Wind in the Willows deluxe edition work, CODEX VIII, and Manhattan VI

05 Tuesday Apr 2022

Posted by Deep Wood Press in CODEX, Manhattan Fine Press Book Fair, Presentation bindings, The Wind in the Willows

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Since the completion of the standard edition of The Wind in the Willows I’ve been busy in the bindery working on the 10 deluxe copies of the book. There are an additional 9 books queued up for presentation bindings to fill orders placed in the past few months for my past books including The Intruder, In the Penal Colony, and The Mad Angler Poems so those will make reappearances here in the future in their new clothing as well. I seem to be more a binder than a printer these days….

I am usually loathe to share images of unfinished work and only a couple of these are even close to completion so apologies for the less than stellar images taken with my phone on the bench with plenty of glare. Quite a bit of leather onlay and underlay work, tooling, bits of foil and great fun refining binding structures. I stocked a fair amount of new leathers for this endeavor in both goat and calf as well as a few fair skins that I’ve dyed to suit my needs. These will all be in solander boxes when completed and accompanied by a suite of the 12 full size illustrations from the book.

Cambridge style binding with title inlay. Still working on Toad.

CODEX

This Friday I’m off to CODEX in Berkeley, CA for yet another gathering of fine press makers and book artists from around the globe. I’m excited to see everyone again and have volunteered to help Peter and Susan with all the gory details of show set-up, shopping and general flunky. That’s what friends do!

Visit me at Table 56 to see the new work and catch up.

New York

Upon returning from California I’ve a few days to repack for the Manhattan Fine Press Book Fair on Saturday, April 23rd from 10am – 5pm. The last “in-person” fair I did was Manhattan 2 years ago just as Covid was hitting the USA. I managed to escape back to Michigan unscathed (though quite a few friends were not so lucky) where I have been practicing social distancing and isolation for 30 years now here at DWP.

Winter was lacking in many ways here on the Michigan 45th parallel, bitter cold prevailed but not the kind of snowfall we have historically enjoyed, so cross country skijoring with the dog was a limited activity which is one of the things that keeps me sane during our long winters. Life was interrupted by a power outage during the holidays, I was out for 5 days but the worst part was when power was restored it dumped high voltage through all the buildings and AirBnB rental taking out the furnace controller, refrigerator, ceiling fans, gfci outlets, audio gear and all kinds of other little things that sometimes take weeks to discover. Needless to say, this took priority for a while along with all the fun of dealing with insurance, ordering and installing replacement items.

There is still snow outside as I type this though spring is around the corner. There are geese and ducks on the river verbally making themselves known to potential mates. Coyotes, fox and bobcats are on the prowl and the otters and beavers are enjoying their icy slides. On a sunny day last week I say my first turtle that had emerged from the winter muck to sun himself on a log. A few early hatches that the trout have ignored and when I return from New York trout season opener will have already happened here in Michigan on the 24th. Don’t worry, I’ll keep focusing in the bindery. Mostly. You know I’m looking forward to printing The Machine Stops this fall and the drawings we’re getting from Marc Castelli will blow your minds.

The Wind in the Willows nears completion!

04 Thursday Nov 2021

Posted by Deep Wood Press in Book Bindings, Kenneth Grahame, Letterpress, Mad Parrot Press, The Wind in the Willows, Vladimir Zimakov

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Bookbinding, Fine Press, Letterpress, The Wind in the Willows

The Wind in the Willows is almost finished and will be shipping in November!

The 75 regular edition copies of the book are quarter bound, rounded and backed, in a very dark green Moroccan goat with a cinnamon cotton book cloth, the endpapers are a printed pattern on mocha Hahnemühle Bugra with a cloth inner hinge. The title is guilt in foil on the spine in copper and silver and a debossed panel on the front cover has Rat & Mole in a crossed oar emblem foiled in copper on dyed grey vellum. The text is set in 14pt Centaur and Arrighi and printed on a custom made cotton rag paper from Papeterie Saint-Armand developed especially for this book. Featuring thirteen multi color and nine 2 color illustrations by Vladimir Zimakov and an introduction from Peter Hunt, large format 10.25 x 14″ (26×35.5 cm)

Copies of the regular edition are still available and are available with a deposit at the

Mad Parrot Website

The pictures below are bench prototypes of the finished binding. The inset illustration on the cover will be done on a grey calf vellum and the patterned end papers will be printed this week. Stay tuned for finished photos coming soon!

The deluxe copies of the book are no longer available. Binding will commence on those copies as soon as the regular edition is complete. Look for pictures here in the future as these individual works of book binding explorations come to be. Inadvertently, one longtime customer was mis-marked as wanting a regular edition, to make everyone happy (I hope) there now will officially be eleven copies made in this way.

The printing has been completed and bindery work has been moving along full steam. The printing was all done on my Vandercook 219 OS proof press – nearly 800 runs on the press all hand fed and cranked with over 40 custom ink colors made. But recently it has been a great pleasure having past apprentices and students join in on the arduous process of bindery work. Daniel Schneider (Industrial Rust Press) and Tonya Baumhardt (Snow Fairy Cottage) have been especially instrumental with their more than capable skills and we’ve managed to have some good fun along the way as well. I began the printing of this book in late February of this year with snow drifting outside and today was the first snowstorm of the new winter coming on. Cycles of seasons and books continue here at Deep Wood Press.

This series of photos shows a loose progression from printing to collating, punching sections for sewing holes, cutting and paring the goat skin, foil stamping the title, sewing, rounding and backing and casing in the book blocks.

Manhattan Fine Press Book Fair and other news.

26 Wednesday Feb 2020

Posted by Deep Wood Press in Breon Mitchell - Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony, Letterpress, Manhattan Fine Press Book Fair, Presentation bindings, The Hunter Gracchus, The Wind in the Willows, Vladimir Zimakov

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Next week I will make my way to Manhattan for the 6th annual Fine Press Book Fair. Though I have gone back and participated in the show two or three other years I have very fond memories of the first fair and the great fun for those of us that journeyed there for it. A highlight being a lovely gathering of fellow printers at Jean Shiff’s home organized by Chris Adamson of the Books and Vines blog. So come join me and 40 other presses from around the world and descend into the ugly basement of the school of St. Vincent Ferrer at 869 Lexington Ave at 66th St on March 7th from 10am to 5pm.

For this years show I will have some lovely presentation bindings for my newly translated edition of Kafka’s In the Penal Colony, other books from my catalog and some progress to show for the forthcoming Wind in the Willows being done with my partner James Dissette and our Mad Parrot Press imprint. Vladimir Zimakov is still working away at the illustrations we’ve commissioned for the book. Otherwise the text layout is complete and edited, just waiting to plug in the images where appropriate. It should be forthcoming this summer for all of you who keep asking! I’m also making progress on my other new translation of Kafka’s The Hunter Gracchus but progress once again is being held up by my intaglio prints that will illustrate. They are mostly complete but my big intaglio press is in “Studio B” with the Linotype machine which is kept just above freezing in the winter months and I just can’t justify heating three buildings at the moment when the average temperature here is 25° Fahrenheit.

*Some of the linocuts forthcoming from Vladimir*

I’ve come to enjoy binding books again! Everything is done “in house” here at DWP from composition of the type via Linotype or handset, illustrations, printing to binding. In recent years I had totally burned out on edition binding even with the help of apprentices and the occasional student. Now my editions have become smaller and while I still do some edition binding a growing percentage of the books are becoming “one off” presentation bindings. Making books is rife with repetition with literally dozens of steps along the way to a finished product. Enjoying any part of the process is important to keep it seeming less like work! My apologies in advance to all the librarians and archivists as I keep lousy track of these things.

I see that it’s been roughly a year since my last post about my work, welcome to 2020! I wish that I had more news for you but 2019 was sort of a null year and the old adage of “no news is good news” unfortunately falls short in this case. Some routine medical procedures with complications started out the summer and upon full recovery from that I was shortly after diagnosed with Lyme Disease! The good news is that it was caught early and I’ve made pretty much a full recovery but lost months of studio work time as a result. Regardless, I’m one of the lucky ones. I have friends and family who weren’t diagnosed in time or misdiagnosed with this terrible disease and now suffer the full effects of it. A mere couple years ago this wouldn’t have even registered with doctors in Northern Michigan as a possibility but, unfortunately, the infected tick population has made its way here and now diligence must be made with the animals and, even more importantly, the kids looking for ticks and scanning for telltale bites with rings. My heart goes out to those of you in the Northeast and other parts of the country where this has become the new “normal”.