The Printing

Here's the part many have been waiting for.

All the research, history, design...What about the goods?

Democracy Spoken Here is a type art piece using a group of phrases from famous quotes of people from American history. They spoke of a true democracy, where every person really does count--regardless of their color, gender, race, belief--and now, very significantly, identification.

Whoa! Not so fast with those facts!

With the advent of what I call mutable media, we're stuck in a perpetual 1984: a recombinant jumble of events kluged into "alternative facts" of the day.
Proof of events is refuted because the once-unrefutable truth beheld by the cold eye of the photograph can now be manipulated to "delegitimize a president".

Fully aware of and capitalizing on the lack of digital savvy many have, the current administration has painted a picture of itself as a technological underdog at the mercy of those who attempt to deliver the facts. Calling reality into question seems to always have been America's real pastime.

Which is why print media remains so significant, even as huge printing plants fade as a romantic memory and consolidates into corrals of brokers. There's a wall to scale here: I wrote a few weeks ago that a nice portion of NYC earned its living in the print shops on Canal Street--and that erosion of jobs started in the early 1990's with the final and decisive blow to it in 2008 with the event of the tiny portable computer--the phone. What could take its place?

IT is one consideration. Still predominantly male, a quick certification gets you a job hooking people up to their ethernet ports. Some ascend the sales and design ladder, depending on the attitude toward innovation (read: education). So, is that where the meat-and-potatoes crowd went?

OK, no more snide remarks. I enjoy a good burger once or twice a year myself.

The idea behind Democracy Spoken Here is a resurrection of the art and craft of printing while resurrecting the art and craft of rebellion. A few words in black ink on a white piece of paper, printed just enough times to classify it as evidence go a long way to remind people that differences among people do not signify inferiority or failure.

We take for granted that many of the struggles of the marginalized have given us what we treasure today--starting with something as simple as the eight-hour work day.

What's under the lens here is authenticity. A few words might seem fairly straightforward to execute as genuine. Designing the typography and selecting the finest print medium that reflects their times is, though an art form, merely mechanical. The words are what stand as a testament to truthfulness and accuracy that we so cherish in this country, and which is so imperiled at this time.

Printing--Conversation II

The first known cover of
my high school mag-
azine. When the new
building got rid of its dome,
name of the magazine changed
to DOME.

In high school, I became art editor of my school's magazine, DOME in my sophomore year. Although my public high school wasn't much to talk about, and still maintains its mediocre status in NYC's DOE roster, it came from the grand tradition of having both a monthly newspaper and a twice-yearly magazine.

Both publications had their own offices and DOMINO, the school newspaper, talked about pertinent events like school sports, academic achievements and the occasional music review (of which my brother wrote a few) while DOME was the art and literary magazine and featured the more fine art side of the school.

And, both were printed in their own representative style: DOMINO was black ink on newsprint, and DOME was black ink on coated paper stock with a 2-color Kromekote cover. Kromekote is a beautiful white-clay-coated paper used for offset--and now digital--printing. Sadly, it yellows and is not archival, but the surface is smooth as glass and lends itself well to hand lettering destined for print reproduction.

Designing the layout of the magazine was also my entry into print production, since every aspect of the magazine had to be handled by the students--all the way to the doorstep of the printer. We even had an advertising and budget staff--with some very tenacious individuals--one of whom sells TV ad time for the Super Bowl to this day. Just about everyone else on my staff entered the magazine art, design or writing industry one way or another. I spent most of my education years longing to become an art director or photographer for magazines. That's how intoxicating magazine life can be and sadly,  careers in it are often for the very affluent.

Which is to say, no one with a trust fund was ever found working in a press room.

The print-on-demand kiosk at
MoMA. No longer do pillars
of unsold catalogs linger at
their bookstore. Not a sheet
wasted.

I loved printing and publishing; ink on paper was the way to express everything from Happy Birthday to an incite to riot. I devoured everything I could find about printed materials: the wonderful Constructivist movie posters, magazines from the 1950s forward, the giant movie posters wheat-pasted in the subways--yes, they were offset printed as late as 1998. I just wasn't wild about printed illustrated books. That permanence didn't resonate with me, even though my first job out of art school was to work as an assistant in the Studio Books division at Viking Press.

I believed--as I do now--the print medium, is meant for immediate consumption; immediately disposed of the next day. Its preservation in an archive is perfectly acceptable and necessary; however its manufacture to a more permanent intent makes books seem pretentious and outdated as they come off the press, even before they're bound.

That's why I love the museum catalog digitally printed on demand from a kiosk. But, alas, it's also a symptom of a developing American disease: Fact Amnesia.

We tend to forget anything we've said or done by the next news cycle, and pin its reporting on the dreaded media.

A permutation of American Exceptionalism? Ask Vladimir Putin--or as our new president would say: I don't know, you tell me.

Printing --Conversation I

Most of my friends' dads were printers, and their jobs were safeguarded by the unions. They went to work on the A train, and stood in the noise, dirt and smell of the giant presses that sat in hulking manufacturing buildings in what are now the tonier sides of town: DUMBO, Soho and Tribeca.

This was the set I had; I eventually
stored the letters in a jar; discarding
composing rods. 

When the "Negroes" came, they moved into areas in and around downtown Brooklyn through to East New York, disrupting the "safety" of the long ride on the A. Some came from the South, and others, "The Islands" (the Caribbean), starting a shift: the printing industry gradually changed from white pressmen to black ones; and as the production sphere turned digital, IT and production became more diverse, too. What's interesting is that middle and upper management in the print industry remained overwhelmingly working class white in New York, and, as I'd discover many years later--in 2000!--in the Midwest also.

None of this affected me at the time. We were the second "Latins" on the block (my godmother and her family were the first). And, our was landlord "forgiven" for renting to us because--I think--my mom was an Italian national and we were light-skinned, though we had other discrimination issues to deal with.

Now this would have been nice to own.
Note the R and Q. Not entirely Clarendon.

However, most significantly, my parents had never experienced the sense of security--the cradle-to-coffin guarantee of a job, house and pension--that the white working class had in my Queens neighborhood. Partly because we were immigrants and partly because my parents had experienced WWII where all economies were upended, we had an inner sense that we would always have to create the padding to let us land on our feet. We never had anything to take for granted, and that was OK. It meant that education was everything, and I believe that's why, quite often, immigrants send their kids to school.

Back to how I was exposed to printing.

My print exposure constantly developed in many different environments. My dad, not at all a printer, loved print medium. He would sit down with me and show me, through a magnifying glass, how the different colors of the Sunday comics were made up of dots of four colors, and how the tightly placed "rosettes" created the illusion of the color photographs on the covers of LIFE, Vogue and Ms. magazines.

This looks closest to a Clarendon font. Look at the
Q and R.  It appears to be condensed, however.

But the real magic came when he bought me my first rubber print set. There were animals and letter stamps; I don't know how my tiny fingers could be so dextrous to handle the square letters, but they were. I think if I look for a set I'll find it; I'll post an updated image.

What's fun to note is that I added text to my drawings (and later, in art school, silkscreens) with that same rubber set. The images I've found around the Internet show some sets as well as others with wood handles. The font is of the Clarendon inspiration, but alas, the give-away is the R and the Q. I did find one with a version of Clarendon, included here.