Walter Hamady // book artist and paper maker

Above (and below) Title frame and other single frames from a new 20-minute video talk about Walter Hamady (1940-2019), prominent book artist, paper-maker, and collagist, who was well-known as a teacher at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. 

Having earlier taught in Milwaukee for ten years, I had become aware of his work in the 1970s. Because of his liking for Ballast Quarterly Review (which I had founded in 1985), he and I began to exchange spirited letters (along with a mix of enclosures), once or twice or more a month. 

This led to collaborations of one kind or another, eventually resulting in exhibitions, published essays, and an archive of his artist’s books. I saved everything, even all the envelopes and mailing containers, in part because they were always addressed to mutilations of my name, such as Corps du Roy, Rhoidamoto, Trompe L’Roi at Labbast, Royatolla, and so on. This continued for more than a decade, perhaps to the mailman’s amusement.

Looking back on what I have, I have now produced a video talk (a brief memoir-like tribute) titled BOOK ART: Walter Hamady’s Books, Collages and Assemblages, which can be accessed free online on my YouTube channel.

Dennis Ichiyama | Curris Endowment for Design

Dennis Y. Ichiyama

Above Graphic designer, typographer and teacher Dennis Y. Ichiyama will speak at the University of Northern Iowa at 6:00 pm on Monday, November 12, 2018. The presentation will take place in the auditorium (Room 111) of the Kamerick Art Building. It is made possible by The Elena Diane Curris Endowment for Design and the UNI Gallery of Art in conjunction with the endowment's inaugural biennial exhibition, titled THE REACH AND RICHNESS OF DESIGN, in which the work of Ichiyama and other designers is featured. The event is free and open to the public.

Professor Ichiyama is widely known for his work in publication design, typography, and his active interest in the renewed use of vintage wood type in printmaking. He was featured prominently in the documentary Typeface, which includes an account of his efforts as an artist / designer at the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum in Two Rivers WI.

Ichiyama earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Hawaii-Manoa. He received his MFA degree at Yale University, where he studied with Paul Rand. He also studied with Armin Hofmann at Allegemeine Gewerbeschule in Basal, Switzerland. Before his retirement, he taught Visual Communications Design at Purdue University for many years.

Sculptor / Printmaker Dallas Guffey

Epochal Descent © Dallas Guffey (2017)

We really respond to these woodcuts by sculptor/printmaker (and clandestine graphic designer) Dallas Guffey. See more at his website.

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Rebecca Loncraine, The Real Wizard of Oz: The Life and Times of L. Frank Baum. NY: Gotham Books, 2009, p. 252—

In 1913, [Henry] Ford began making the Model T automobile in his Michigan plant through a researched, rationalized assembly-line production method. Before 1913, automobiles were custom-made. One of Ford's engineers was inspired by a visit to a meatpacking factory on Chicago, where he saw dead cows butchered in a rational assembly-line process, where a carcass was chopped into recognizable joints as it moved along a conveyor. The engineer reversed the idea and envisaged building an automobile along a moving line where static workers performed the same repetitive task over and over again. The cost of a Model T fell rapidly from $575 to $240, and became affordable to middle-income households.

Divulge © Dallas Guffey (2017)

Book Review | Design Before Designers

Ad for Chromatic Jobber printing press (c1886)

Graphic Design Before Graphic Designers:
The Printer as Designer and Craftsman 1700-1914
by David Jury
Thames and Hudson, London and New York, 2012
312 pp., illus. 219 b&w/560 col. Trade, $60.00
ISBN: 978-0-500-51646-1.

This is a richly illustrated book on the history of printing—or, more accurately, on one area of printing. It is not a history of “book printing,” but of a less exalted branch called “job printing.” Historically, book printers (or so it has long been widely assumed) are prestigious purveyors of culture, while job printers are those who produce “ephemera,” the everyday stuff that is rarely preserved—handbills, posters, tickets, advertisements, trade cards, stationery, labels, receipts, passports, charts, certificates, postage stamps, banknotes and so on.

When Samuel Johnson wrote his Dictionary (1755), he made no distinction between designing and printing—a typographer, by his definition, was “a printer.” Continuing well into the twentieth century, arranging elements on a page was part and parcel of printing, so there was no additional cost for “graphic design,” a phrase that is commonly said (erroneously, I think) to have been used for the first time by book designer W.A. Dwiggins in 1921. Today, as designers and their clients know, graphic design is its own thriving category, and the work of a graphic designer is billed in addition to printing.

This well-written and beautiful book, titled Graphic Design Before Graphic Designers: The Printer as Designer and Craftsman 1700-1914, is a history of what printers did, as clandestine designers, in advance of the formal establishment of graphic design as a career field. It also provides an account of how the design services of craft-based printers were deliberately discredited by graphic and advertising designers in order to justify charging for a service that had once been gratis. Surely, it must have been argued, the author writes, “the modern businessman’s media requirements could only be addressed by a new profession made up of university-trained communication strategists.”

The book is organized in chronological, alternating chapters (there are six in all, plus other parts), each of which offers two components: First, a persuasively-written historical text, detailing what took place, in what order and why, including the names and achievements of individuals who were major players. These narratives are illustrated by well-chosen informative images from the history of printing. Second, each chapter also features about 30 pages of the most wonderful full-color images of examples of job printing, from every category imaginable. more…

Film Review | Linotype: The Film

Linotype type casting machine

Linotype: The Film
by Douglas Wilson, Director and Producer
Onpaperwings Productions
Springfield, MO, 2012
 DVD, 1 hours 17 mins.
Distributor's website:
http://www.linotypefilm.com

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I have had “printing” in my blood since I was ten or eleven. One summer at about that age, having read The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, I sped downtown on my 20-inch Hiawatha bicycle, strolled into the local “job printing” firm, and inquired of the aging (and greatly amused) owner if he might be willing to take me on as a “printer’s devil.” Kindly, he responded “no” (I was far too young) but he did talk to me for awhile and gave me a tour of the “tools of the trade.” This was about fifty-five years ago, yet, even now, I still remember the moment that day when I saw a linotype type casting machine for the first time. 

I myself don’t know a way to describe how it feels to stand next to a functioning linotype (much less to actually operate one, which can be hazardous at times because of the hot molten metal it spurts). In general, one could simply say that it is a huge complex mechanism for casting metal type that was invented in 1884 by Ottmar Mergenthaler (1854-1899), a U.S. German immigrant. Amazingly, it revolutionized printing to such an extent that its inventor is sometimes said to have been “the second Gutenberg.” But that is at best an inadequate way to convey the feeling of standing in the presence of this clackety, stinky, hot, intimidating, almost room-sized monster that casts lines of hot lead type—one line at a time, hence its quaint historic name “line-o’-type.” more>>>