Nobody’s Perfect

At the end of Some Like It Hot Tony Curtis tells Joe E Brown that he can’t marry him because he’s really a man. Brown replies that nobody’s perfect.

We’re put in mind of that scene when we come up against one of the few disadvantages of our wonderful Pinchin Street premises: when the sun shines we’re almost blinded by reflections from the cars parked over the road.

As well as being about as close to cinematic perfection as possible, Some Like It Hot is the name of a fabulous CD by Steve Lucky and the Rhumba Bums featuring Carmen Getit.

Cropper treadle platen

This Acme Cropper treadle platen used to be in Bruton Museum in Somerset. They no longer have room for it, and Lucy and Robert Carter have given it a temporary home. They would like to pass it on, together with some type, to someone who can use it.

If you’re interested please contact Lucy.

Tipoteca Italiana

The weekend before last Phil had the good fortune to visit the Tipoteca Italiana in Cornuda, northern Italy. This remarkable museum, founded by Silvio Antiga, is built around a large collection of historic Italian printing material. For the last fifteen years or so Silvio and his colleagues have been traveling round the country, talking to printers, photographing them and collecting type and machinery. This is restored magnificently in their own workshop, and some of it is on display. The building itself is a former rope works that has been restored and adapted with wonderful taste and sensitivity.

One of the things that shines through is a high a regard for the printers themselves, as well as for the tools of their trade. The place is a must for anyone interested in printing and its past. It has the added attraction of its location in the Veneto, close to both Venice and the equally spectacular plain and Dolomite mountains.

For those who can’t get there the museum have published A Story of Character, a book of their first ten years. Written by Sandro Berra, their genial director, it has over three hundred beautiful photographs superbly printed on uncoated paper by Silvio’s other enterprise, Graffiche Antiga.

You can see more of Phil’s photographs here.

New edition

Letters Are Letters was one of our first poster, and it has sold very well at Ben Pentreath’s shop. So well, in fact, that it we have reprinted it. The first time round it was in black and red, so we made the second colour green this time.

The text is a quote from Eric Gill’s Essay on Typography, and it’s something that is central to the way we design things.

Letters Are Letters is available now in our store.

Interns on the web site

We’ve updated our web site with a page about internships. Although we haven’t mentioned it here for some time, our programme is going very nicely. We have had interns with us for most of this year, and we’re currently booked up until the middle of October. Most participants are from the UK, but Johannes Languste joined us from Austria in January and this month Jeff Benjamin came over from New York state.

We get a lot of pleasure from having new people around, and an extra pair of hands around the place really helps.

New guillotine

We upgraded our guillotine recently. The one we bought when we moved to Pinchin Street really wasn’t up to the job. Our instincts are to buy good quality tools but we were spending an awful lot at the time and the price of a decent paper cutter scared us off.

Sadly it proved to be a false economy. We can safely say that we would not recommend the Laser 66. It always seemed to have an intermittent fault that didn’t show itself when an engineer was present. Most annoyingly, it wouldn’t cut through some of the paper we use, often leaving the bottom sheet or two intact. And we soon found that we need to cut paper bigger than SRA2, its maximum size, more frequently than we thought.

Now we have a Wohlenberg 76 SPM that cuts beautifully. It’s solidly built and has an airbed, and we’re happy with it so far. There have been a couple of teething problems, one machine related and the other user error, but so far it looks like we’ve made the right choice.

Eric Gill poster

A new poster. This quote from Eric Gill’s ‘An Essay on Typography’ has long appealed to us. It was a natural to use our Gill Sans wood letter for it. We printed it on Somerset Book Soft White 105 gsm paper, an acid-free mould-made. Soft is a description of the white but it might also refer to its silky feel. We have kept its two deckle edges and torn a third one.

It’s available now from our shop for £50 plus p&p.

Made to make your mouth water

We’ve had a lot of fun printing this poster, and we’re rather proud of it.

We started off by setting the wood type and proofing it in black to get position. We then decided on the colours, using our trusty Pantone book as a guide, and set about separating the type for each printing. We checked each colour against the black proof, lining it up on our light box.

Called Tutti Frutti, it’s available from our ebay shop. There are also some more pictures on our Flickr site.

We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

Ben’s Big Gig – poster printing

Hello, regular Hand & Eye readers. This entry isn’t being written by Phil, as he’s downstairs doing some actual work. Instead, this is Nick; I did a couple of weeks’ work experience with Phil back in September/October last year, and I was so successful at bringing biscuits to the workshop that Phil asked me to come to work for him this year. My skills have greatly improved since then, and I now make a pretty good cup of tea as well. This post indicates yet another expansion in my responsibilities, as I’m now in charge of long, rambling musings on whatever work I’m up to.

Enough of me. To business! My old friend Ben Walker is a constant user and champion of social networking sites, and Twitter in particular; you may even have heard his musical observations on the Twitterverse through YouTube (or possibly even the actual radio). Ben is attempting what we believe to be a world first, in integrating mobile blogging, social networking and music performance by putting on Ben’s Big Gig on 1st May this year; if that sounds like an amazing mix of activities, that’s only because it is. Have a look at Ben’s site to find out more aout it. He gave us a call yesterday, asking if we could make him some posters to promote the show around Oxford. Saying, perhaps unwisely, that he trusted me to lay it out as I saw fit, his design brief read…

“Eye-catching is better than classy.  Play on high-tech vs. low-tech.  Funny is better than good.”

An excellent brief, if ever I heard one. With that in mind, we immediately set to designing with my usual pensmanship.

With such clarity already present in the design, the rest of the process was almost a foregone conclusion, but we felt a little experimentation was in order. It was only a short step from here to a first proof from our wood and metal type…

Turns out that was ok; sadly, there were many more words still to fit on the page.

And yes, after a great deal of tinkering, making ready, changing to silver ink and putting in the words ‘The Funky Llamas’, we were done…

Thanks to Ben for providing us with a great project; if you, dear reader, have an event for which you need a poster, you know how to get in touch. See you all down at The Big Gig…

Our new shop

When we updated our website last year the shop was the least satisfactory part of it. We have now transferred it to ebay, and while the look could be improved, it is easier to manage. We already have our books and posters there, and there is more to come.