Factory Yellow (edition of 30) or Charcoal Brown (edition of 20). Printed slowly & patiently via letterpress in Newark, Delaware. 2020

Could you help us help a righteous cause? LEADGRAFFITI.COM/broadsides/for-george.

. . .

Lead Graffiti has settled its debt with BlackLivesMatter over the sales of 28 posters ($25 each) produced in support of their cause. We had stated that we would match the cost of mailing tubes and USPS shipping (to support that cause). At the end, that was $940.80. We rounded it up to $1000.

Lead Graffiti hand-rolled type in magazines

This isn’t intended as a New Year’s resolution as that has never worked before.

We want to see our hand rolled wood type in a MAJOR NATIONAL MAGAZINE (think Vanity Fair or New Yorker). We are looking for a (maybe 2) creative, outside-of-the-computer designer (student or professional) for an UNPAID INTERNSHIP / APPRENTICESHIP who will focus with us on that goal. WE’LL TRADE YOU for press time, portfolio work, food, or most any other expertise or printed materials we have to offer. FIRST PLANNING STEPS? : list of target magazines; list of target people; physical, affordable portfolio architecture; strategy for typographic images; and mailing strategy.

Here are a few examples pulled from our past work to start the conversation. Laughter.

1 : Article about people talking about nothing. Political talk.

2 : Initial cap. Maybe for the word “ABsolute.” Interesting in that nothing about the color is absolute.

3 : article on the Grand Opera House or the Metropolitan Opera.

4 : Opening paragraph of an article about conflict, chaos, politics (red / blue).

Posters for the "Peter Wood sit-in"

I hope I get around to writing up the story about how these posters came into being. Would be nice to put these on the VC/UD Facebook page. Here is an outline to get things started.

• Drove to Ogilvy (NYC) for an evening talk on 360° Advertising

• 3 speakers including Peter Wood (friend of mine who was a Group Creative Director at Ogilvy), Brian Collins and President of Ogilvy.

• Talking afterwards with Peter, he told the students to come by and show their portfolios.

• I said that was a hollow promise as he was never around (always traveling)

• 5 minutes later that sunk in.

• I asked for him to call me sometime when he knew he was going to be out of his office for 2 full weekdays. He said, “Sure.” And he called.

• The idea was we would sit in his office for the two days and breathe the rarified air and work on an advertising design project. Turned out it would be the One Club’s student competition project on an advertising campaign to promote Vietnam as a vacation destination.

• This got us there.

Then there is the other story about what happened after we got there.

• Turns out Peter, who was supposed to be in London, was in his office when we got there. I had been concerned with what was going to happen when we got to Ogilvy. My plan was to walk up to the receptionist and say, “We are here to occupy Peter Wood’s office.” She gave is the directions without a moment’s hesitation.

We produced a series of posters to warn the people at Ogilvy that we were intending to invade the place.

The text at the bottom of each poster reads :

Edge. Having it. Not having it.

An experiment in uncommon air.

DEsigners invites itself into Peter Wood’s office
Wednesday, November 17 and Thursday, Vovember 18
to think about advertising, lunch, 360° branding.
getting other people out of their offices, and taking
on Vietnam for the One Club College Competition.

Party crashers invited.

Thinkers invited.

People tired of their wallpaper invited.

We’ll make room for you on the floor.

Bring your own tools.

Anyway, the following group of students produced these posters using the blueprint machine in VC.2000 — Jenn Dehghan, Todd Eisner, Drew Haines, Joe Ibrahim, Kara Mayberry, Julie Prager Palaez, Andrea Scaglione (all of VC’00) and Michael Tavares (VC’01). Maybe Michael remembers exactly how it was that he got invited.