Welcome to BookLab

open to art trades with other printers! | when I said I made a tumblr everyone said "isn't tumblr dead?"

[umdbooklab]

Intro to UMD BookLab!

Hi! We're BookLab, the University of Maryland's English Department Makerspace. Plaintxt Press is our imprint (the entity that issues our prints [really we just like to put the logo on stuff]). BookLab was started by Professors Matthew Kirschenbaum and Kari Kraus in 2018, and Plaintxt Press was created in late 2023.

Here at BookLab, our primary medium is letterpress art. We also have materials for bookbinding, linocut, stamp making, collaging, and we're looking into screen printing. And we have a lot of random art supplies on the shelves. We also have a library of artists' books (super weird artistic books, like a book that is bound on every side) and books about books.

I made this tumblr bc I thought it would be funny.

Dramatis Personae / Cast List / People who work in BookLab

Matt (he/him): One out of two professors who started BookLab. He has a ton of awards or whatever. Nat says he has tenure for his tenure. He's a super weird guy but pretty cool. He's addicted to Twitter, so you can go see that @mkirschenbaum, it's so academic it breaks my brain.

Kari (she/her): The other professor who started Booklab. I don't know her that well but she seems cool.

A fun fact about Matt and Kari is that they are married. A second fun fact is that you will not hear this from either of them. It's normal to be cagey about being married in the workplace except that half of the English department here is married to the other half of the English department, so most people don't worry about it. Except these two.

Nat (she/her): PhD student with extreme goblinesque bisexual chaos energy. She is extremely accident-prone and yet competent at BookLab things. Also my bestie. She is studying digital humanities. The universe is currently in the process of entrusting her with a child (and we are extremely happy for her).

Diana (she/her): Goth PhD student getting her degree in English. Extremely literary in a dark academia kind of way. She acts kind of shy but is actually good at a lot of things and friendly. My other bestie.

Dylan (he/him): I don't know him super well but he's getting his PhD in something like queer literature. He's super gay and pretty cool.

Nat and Dylan have weird complicated beef that might be more Dylan's fault. I love to know the drama but I do not wish to actually get in the middle.

Rifka (they/them): Me. I like doing experimental letterpress and getting very messy. The fact that I run this Tumblr should tell you a lot about me.

RB (they/them): Occasional specter haunting Booklab (Matt is their mentor for this semester). Getting their PhD in comic book studies, porn studies, and digital humanities. They like BL. They are cool and transgender.

Aaron: Used to work in Booklab and they never took away his swipe access. He is very nice to hang out with. Knows all the drama and I am going to get him to tell me. He's really good at bookbinding.

[uwmspeccoll]

Fine Press Friday

Today we present a few pages from a bittersweet letterpress artist's book, To Fly or Fall, by Wisconsin painter, printmaker, and book artist Stephanie Copoulos-Selle, printed and bound in 2023 at her Citron Press in Waukesha, Wisconsin in a limited edition of 27. In 2020, Stephanie lost her husband, life partner, and fellow artist Tom Selle and this book is a cathartic exercise to contend with her grief.

The book combines repurposed prints and proofs made by both artists over their 44-year marriage. These images, unfortunately, do little justice to the book's sublime movement and balance, but we hope something of the poignancy of its contents are conveyed adequately.

View more works by Stephanie Copoulos-Selle.

View more Fine Press Friday posts.

[holespoles]

William Morris (1834-1896） Tree of Life

[thebookcryptid]

I've typeset and bound the Bifrost Incident by the Mechanisms. Courtesy of two fellow bookbinders I've got fancy corners and apple leather. And courtesy of Mum and her sewing machine, getting the leather and cloth together was easy (for me 🤭). I didn't quite think through when cutting the edges and so they're not really pointed. (Which is mostly hidden by the corrners now.)

I entertained various ideas for the cover. Would've liked to create a mock tape, complete with a ribbon acting as magnetic tape on the spine. But that was two narrow for me to really feel like doing. Another idea was creating a file, which we might see in the typeset as well.

In the end, I didn't have cloth or paper in a colour I would've like, so a vegan leather notebook it became.

Also, I've found two spellings for the narrator. Everyone seems to be using Lyfrassir, and only on the band's bandcamp I've found Lifrassir. Decided to go with the Lyf spelling, but as we see… the cover had different ideas, which I only noticed after reaching the first or second s…

I don't think the leather will like being bent and unbent a lot…

It's basically a pamphlet stitch.

[uwmspeccoll]

Typography Tuesday

We've just acquired a small group of type display books to add to our typography collections. Among them is this 1916 Dutch specimen book, Letterproef der Lettergieterij "Amsterdam" Voorheen N. Tetterode (Letter proof of the Letter Foundry "Amsterdam" Formerly N. Tetterode). The Amsterdam Type Foundry (Lettergieterij Amsterdam) was founded by by Nicolaas Tetterode (1816-1894) in 1851. The business was carried on by this son (also named Nicolaas), and soon after his death in 1912, the firm was renamed Lettergieterij Amsterdam (1914). Aside from the historic foundry of Joh. Enschedé, Lettergieterij Amsterdam was the only other major type foundry in the Netherlands throughout the 20th century until rights to its typefaces were transferred to Linotype in 2000.

Shown here are some examples of their fancy initials (fantasieletter) and a few of their cuts and type ornaments.

View our other Typography Tuesday posts.

[positivelyqueer]

hooray for paper craft and traditional collage and papier mache and dioramas and miniatures and cardboard sculptures and paper dolls and black out poetry inside physical books and I forgot what the point of this was but I love all these physical art mediums and think they should get more recognition

[duran-binding]

Hidden Fore-edge Painting tutorial part two

[umdbooklab]

Prints we were sent by @kennedyprints (Amos Kennedy) in exchange for Rifka's piece from last year.

[sacramentohistorymuseum]

We have an important message to share from the Print Shop exhibit at the Sacramento History Museum. This message was typeset in 36 point Cheltenham Bold Condensed font and letterpress printed with blue rubber base ink using a 3x5 Kelsey Excelsior tabletop printing press.

The text reads: “We’ve been trying to reach you about your car’s extended warranty.” This print is available as part of a bundle of prints in our museum store!

[bobafett]

Persuasion by Jane Austen

Persuasion, published in 1817, is Jane Austen's last completed novel. It follows Anne Elliot, the only sensible daughter of a vain and foolish baronet, as she is given a second chance at love with the naval officer Captain Frederick Wentworth after spurning him and breaking their engagement seven years before.

Another set of fraternal twin binds! One of these is a gift, the other is for my own shelf. I'd say the biggest takeaway from this particular bind was, "Just because you can cut something on your vinyl cutter doesn't mean that you should." The covers almost killed me. BUT I LIVED.

About the Bind

This edition was typeset in Affinity Publisher in Cardo with titles in Glamora and drop caps in Art Nouveau Caps. In keeping with the art nouveau theme, the decorative ornaments are all drawn from contemporary advertisements published in 1903 to 1904. It was printed on 24/60 lb off white short grain paper.

These books are both rounded hardcovers with full bookcloth cases. The cover decorations were applied with custom vinyl stencils and acrylic paint. Both of them were supposed to have ribbon bookmarks, but I forgot to add one to my personal copy and didn't remember until the entire spine was finished. Oh well.

It doesn't come through in the pictures, but pulling these books together was.... a battle. Stencil issues, scuffed paint, glue strike through on the bookcloth, crooked case in: you name it, it happened. Overall, I'm mostly pleased with the results (and the second copy definitely turned out better than the first!), but I was unbelievably happy to close out this particular project.

The text of this edition was drawn from Project Gutenberg. I've made a copy of this typeset available on the Renegade Bindery discord, but if anyone else wants a copy to bind for themselves, feel free to send me a message!

Excerpts from the typeset below the cut.

[gallusrostromegalus]

Are you the "I have strong feelings about parchment" Tumblr user? If not, I feel like I saw you might know who they are. I was going to put parchment in a fic, but then I was like "no, I can't do that without asking the Parchment Person first because I don't want to get it Wrong."

...no, but I know the post you're talking about, and I too have strong feelings about parchment, esp because I've worked on it before.

I took an illumination course while getting my illustration degree and did an "H.M." in the style of a medieval manuscript on a small piece of the stuff.

Parchment is not paper. It's cured calf or pig skin.

It's thick, and HARD like non-corrugated cardboard. If it's been stored in a roll, it does not want to unroll. If it's been stored flat, it does not want to roll. It's got the same texture as skin, because it IS skin, and you have to account for that while working on it. It smells like rawhide. It actually takes ink in a really interesting way- there's a half-second to blend of fix something before it actually sinks into the parchment, but it doesn't bleed once it's in there. It also never comes back out. It's not bright white like paper, almost a buff color, and white stands out on it.

Fascinating stuff. Actually pretty fun to work on, but it's definitely a medium for highly polished and important pieces (like illuminated manuscripts), not for casual note-taking (because it's MAD EXPENSIVE to make)

I should go hit up the local art stores and get different paper-and-other-art-media samples to demo for everyone for fanfic purposes because they are VERY different things that have different purposes, prices, origins, and societal connotations, all of which can be used in your writing.

[zhongluong]

That sort of demo would be incredibly useful to people aiming for accuracy in their writing, and not just for fanfic!

[gallusrostromegalus]

Well, there seems to be a lot of interest, so I think I'll do a broad demo for Tumblr and some more detailed demos for patreon, sound good?

[momkat]

One of the things that pisses me off most in fiction is people using parchment to do homework on, or crumbling up a piece of parchment because of a mistake. You could get AT MOST 8 pieces of parchment, similar to a standard piece of paper, out of one sheep. More likely 6. One sixth of a sheep. That then has to be processed. It would be analogous to throwing away an old iPad because it has a typo on it.

The very word, palimpsest, shows you that parchment was valuable enough to scrape off and reuse, sometimes until it was worn thin.

You would use slate or a wood panel or even write on stone and wipe it off for anything that was practice. Parchment is for more permanent work.

The world CHANGED when paper became readily available. An entire type of government was created because of paper. (Chinese bureaucracies arose because of their early development of paper. Bureaucracies that kept the wheels turning regardless of the regime changes of the higher echelons. Records and commerce rolled on because of paper.)

Parchment is not paper. We live in a world of paper and cannot imagine how valuable its predecessor was.

[beatrice-otter]

Enough parchment to write a book on would cost about enough to buy a house.

[therepublicofletters]

07.08.2024 || Florence, Italy

My favourite initials from the last two weeks in the Archivio di Stato—mostly from the 1469, 1478, and 1494 Provvisioni (registers of passed laws)

[queer-as-city-folk]

I made a stamp (:

[queer-as-city-folk]

The lower one is the physical stamp and the upper one is the image it produces

[queer-as-city-folk]

The stamp is on pink rubber, it stamps black ink onto white paper

[queer-as-city-folk]

My supplies to do it arrived like 3 days ago and I have been in a frenzy since then

[whoslaurapalmer]

they're done!!!!!!!!!! the tiniest asoue books 📚 📚📚 each book is barely an inch, and the whole box set is 2 inches, I LOVE THEM SO MUCH

this was so much fun to do and I cannot wait to get pictures of them with the frogs!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[umdbooklab]

This was my big project for the semester. It took me probably six weeks. The background is slogans of protest signs I printed, and the foreground is If I Must Die by Refaat Alareer and an original quote. The final image is the laser-etched tikkun olam type piece I made.

Artist's Statement:

We often look at the past as a picture pulled into focus by the writers of history, rather than an entanglement of events and people and messaging. We forget that the student protests against apartheid, against the Vietnam and Iraq wars, were decried as violent unrest. The pieces of art made for those movements were deemed too controversial or political at the time; and now we display those pieces in our museums, on the walls of our reading rooms on the fourth floor of our libraries. Our universities call it a “history of student activism.” We forget that in the days in which the pieces were produced the art curators of the days, the university administrations, the parents, the news media, and the politicians were usually against those movements. When we look at past protest movements we know some opposed them, but we think of them as "bad people," who are nothing like us "good people," because we could never be so blind or so prejudiced.

This piece is made with the type I used for several protest signs--as I made those signs, and as I made this piece, I took the time to reflect on how the opinions I was expressing lined up with my concept of the history of protest and oppression. I used the phrase tikkun olam—"repair the world" in Hebrew—because I feel aligned with the history of Jewish activism and the need to repair our world, but I include it in this piece specifically because I acknowledge that there have always been Jews who were blind and prejudiced; believing that I am following a commandment does not mean I am kind or righteous.

We forget that many people—often those who we think of as “good people”—opposed those movements, and that most of them are ashamed of those opinions today. But when we view history with a lens crafted by the victors and do not turn that same gaze upon the actions and creations of today, we do the world a disservice. We do the people of history a disservice by forgetting that many of them were just as fallible as many of us are today, and we do ourselves a disservice by forgetting we are as fallible as those who came to regret their actions. One day we will join the ranks of the people of history and the people of the future will be looking back at us. There is no perfect way to know we're doing the right thing. But we cannot start from a place of thinking that we would have been just as righteous if we were alive during the history we look back at, or that we will always take the righteous actions today.

[umdbooklab]

this was made by someone's kid lmao

[umdbooklab]

from the archive