Tuesday, May 5, 2015

what's next for Electio

there's been something of a hiatus in printing at Electio, occasioned by damage to my shoulders after years of wielding a heavy ink roller & handpress handle turning - right now I am doing gentle exercises & receiving physiotherapological pummelling in order to loosen the shoulders and heal the damage - so I'm planning smaller projects than books, even tho I have two books on the bench to which I am committed - one, a poem by Robert Wood I commissioned last year, and the other, a selection of poems by my friend & mentor of the 1960s George South - 

meanwhile, a suite of prints or broadsides is being prepared - poems are in from Ross Brighton, Marion May Campbell, & Robert Wood, two more are in preparation (I'll announce those when the poems are in), and I may add to it myself - for the broadsides Robert Wood will turn the press's handle for me - the proposal at present is for the broadsides to be available as a boxed set, with some prospect of individual copies also being for sale - the overall edition is likely to be 26 copies, each approx 230 x 305 mm (9 x 12 inches), with a range of papers, types, designs, colors, and some hand-work on all or some of the prints by Miriam Morris - 



as part of my thinking about how I might usefully 'down-size', as the saying goes, I have ordered a few sheets of papyrus (yes, made in Egypt) to see what other prospects can be in store - and it has only just occurred to me to wonder if the printerly fascination with Zerkall Nideggen paper (see picture above), with its very visible laid and chain lines and darkish tan color is in part due to a sort of historical memory of the texture & color of papyrus, upon which so much of the original western literary & philosophical heritage was written - after years of messing around on the edges of Ancient Greek material, I started formal study of the language at Melbourne University this year, and 'I wouldn't be surprised' (as Archilochos said after seeing what seems to have been a solar eclipse), if I began writing poems in Greek - and wouldn't it be great to be able to print something that looked like this, from Callimachos (taken from Wikipedia) classified as an 'Elegy, Aitiological poetry' -