You’re a Times New Romance!

Friday February 9, SCU Letterpress got everyone ready for Valentine’s Day by hosting a card printing and decorating event. We had the best turnout we have ever had at this event, with at least 75 students, faculty, staff, and family members filling Dowd 306 and 310 between 3-5pm to print, decorate, and de-stress on a Friday afternoon. We’ve set the bar pretty high with Valentine’s designs in the past, and I’m happy to say I think we met the bar this year. Kathryn Kain made a stack of special decorative Valentine-inspired stock to print on (see middle photo), they are…

Harvest Fest Letterpress at the Forge Garden, 10.26.23

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…

Printer’s Valentines, 2/8 CAH Open House Letterpress Event

On Wednesday 2/8 SCU Letterpress helped co-host the Center for Arts and Humanities Open House held on the 3rd floor of Dowd. The many people who contributed to putting on this event included Michelle Burnham, Amy Randall, and Britt Cain of the CAH; and myself, Kathy Aoki (AAH), Renee Billingslea (AAH), and Heather Turner (English) of the DHI and SCU Letterpress. We had a great array of participants and visitors at the Open House and printing event, from our CAH Frank Sinatra Artist in Residence Mark Duplass, to groups of students, staff, and faculty from across campus. Visitors started in…

MLA 2023 slides: “Blood Type: Printing Battlefield Labor in the 18th Century”

If you’re at MLA this weekend, please come to our New Directions in Book History panel! Session 264, Friday January 6, 12-1:15pm in Moscone West 3000 (level 3). I’ll be presenting on the labors of making eighteenth-century printing ink, especially red ink, and how that work matters when you read texts printed in colors other than black ink (but black ink, too). Here are my slides – they may change slightly before tomorrow, but these are a final draft. I’m concerned that the red text pages may be hard to read or inaccessible to some, so I will provide a…

Making Sonnet Books in Letterpress Composition

This Spring term I was grateful for the opportunity to team-teach Letterpress Composition once more, this time with Renee Billingslea (Art & Art History). After first teaching this course in Spring 2019, with Kathy Aoki (Art & Art History), we decided to put the course on hold during remote instruction since team teaching was made possible by a Dean’s grant (thank you!), and we did not want to use that on a remote teaching experience. For the final run of the course, we added a binding element to take advantage of Renee’s strengths in binding. Our last assignment brought writing,…

Videos for “Resistance in the Materials: A Gathering of Printers Pressing for Change” Plenary and Roundtable Events, 25-26 Feb. 2021

The videos are here! The #antiracismUMD YouTube channel just released recordings from “Resistance in the Materials: A Gathering of Printers Pressing for Change.” The two-day bicoastal event, held 25-26 February 2021, centered BIPOC artists, scholars, interventionists, and allies who leverage “print” broadly construed across many media as an accessible form of activism capable of leaving its own unique impressions in diverse communities. Featuring Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, Jonathan Senchyne, Victoria Law, Sarah Matthews, Rio Yañez, and Amy Suo Wu. “Resistance in the Materials” was co-organized by Santa Clara University (Kirstyn Leuner, Kathy Aoki, Michelle Burnham) and the University of Maryland (Matt Kirschenbaum,…

Resistance in the Materials: A Gathering of Printers Pressing for Change

It’s now March 8, unbelievably, and I’ve finally caught up sufficiently on grading and administrative tasks to blog a bit about a recent two-day event I co-organized called “Resistance in the Materials: A Gathering of Printers Pressing for Change.” The organization efforts for this event mirror the interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of the event itself. Resistance in the Materials was a collaboration between the year-long Antiracism Series at the University of Maryland’s Center for Literary and Comparative Studies and Santa Clara University’s Center for the Arts and Humanities. A discussion begun by Tita Chico (UMD) and Michelle Burnham (SCU) early…

“How Anne B. Poyntz Lost Her Je ne sçai quoi (1769) to a Patron, a Printer’s Reader, & Google Books” – Technologies of Print Symposium 2.19.21

Here are the slides for my talk, “How Anne B. Poyntz Lost Her Je ne sçai quoi (1769) to a Patron, a Printer’s Reader, & Google Books,” delivered at the Technologies of Print Symposium: Geographies of Meaning on 19 February 2021. I have also included a few additional links for reference. British Library’s catalog record for Je ne sçai quoi : http://explore.bl.uk/BLVU1:LSCOP-ALL:BLL01017187626. British Library’s digital library copy of JNSQ: http://access.bl.uk/item/viewer/ark:/81055/vdc_100024578154.0x000001 Google Books’ PDF of JNSQ: https://bit.ly/3azqR1q ESTC record for JNSQ: http://estc.bl.uk/T27753 Worldcat record for JNSQ: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/561404295 Thank you to the following people for your assistance with this project-in-progress: John Boneham…

BWWC 2020 (TCU), co-presenting with Danna D’Esopo (’20)

From College Notes, March 27, 2020: “On March 6, Kirstyn Leuner (English) and Danna D’Esopo ’20 (English) co-presented their paper, “By A Woman, in Red: Anne B. Poyntz and the Blush of the Page,” at the 28th annual British Women Writers Conference, held at Texas Christian University. Their paper argued that Poyntz begins her book of letters and poems, Je ne sçai quoi (1769), with a dedication printed in red ink in order to make her book appear to blush. The blush is, on the surface, the customary apology that all 18th-century women writers were expected to make for their published writing. But Leuner and D’Esopo…

Flat-Back Case Binding Workshop SFCB (Core 2)

On Sunday, I spent the day at the San Francisco Center for the Book learning how to make a flat-back case binding with our instructor Nina Eve Zeininger. I bought myself this workshop as a birthday present, so I was eager to cash it in even at the loss of a Sunday outside on my mountain bike. This class is the sequel to Core 1, coptic binding, that I took last May and blogged about here. I must say that I did not succeed in taking as detailed notes during this class because it moved faster (presuming we remember Core…