An inked proof press at the San Francisco Center for the Book. All photos by the author..
When I moved to the Bay Area, I expected that its arts scene would be lively and vibrant. The Bay is home to the San Francisco Art Institute, Mills College, the de Young Museum of Art, and many other institutions dedicated to fine arts, music, architecture, and literary culture. But, as an early modern literary historian and aspiring archivist who specializes in British print and manuscript cultures of the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, I did not anticipate how San Francisco’s book arts scene would critically influence my research in new and surprising ways.
There are numerous book arts institutions across the city and in the East Bay, and I’ve visited a number of them since I began assembling my dissertation proposal. I was inspired to do this in part by Joshua Calhoun, whose work on early modern paper is shaped by his own practice of what he calls “makenning”—the playful, exploratory, and expressive process of making to know. In the tactile process of making a book, we engage firsthand in the networks of people, plants, environments, and objects that must come together in order to produce it.1 My visits to the San Francisco Center for the Book, the American Bookbinders Museum, and M&H Type Foundry have prompted me to ask new questions about how books are made and used, both now and in the past.
Vandercook proof presses at the San Francisco Center for the Book.
When I first walked through the doors of the San Francisco Center for the Book (SFCB), I realized there was so much about print culture that I could not possibly know until I handled a printing press myself. The SFCB is a critically important center for book arts in the city, offering hundreds of workshops and classes each year as well as studio rental space, school tours, and a gallery for local artists to display their work. The “joy of books and bookmaking,” which the center claims as a central tenet of their organization, is palpable when you enter the studio space. There, you see not only the colorful, paint-spattered tables, but also the hundreds of drawers full of type and the rows of vintage Vandercook proof and hand-platen presses.
I’ve visited the SFCB numerous times since I arrived in California; first, on a class tour (where I watched our guide demonstrate printing techniques using the center’s iron hand press), and later as a student. I registered to take Paula Gloistein’s “Letterpress Business Cards” course to try my hand at printing on a Vandercook proof press. Whereas early hand presses require force exerted upon a lever system to press paper directly into the inked type, the more modern and industrial Vandercook proof press rolls a sheet of paper across the type via a cylinder. Gloistein walked us through the whole process from start to finish: I chose my font, found the correct letters, inked the press, and set the type on the composing stick. I set the type backwards at first, which I didn’t realize until I ran a print, so I then had to remove the type pieces, re-set them, and reprint my set of cards. Finally, I sorted all of the type back into the correct compartments in the type case.
A first attempt at setting type in a composing stick.
We then moved to a room in the bindery, where Gloistein assisted each of us in trimming our cards down to size with their large guillotine paper cutter. The whole process took hours, which surprised me. I had entered the course with knowledge of printing processes after reading foundational works in book history, including Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change and D. F. McKenzie’s Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, so I was comfortable with the components of a press and the processes of printing. At least in theory.2 What had been missing was embodied practice. Setting type, locking it into the press, and inking the cylinder brought to life the abstractions of printing in ways that have since helped me make sense of the moments where bookmaking appears in early English literature.
A finished letterpress business card.
My experience at the SFCB made me all the more eager to visit the American Bookbinders Museum and M&H Type Foundry. Both of these institutions offer guided tours of their collections of vintage presses, bookbinding equipment, and galleries, and I was able to see centuries-old equipment in use.
The American Bookbinders Museum allows for both self-guided and docent-led tours of the space, and I opted for the latter so I could see demonstrations of the oldest equipment. The museum’s collection on display includes an English imperial press, numerous book presses, and other binding equipment from as far back as the eighteenth century. The docent gave an engaging description of pre-industrial bookmaking, and demonstrated how to create a text block for binding on their sewing frame, how to evenly distribute ink across set type on a hand press, and how to emboss an image onto a book cover using their embosser. Visualizing each of the steps through these demonstrations and examining the machines cemented in my memory what I had read of these processes prior to my visit, and has even prompted me to purchase a sewing frame so I can try my hand at more formal bindings.
I visited M&H Type Foundry later in the year, during their annual holiday open-house. As the oldest operational type foundry in the United States, M&H Type has been casting type for over a century and is now owned by the Arion Press, which works alongside the Grabhorn Institute to offer apprenticeships, fund and publicize the letterpress printing and hand-binding of limited-edition books, and offer a “living museum” experience with weekly public tours of the historic foundry in use as well as its adjoining artist’s gallery.
Shelves of type cases and type made at the foundry.
The open-house allowed visitors to wander the gallery, press, bindery, and foundry at their own pace, so I spent some time looking at the equipment and conversing with artists who were at work. When I arrived in the foundry itself, I found I had caught up to a small tour beside a long row of casters, machines used to melt metal and form type. The guide explained how typecasters protect themselves from fumes while melting down the mixture of lead, antimony, and tin—called “type-metal”— used to create type. Early typecasters also had methods of protection against lead poisoning: Joseph Moxon’s early seventeenth-century printing manual detailed use of open furnaces to allow fumes to escape, reduce the risk of indoor fires, and alleviate human exposure to “obnoxious” vapors. He also suggested that the metal workers consume a mixture of salad oil and wine to counteract the effects of inhaling the fumes.3
Hearing directly the lived experience of casting type as I stood by a row of casters brought to the forefront of my attention the bodily interactions between humans, the equipment they use, and the books—and book parts—that they make. The experience also led me to question other ways that the whole process of book production—from picking rags to be made into paper to setting type, inking presses, and more—might have a material effect on workers’ bodies.
Type cases and work stations at Arion Press.
Although various disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, and arts tend to be separated into different departments or divisions, I’m discovering that they are critically interconnected. This is especially true as historical research relies more and more upon digitally-mediated texts. Arts institutions, and the practice of making art ourselves, remind us that there are always elements of a text that are difficult to see through a computer screen, and that the interface between human body, book object, and creative environment can be a crucial space of discovery. The material conditions of book production can only be fully explored hands-on, and with so many Bay Area institutions available to facilitate the process, I hope to visit as often as I can.
- Calhoun argues that we must ground our understanding of “media and media-making in a landscape (or multiple landscapes as texts travel through time and space)” to notice the “place-based constraints of book technologies.” Centering book arts institutions as critical sites for experimentation helps us notice both these constraints and varied and nuanced entanglements that are required for book production and use. Joshua Calhoun, The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking, and the Ecology of Texts in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 4.
- Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (London: British Library, 1986).
- Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1972), 9; Joseph Moxon, Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises, or the Doctrine of Handy-Works Applied to the Art of Printing (1683; reprint, New York: Typothetæ of the City of New York, 1896), vol. 1, 167–68. For more on the typecasting process at M&H, see Glenn Fleishmann, “A California Type Foundry Is Keeping Vintage Printing Alive,” Atlas Obscura, Aug. 28, 2019.