Letterpress was excited to be invited by the Forge Garden and the Center for Sustainability to be part of Fall Harvest Fest during Mission Week.
There were a whole bunch of firsts for letterpress that made this a great learning opportunity: it was our first time printing outdoors at an event, the first time wheeling the table top C&P over on our brand new printing cart (print-on-wheels!), and our first collaboration with Kathryn Kain (Art & Art History). Special thanks to Maria Judnick and Rebecca Nelson for your invitation and for putting so much care and thought into this special event. I believe you counted almost 80 visitors, and everyone I saw was enjoying being outside and doing activities, like pumpkin carving, visiting the plants and chickens, letterpress printing, eating cookies, and taking a great mental health break during midterm week. Personally, I had a blast and my students said that they did, too.
The press was stationed on the deck of the solarium, which is a little house with a library and kitchen. It was sheltered from falling leaves and debris yet still outside. We had excellent natural lighting and good weather.
The print was a collaboration between myself and Kathryn Kain. We wanted to set an autumn vegetarian recipe for printers to take home and cook, and we settled on butternut squash soup. However, I wanted to amp up the engagement and whimsy of the print beyond a simple recipe, so we turned the recipe into a bit of a riddle. We called it Mystery Fall Harvest Soup and supplied all of the quantities, steps, and ingredients except for the main ingredient, which is not too hard to guess. For the lit history buffs: can you spot the Christina Rossetti allusions?
Each print came with an envelope to decorate as well as the recipe’s garnish ingredients, sage leaves and pepitas, in a little packet that printers collected at the table beside the press.
The Forge also dedicated their kitchen table to a decoration station for printers to decorate their envelopes and prints. If printing almost always produces surprise and a huge smile when the printer gets their print off the press, then the decoration station is a zen space, where we can all enjoy personalizing our prints for gifts or our own pleasure with markers, colored pencils, stencils, and stamps.
Process: The Gory Details
Every letterpress project has a back story, a tale of inspiration, woe, and troubleshooting, and this one was no different. Kathryn and I cut down this recipe for butternut squash soup to its bare minimum, knowing we had only a 5×7 inch printing space to work with on the table top press, leaving enough room for pins at the bottom of the platen to hold the printing paper. While editing the original recipe down to its core, we kept an audience of undergraduate cooks in mind and retained some details. For typefaces, we picked Caslon shaded for the header and Goudy Old Style for the text body. I love Caslon open face headers, but in retrospect I think the Goudy was perhaps too formal for the body content and occasion, and I would have liked to try a sans serif. However, we ran out of time for this, despite starting the setting process weeks in advance.
Our first proof lock-up was far more obstreperous than the one pictured below. In the final lock-up, there was just one problem area on the line ending in “tender” where we had to work some tightening magic with a trick courtesy of Mary Laird.
Our early proofs simply set the recipe, and we proofed them on the Nolan proofing press in the studio with the form locked up in the chase. Proofs are always exciting because you’ve spent hours coming up with a design and setting type, and you finally see what happens when you ink it up and apply it to paper. We also deliberated over dingbats and borders related to Halloween, making some good and some questionable decisions. This is perhaps our 5th proof, after we had already revised and corrected some errors in the form.
You can see that we had some alignment issues to fix on the left margin, and some punctuation we revised, but the best typo of all is in the last line. The “crusty beard” survived several proofs and made it all the way to this near-final proof. It was the typo that didn’t want to be caught. But once I did catch it, it inspired me. It said: this recipe could be more: more playful, more whimsical, more fun to interact with after you pull a print and walk away with it. I toyed at first with making a pirate-themed recipe, leaving in the crusty beard and adding “3 cloves of garrrrrrrlick” and any other pirate allusions I could cook up. However, this didn’t fit well with the theme of the event of Harvest Fest as part of Mission Week. So I canned the pirate theme and instead drew some inspiration from Mad Libs and another source that I find quite Halloween-y: Christina Rossetti’s poem “Goblin Market”.
This is the final version printed by a student, who also added some floral stamps to the print, which I love.
Kirstyn Leuner, Associate Professor, Santa Clara University 