MEANDER BOOK creative letterpress

We’ve always thought our Meander Book creative letterpress workshop was the best workshop we’ve ever had explained to us.

With the world in its present state we want to take it online where we will do the heavy lifting.

THIS IS THE BEST, intensive one-day creative letterpress workshop you can sink your teeth into. For students, it's a little history, diving into a sketch-free form of creative thinking, a bit of writing, and typographic high jinks with a whole lot of hands on. For professionals, it's a different R & R : rerouting the way you think and refueling your creative engine.

⬆ This workshop project is all about density and being observant. You can see where you'll be headed in the photo above. On the left is the lock up of fourteen 4" x 5" pages of wood & metal type used for the 2nd color (red). On the right is the final 2-color printed broadside which makes up the text block of an accordion-fold book. The 3rd image below shows the architectural form of the final book.

You're in charge of only one little page out of 14, but it's yours alone to command as you will. You are encouraged to color outside the lines, play, and experiment with your typographic opportunities.

THE TOP IMAGE shows the results from a number of workshops working with a number of schools. The double pages are workshops with fewer students (6 - 8) where they work in spreads instead of single pages (9 - 14).

Good to know

• For 12 people in a group, age 10 and better;

• $125;

• 6 working hours total (an estimate).

• we will do the work after you do the design for your page;

• all interaction components will be held over Zoom.

The plan

There are essentially 5 steps to your involvement.

Step #1 : INTRODUCTION and EXPLANATION of the meander book workshop. Our plan is to schedule multiple Zoom meetings where you will be free to ask questions about the project or letterpress printing in general. There will be a video available explaining the project if you cannot make the live Zoom gathering.

Video to come

Step #2 : DESIGNING YOUR PAGE LAYOUT with Illustrator / Photoshop, cut-and-paste, or tracing.

Video to come.

Step #3 : PAGE LOCK-UP of your meander book design.

We designed a page using Illustrator. Click here to watch the ENTIRE process in a video on our YouTube channel (57:44).

Once you’ve design your page you’ll send us the digital file or a clean, squared-off scan / photo of it. For the scan / photo, we will make sure it is the right size and all for us to proceed.

We will schedule a Zoom meeting with you where you can essentially look over our shoulder at us locking up your page. You’ll be free to ask questions or inquire about letterpress related issues. There may be instances where we will suggest design alternatives to ramp up the creativity or to better implement advantages letterpress offers.

Then we have to wait until we have all 12 pages completed

Step #4 : PRINTING the cover, spine, and text block printing slowly & patiently via letterpress.

Explanation / description to come

We will schedule another group Zoom so you can see and ask questions about the printing process. Jill will be set up to print the cover, using Lead Graffiti paste paper, and spine on colored stock on our Vandercook SP15. Ray will actually go through the process of locking the 12 participant pages, along with the title page and a colophon page, that will be used for the text block.

Step #5 : BINDING the hardback meander book with no sewing & no gluing.

Explanation / description to come

This is a how-we-did-it video for Step #3 of Lead Graffiti's creative letterpress ONLINE workshop. The workshop requires 12 people, each designing their own 4" x 5" page, and in this case, starting with the words "Back in the day...". Digital typefaces pulled from our wood & metal type collection are provided to produce your page's layout by : 1) using Adobe Illustrator, 2) cutting-and-pasting the letters, or 3) tracing the letters from a printout. This video shows the beginning-to-end process of us locking-up and proofing our layout. Lead Graffiti includes a 1-hour personal, over-our-shoulder look at us translating your design into wood & metal type to be printed via letterpress. A group Zoom shows the locking-up and printing of the 14-page text block. At that point, we will mail you 3 sets of pieces for you to bind 3 copies of the no-sew, no-glue book. A final group Zoom meeting walks you through the simple binding process. Link to see the description with photos when we do the workshop in our Newark, DE, letterpress studio.Step 1: We are putting videos on our YouTube channel as we can get them done.

We start a short tour of our lab and a quick demonstration of hand setting wood & metal type, a few portfolio pieces, and then you're on your own, exploring type cases, mixing and matching, and sorting through design options. Each person is responsible for the words, composing the type, ornaments, borders, punctuation and spacing for one page in what will become a 14-page hard cover book (complete with printed cover, title page, and colophon) by the end of the day.

Good things come in threes

Take a break with a pizza lunch in the studio to talk about your page design and ask questions about creativity, typography, old-school printing, and anything that keeps you focused on your project.

During the workshop, each person will print 3 copies of their book's cover using a hand-cranked Vandercook SP15 press. Once all the pages are set and locked up, everyone will print their broadsides on an automatic Vandercook Universal III, which become the text blocks for the books.

Bonus no.1 : You'll sit at our Intertype line caster and keyboard your name in "hot metal" for use in the colophon. Mark Twain called Ottmar Mergenthaler's original machine (invented in nearby Baltimore in the 1880s) the "8th wonder of the world" for a reason.

After everything is printed, you'll do some nimble folding and careful tearing to transform a single flat sheet of paper into a smart little accordion book (shown below). With no sewing and no gluing, the binding will hold the book together with a remarkable no-visible-means-of-support construction.

Bonus no. 2 : You'll walk out with a finished copy of the book and enough printed material to produce 2 more books on your own, so you can practice what you've just learned. You'll have a finished portfolio-worthy piece and some cool talking points for future interviews.

Bonus no. 3 : The Rare Books and Special Collections of the Library of Congress and Special Collections at the University of Delaware Library maintain complete sets of the books that result from this workshop. Having your work in those collections makes for a pretty cool line on your résumé, too.

From our portfolio

Not just for workshops, this meander book format also makes a carefully-crafted, fine press book. John Dorsey, an Ohio poet, wrote 12 short poems specifically for this Lead Graffiti book, produced in an edition of 125 signed and numbered copies, plus 12 deluxe copies, each encased in a clamshell box.

Photos from the workshop