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progress on
Oxford's Ornaments
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A survey and
display of the typographical ornaments at Oxford University Press
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September 2007
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Printing will soon be finished and the edition is all but sold out as I write.
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In my last newsletter I noted that the type was ready and waiting in galleys.
The next step was to make the forme on the bed of the Western proof press. The
press will
happily print four pages at a time, which means I can lay down two openings on a
full sheet of the Rives BFK paper that I am using. Part of the design has of
course been to decide how the text block will go on the page and where the
running heads and folios will be placed, and now it is the arrangement of
furniture (which stands for the white space on the page) that makes that design
come true. The page size is the same as the four earlier titles in the series.
I've kept the same position for the
text block - more or less - as for Stanley Morison & 'John Fell' and
Harry Carter, Typographer, but I've used a more centred, symmetrical scheme as with the
former. I spent perhaps a day just getting the furniture in place for the four
pages - this scheme will stay in place for the printing of the entire book, and
I have to bear in mind that for about half the book the text is 24em rather than
32em wide, with an 8em column for the displays of the individual type ornaments.
I had to design the furniture to allow easy switching between the two page
formats, to get things precisely where I wanted them on the sheet, and finally
set the lay guide that positions each sheet in exactly the same position
relative to the type. This is one of those moments when you realise that it
actually was a good idea to buy that huge case of Resalite furniture which at
the time seemed an extravagance. |
The main part of the book is 64pp, and as I am printing four pages at a time
there will in principle be sixteen runs, eight fronts and eight backs. But I have to print the
OUP ornaments separately as OUP's type is fractionally (but significantly) higher,
so each sheet must go through again twice more, making a total of thirty-two
runs. When I printed the prospectus I planned an edition of 100 copies so
started printing 130 off each sheet, just to be sure. But by the time the
prospectus went out it was clear that demand would be greater so I have
stretched the edition to 123, hoping that some extra material (further ornament
displays and photographs) will compensate. |
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Overall, the printing of the main text in 13pt Van Dijck has gone very smoothly, and
small piles of sheets have been mounting satisfyingly in the house (you can always tell
when a book is going through the press as our dining room floor gets used as an
intermediate store in preference to the press shop which has a tendency towards
dampness, especially with all the foul weather we have been having recently).
The printing of the ornaments has by comparison been a lot trickier. I can
handle the greater height-to-paper by reducing the packing and adjusting the
roller heights. But anyone
reading the book will learn that the making of the matrices for the ornaments
has never been quite the precision affair of, say, Monotype. Many of the
matrices date back to the eighteenth century, and many more were made in
the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a result the type cast from them
can vary slightly in height from one ornament to another (depending on the
'drive' of the matrix), and indeed in some cases the printing surface on an
individual piece of type falls away
to one side enough to make the printed ornament dark on one side and faint on
the other. This can be dealt with to a degree when printing a single ornament on
its own, by adjusting the make-ready, but when ornaments are used in combinations it is
a great deal harder and one tends to rely on a rather heavier impression than
one would like in order to get some sort of evenness of inking. That in turn
would be acceptable on a heavy paper but the Rives BFK I am using is relatively
light and the result is a slight braille effect. I
comfort myself by looking at items that OUP themselves printed in Fell and
noting the heavy impression they tended to give it. As Martyn Thomas and I
recorded in The Fell Revival, the press-men at OUP always found printing text
set in
Fell a 'challenge' and costings were invariably increased for working with it.
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During my research in OUP's archives I have taken a large number of photographs
of the materials for my own reference, and I have chosen fifteen to illustrate points in the book - I
feel that being able to see the actual matrices, punches, and type gives a
great deal more meaning to the text. This presents the usual problem of how to
incorporate that sort of material - colour photographs in this case - into the
body of the book. Having used archival inkjet (giclée) with success in the past
I decided to use it here. The range of papers suitable for giclée has increased
over the past few years and I shall be using a matte 188gsm archival (100%
cotton) paper from Hahnemühle. As I type, a stack of thirty boxes of 50 sheets
each sits/towers next to me waiting to go through the Epson. Soon I shall have
to put in a bulk order for the seven different ink cartridges that it eats.
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The 64pp of text and twelve photographs are not the end of the story. As I have
been printing the text I have put aside one sort of each ornament for a summary
sheet that will fold out from the book - individual ornaments are referred to here and
there and it makes it more convenient if the majority are accessible easily. For
that sheet I have used yet another paper - Hahnemühle Simili Japon - which is
somewhat smoother and has rather less colour than the Rives; I chose this so
that the detail of the ornaments would be more easily seen on this summary
sheet. There are then the end-papers, which will have large arrangements printed
on them, the dust-jacket for the standard copies, and
finally labels for spines and slip-cases. This afternoon I printed the title on
the title page in a second colour - the fifth time those sheets have been
through the press! Ann Muir has just completed the marbling of the paper that
will go on the boards of the de luxe copies: she has used the same colour
way of the previous titles but this time done them in a French Curl style -
suitably whorly/whirly for a book on ornaments. I shall be collecting them later
this week as well as visiting Brian Settle who will bind the edition for
finalising details. We're nearly there ...
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