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.

Friends, roaming charges and bikes

People seem friendly here. Often in shops, of rather stores, I’m told ‘You have a wonderful day’ with every appearance of it being meant. Even the well presented men inviting us to have a drink and a little fun outside the strip clubs on Broadway are affable, unmenacing and a little humourous.

Michael and I quickly became welcomed regulars at our breakfast place, Pat’s Cafe. As well as good food and a friendly welcome we get free wi-fi. O2 make an exhorbitant charge for Internet connection by 3G, so checking email etc has become part of the morning ritual. This post is being written at the airport while waiting for my plane home, but all the others came from Pat’s. The wi-fi isn’t free here, so this won’t be published until I get home.

Another of our shared interests is cycling, and we have been looking at the bikes locked up on the streets as we walk round. Fixed wheels seem as fashionable here as in London, and some of the machines are gorgeous. Many of them have centre pull brakes and alloy handlebar stems, suggesting to our expert eyes that they date from the seventies or eighties.

Fixed wheels seem an odd choice for a city with such dramatic, vertiginous hills, but cool and practicality often don’t go together.

Promised Land

One of the great things about being here with Michael is that we are visiting people in the lettering and printing community.

Yesterday we went across to Berkeley on the train. It was a gloriously sunny spring day. Our first visit was to letter cutter Chris Stinehour, whose picture is here. After lunch Chris took us up into the hills where we had an astounding view of the Bay area. On the way back down I thought that if I’d come here in my twenties I might never have gone back. Chuck Berry’s promised land was Los Angeles, but this may well be mine.

Chris left us at the workshop of David Goines, whose Constructed Roman Alphabet was given to me not long after I started Hand & Eye. It was exciting and slightly surreal to drop in on someone whose book I’ve known for over twenty years.

The Saloon

San Francisco is a magical city with many wonders. One of them is The Saloon, a blues bar at Columbus and Grant, where I’ve been spending more than a fair share of my time.

It is all that a bar should be, untouched since who knows when, dingy and, above all, with great bands and juke box. Most of the musicians look as if they’ve been playing there since the last time the decorators were in.

The first two times I went in the bar tender was a man who had made an art of his job. He never stopped, his fluid movements in time with the music, spinning glasses in the air, catching them and then sweepng them behind his back and down the bar…

As my travelling companion is Michael Harvey, lettering artist, type designer and photographer, I have been paying particular attention to things like the notice in the second picture here. The letters are gloriously drawn and irregularly spaced. So much better than if they’d been printed out in Arial or Times.

Holidays

We’re closed next week, as Phil is away. There may be a post or two from San Francisco…

Otherwise we open again on 23 March.

St Bride Letterpress Conference

The title of this year’s St Bride Conference is Letterpress: A Celebration. Anyone who reads about the history of printing soon comes in contact with the St Bride Library, so it is a great honour to Phil to have been asked to speak at the conference. He intends to talk about how he came to start Hand & Eye, what we do now and how we do it, all profusely illustrated. We will also have an exhibition stand where Phil and Rosa will be pleased to see you.

The conference takes place on Friday 7 November from 9.30 am to 5 pm.

What we did at Whittington

The weather for the Whittington Summer Show was as miserable as we have come to expect. It didn’t spoil the day, though. We were put in charge of the Whittington proofing press, and we set this specimen in their fine 60 pt Walbaum Medium Italic. The green was what they had on the press and the paper was an offcut of Somerset Velvet that we took with us. We printed demonstrated the printing of them, and many of the visitors printed their own copies.

We also took with us a poster that Rosa had produced. The grey type, rather hard to read here, says ‘The spoken word flies away but the written one remains’.

A Greater Journey

Last month Phil also went to the Greek island of Paros to visit The Aegean Center for the Fine Arts and its director John Pack.

He thought the Center was remarkable. Its students were learning the technical side of their art in a small group that was clearly open and supportive.

John asked Phil over to discuss a future collaboration. This autumn the Center will be publishing The Greater Journey, a book of John’s photographs and poems by Peter Abbs. Hand & Eye, we are very pleased to say, will be printing the text.

Visit to Germany

These cases for setting Chinese type are in the Museum of the Printing Arts in Leipzig which Phil was fortunate enough to visit a couple of weeks ago. As well as a vast array of type and matrices they have an enormous collection of typesetting and printing machines from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They are all beautifully restored, not as heritage artifacts but for working. They are oiled and, where necessary wired up, and their bare metal parts are clean but not overly-shiny.

If he had to choose highlights they would be

• the B1 swing cylinder letterpress machine
• the Soviet version of a Linotype machine
• the telex-operated Linotype for transatlantic publications
• an enormous stone litho machine
• a large and fascinating exhibition of the work of Hans Madersteig and the Officina Bodoni