Miriam's photographic take on the last printrun of Will there be words - while the top portion (the proportion is the golden ratio) looks black here, it is Thalo Blue, from Graphic Chemicals, darkened by the red underneath it - even tho the brass rules used to make these images are not spaced out, they still have apparently un-inked lines between them, as can be seen in the red section - when the blue rules are over-printed at the top, and because not all the rules are of the same width, there is this nice effect that some of those 'between' spaces appear light blue - three colors from two, which is an old letterpress trick, but one which can still surprise & delight - it might be a fault, and some will think so, but I like a bit of indeterminacy, a bit of uncertainty, in my work - I admire without stint, don't get me wrong, the extraordinary control in the work of printers like Russell Maret in New York (tho there is no one 'like' him), or Gaylord Shanilec in Wisconsin - and it could simply be that I am lazy and should strive to be more of a printing technician than I am - but I do enjoy a measure of shiftiness in the image, which of course is not visible in any one volume, but is when one sees all the printed sheets laid out side by side - it raises an old bibliographic question about printed texts : which is the 'real' work, this variation found here, or that variation found there - or is the 'work' the whole edition, or the whole collection of textual variants which a poet, say, might spread over time - in which case, the 'whole work' is never visible in a single view - I like such conundra, and feel no urge at all to solve 'em -
