Monday, October 3, 2011

prospectus for If not in paint

today I will finish printing the prospectus for if not in paint - it's been some time since I printed prospectuses, but it has seemed to me of late that the book to be done is somehow incomplete without its modest harbinger - in many ways, the prospectus can be simply a straight-forward advertisement, or an appropriate register of what the book might look like (many prospectuses have included a piece of text setting from the book or even an image or illustration), or it could be a sort of preliminary showcase for the book and the press, one that reflects the hoped-for quality of the book that might find its way into cheerful hands. So, this is my first prospectus for a while, and here is the outside of the single yet-to-be-folded sheet -
to receive a prospectus for if not in paint, simply email name & postal address to the printer at alanloney@gmail.com -


it's not often I use so many different types on a single page - the large wood type is not De Vinne (as I speculated in a previous post) but Howland, issued by Hamilton wood type makers in Two Rivers, Wisconsin (nicely identified for me by local wood type collector Philip Moorhouse) - the types in blue (Handschy inks, a mix of bronze blue & opaque white) are Giovanni Mardersteig's Dante & Libra by S H de Roos, and the red line is Eusebius Open, designed by R Hunter Middleton for the Ludlow Typograph Company, and based on the Eusebius of Ernst Detterer, issued by Ludlow in 1923, and which was first known as Nicolas Jenson, and first shown in a printing of The Last Will and Testament of the late Nicolas Jenson in 1928 - the image of the handpress printer is of course by Albrecht Durer and is part in fact of a larger drawing that humorously sends up the activities at the printing house of his godfather, Anton Koberger who established the first press at Nuremburg in 1470 - all of which is interesting of course, but the 'onlie begetter' of this book is the poet, Marion May Campbell, pictured here -
photo by Zoe Campbell Walker