|
Before the update on progress, here's a plug for a TV programme this coming
Wednesday, 17 December: BBC 4 at 2100 - The Perfect House: The Life and
Work of Palladio. If my hunch is right, one of the people appearing will
be Witold Rybczynski, author of the book The Perfect House, which
accompanied my wife and me when we toured Palladio's villas in the Veneto in 2006
and which I'm sure helped bring on Palladio's Homes as an idea for a book
from The Old School Press. Indeed, Professor Rybczynski has contributed an essay
on Palladio to our forthcoming Palladio's Homes; indeed, it is already
printed . . . but I get ahead of myself.
I made two trips to
Stan Lane at Gloucester Typesetting for the type. It fills a 75-galley rack once
I have broken it down into the different pages. The 14pt Dante is in fact a
Didot point size, so, as Stan cast it on a standard 14pt body, some letters
overhang at the top or bottom very slightly, which makes inserting and removing
leads a tad dangerous - one can all too easily lift out those overhanging
letters when pulling out a lead. Up to this point I had still not decided how
much to lead the type but now I had facing pages of Italian and English it was
the time to try different leadings, print them up, and see how they looked.
Interestingly - and annoyingly - the Italian and English looked quite different
with the same leading. I knew there would be a difference in their appearance -
Italian, like its forbear Latin, has fewer letters with descenders (p and q and
the occasional g) compared to English (with g and y appearing quite often as
well as p). The Italian looked just right with 3pt, whilst the English still
looked a little cramped. On the other hand, the Italian looked too 'windy' at
4pt whilst the English looked fine. I tried having 3pt-leaded Italian facing
4pt-leaded English but that looked a mess. Finally a compromise was necessary: I
decided in favour of the Italian and went for 3pt. This meant ordering a stack
of 34em 3pt leads from Stan as well as the type.
I had ordered 3,500
sheets of a lovely, soft hand-made from Cartiera Amatruda, in Amalfi. Once it
had arrived in the UK it took me another week to satisfy the bureaucracy before
the shipper would deliver it, which included sending them proof that my bank had
paid them and the supplier. I naively assumed they could check their bank
accounts to see that I had paid by electronic funds transfer, but no. The paper
has four deckle edges which makes registration impossible on a proof press which
operates by gripping one edge. So I had to make two trips to a friendly
guillotine owner to slice the entire shipment in half to give one edge for the
grippers - that would at least guarantee good backing up, whilst still leaving
some variation in side-to-sideness given that the deckle edge would still be
used to bring the paper against the lateral guide on the cylinder (hope you're
following this). Now I have 7,000 sheets of paper, each yielding four pages, and
each of which must go through the press two, three, or four times for the texts,
blocks, and lino-cuts.
Towards the end of
October the linocuts and line
drawings arrived from Signor Rapp, and suddenly things were starting to take
shape, though a number of technical problems arrived with them - more of these
in the next newsletter. He has illustrated seven of the villas, each with a
large line drawing which I shall reproduce with a line block and a linocut
providing a colour mass. He has specified the colours to be used as Pantone
colours so that I can get the inks made up. And I have an extra illustration
which I think will work perfectly on the title page.
Now that I had his
splendid illustrations I could think about the final structure of the book. As
it turned out all of his illustrations except two span the two-page opening
devoted to each villa, which means that I must ensure that each such opening is
on a single sheet of paper. Suddenly I seemed to have a lot of four-page
sections - in fact fourteen in a row - and I would really like to avoid having
sewing thread running down the middle and over the illustration. Time to get up
to Ludlow Bookbinders and talk to Brian Settle about how the binding could be
done. The suggestion was that simply gluing these sections together would
suffice, whilst normal sewn 16pp-sections would be used for the preceding and
later material - it is just this middle part that needs different treatment. I
wasn't convinced - but then I'm not a binder, so two weeks later I received a
dummy from Brian with the book made just that way and solving the problem
neatly. Now that I knew the bound structure of the book I could finalise the
pagination and make my own paste-up which has that structure and into whose
pages I could paste the appropriate parts of the galley proofs that came with
the type. This tells me what text/line block/linocut goes on which side of which
of the 7,000 sheets now piled in the press, and using it I can draw up a
schedule of what openings will be printed when. In all I have 81 separate
print-runs of between 180 and 200 sheets each to get through. :-(
A final decision
must be made before machining can begin: the edition size. I am aiming for 160,
of which I will keep a small number of sets of sheets for binders, perhaps just
ten.
So there we have it.
As of this moment I'm just coming up to half way through those 81 print-runs,
generally managing three a day, each of up to 200 sheets. I don't want to rush
things but it would be good to be able to take at least a display copy to
the Modern Works on Paper fair at the start of February (see below) . . . |
