The Elegance of Italics: An Introduction to Calligraphy
Cheryl Jacobsen

Stems and Béziers: An Introduction to Typeface Design
Peter Bain

Letterpress Printing from A to Z
Katherin McCanless Ruffin

Making Books: The Beginning!
Shanna Leino
 

Session Two
13 – 19 July 2008

Calligraphy: The Dynamics of Movement
Ewan Clayton

East Meets West: Traditional Japanese Printmaking and Western Techniques
Keiji Shinohara

Moving Parts: The Book as Kinetic Sculpture
Dolph Smith
 

Session Three
20 – 26 July 2008

More than the Sum of its Parts: Turning Letters into a Typeface
Sara Soskolne

Considering Text and Image
Inge Bruggeman

Boxed In: Creating Custom-built Enclosures
Anna Embree

The Elegance of Italics: An Introduction to Calligraphy
Cheryl Jacobsen

The elegant and versatile italic hand is an excellent introduction to calligraphy because this basic form is legible and establishes essential calligraphic skills, as well as providing a basis for continued study of other hands. Consistent changes to this hand make it adaptable enough to take on any personality and allow for creative expression. We will start at the very beginning and work our way through the basic tools, terms, textures and forms. We’ll talk about layout, paper, writing fluids and resources. We’ll do a lot of practice with one-on-one instruction, see many examples, get a bit of history and end up with several small pieces, one final project and a reference folder to look back on after our week is over. This is a great chance to concentrate on the basics in a lovely, well-equipped scriptorium.

Cheryl Jacobsen is an artist & freelance calligrapher in Iowa City, Iowa, who has been working with lettering, illustration, fine and book arts for over twenty years. As an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Iowa, she teaches a variety of classes for the University of Iowa Center for the Book including a History of Western Lettering, and several in basic and advanced calligraphic hands. Her work has been seen nationally and internationally in shows and publications, and has been in many Letter Arts Review annuals.
 

Stems and Béziers: An Introduction to Typeface Design
Peter Bain

Typefaces are letters, symbols and marks that work together as a coherent set. In this workshop, participants will learn typeface design through development both on paper and on screen. The class will start with informal lessons and continue with group discussion and critique. The format will encourage individual hands-on time in the Book Arts Center’s Digital Imaging Classroom. We will be using TypeTool for its simplicity in the design and production process. Your point of departure may be your ideas, favorite pens or brushes, or a digital sketch; bring them all. Topics to be covered include a functional analysis of familiar types, test words for evaluation, typographic drawing, control characters, fitting and trial settings. Expect live bézier curve wrestling as well as appreciation for the subtle and the brash. Basic knowledge of Adobe Illustrator is recommended.

Peter Bain has been a Madison Avenue type director, avid student of letterforms, and historian of typography. Incipit, his design studio, has produced wordmarks, digital typefaces, handlettering and typographic design. He has taught typography and lettering in New York at Parsons/The New School for Design and at Pratt Institute, written form Communication Arts magazine, co-curated the exhibition ‘Blackletter: Type and National Identity’ at The Cooper Union; and served as chair for the Type Directors Club Typface Design Competition. He finds type speaks with many accents, including those heard in Richmond, Virginia.
 

Letterpress Printing from A to Z
Katherin McCanless Ruffin

Learn the fundamentals of letterpress printing by exploring the subtleties of inking and impressing metal and wood type into paper. Typography and page design will be taught as you use the concrete design tools of traditional hand printing – metal type, composing stick, and press – to create and refine beautifully printed pages. Each student will print a broadside or small artists’ book during the course of the week using metal & wood type and Vandercook presses. There will be a field trip to Boxcar Press to learn about printing from polymer plates, and a collaborative, creative exchange with Shanna Leino’s bookbinding class across the hall. Designed for those with no printing background, this course offers an excellent opportunity to learn about letterpress printing, and will include historical perspectives on the art and craft of letterpress, as well as practical tips for pursuing further letterpress work. Come get inky!

Katherine McCanless Ruffin is Book Arts Program Director at Wellesley College Library where she integrates the book arts and the history of the book with various facets of the humanities. She publishes limited editions under her own imprint of Shinola Press. She has taught at The Center for Book Arts in NYC, Penland School of Crafts, and the San Francisco Center for the Book, and worked as a printer and designer at Firefly Press in Boston. Katherine is a graduate of the University of Alabama MFA Program in the Book Arts. 
 

Making Books: The Beginning!
Shanna Leino

How a book functions is affected by factors like size, paper, covering, sewing method & thread, and board construction. Understanding how these elements behave in bookbinding provides the ability to make a book, be it traditional or non-traditional, that works in the manner intended.
We will explore the balance between the technical aspects and the conceptual development of book projects. The choices of structure, book action, and materials are always an integral part of how a book is experienced or read. We will look at how they enhance, or perhaps detract from, a book’s functioning. It sounds serious, but this will be a week of fun! We will make several types of bindings and enclosures, creating books that address both content and structural principles. We’ll also take part in a creative exchange with Katherine McCanless Ruffin’s letterpress class.

Shanna Leino is a studio artist living and working in Harrisville, New Hampshire, where her time is divided between building historic book models, one-of-a-kind carved bone books, and in producing a small line of hand tools of steel and bone for book makers and craftspeople. Shanna had taught workshops for the Garage Annex School for Book Arts, Scrub Oak Bindery, The Guild of Book Workers, Penland School of Craft, and for the University of Georgia’s Study Abroad Program in Cortona, Italy.
 

Calligraphy: The Dynamics of Movement
Ewan Clayton

This class is about basics. How pen & ink make contact with the paper, how a movement is initiated, with what kinds of force it can flow and along what paths. As an a-typical introduction to calligraphy, this class can be enjoyed by novice and advanced participant alike. Our calligraphic vehicle will be a particular letterform family: uncials. As a transitional form, uncials remain open to a variety of interpretations. Our emphasis will be on using them as a spring board for our own calligraphic development, discovering the range of movements we can make, their sequencing & contrast, and in the process learning more about how an alphabet works and what it is that makes even simply written artefacts meaningful and significant. Participants will create a portfolio of pieces that explore the beauty and versatility of uncials.

Ewan Clayton lives in Brighton, U, where he runs his own calligraphy studio. A Professor of Design at the University of Sunderland, he also consulted at the Xerox PARC in new technology and quality of life issues. He and his family worked in a guild of craftspeople founded by Eric Gill. Ewan has exhibited in the UK, Europe, North America and Asia. Interested in trans-cultural dialogue, in 2000 he curated the exhibition ‘Spring Lines: Contemporary Calligraphy East and West.’ Ewan enjoys working consciously with heart & spirit as well as technical excellence.
 

East Meets West: Traditional Japanese Printmaking and Western Techniques
Keiji Shinohara

Woodcut is the oldest technique for printmaking and combines with today’s technologies in many exciting ways. This course will explore Western and Eastern techniques as we examine the print work of Rembrandt, Goya, Picasso and Munch, along with the Japanese masters Hiroshige, Utamaro, and Hokusai.
Students will learn about using various types of wood for different effects. Carving techniques using knives, gouges, Dremel tools, etc. will be taught, as well as surface-building techniques. Our printing process will include the Western use of rollers and of printing multiple color blocks at once, and the Japanese technique using watercolor, rice paste and a baren. All processes will be by hand; no presses will be used.
Students will start with a black and white image, then use one block with multiple inking techniques, and finally create a Japanese-style color woodcut with multiple blocks.

Keiji Shinohara was a Master Printmaker n Japan before moving to the United States. His natural abstractions are printed from woodblocks in the traditional Ukiyo-e style of 600 C.E. He diverges from tradition by experimenting with ink application and different materials to add texture to his prints. Elegantly understated, these works are a fusion of Japanese aesthetic and Western moderism. Keiji teaches printmaking at Wesleyan University and has been a visiting artist at over 100 venues. His work is in museums in San Francisco, Cleveland, at Harvard and in the Library of Congress.
 

Moving Parts: The Book as Kinetic Sculpture
Dolph Smith

We will approach the book as a small kinetic sculpture with moving parts. Twenty pages plus the covers makes twenty-two moving parts. Using the traditional multi-sectioned binding, we will find ways to set these ‘parts’ in motion. Wooden covers for example, may have odd materials moving about behind etched glass windows. Our books will be built of wood, copper, leather, and/or found and made materials, and then they will be finished in milk paint, graphite, book cloth, veneers and lots of imagination. It is fair to say that the book block will be considered ‘blank,’ challenging the maker to fill it. We will be using simple power tools: scroll saw, drill press, Dremel, and wood burning tool.
Students should expect one-on-one work with me and plenty of encouragement to create each book on their own terms. 

Dolph Smith has over 1,200 works in collections nationally and abroad, and was profiled with nine other American bookmakers in The Penland Book of Handmade Books. His artwork evolved from drawing and watercolors to paperworks and sculpture and finally to one-of-a-kind handmade books, and he is currently creating unique books as kinetic sculpture, animated three-dimensional objects with moving parts. He says, ‘If a book has thirty pages, I see thirty moving parts plus the covers. I believe the illustrations in a 3-D object should also be 3-D!” 
 

More than the Sum of its Parts: Turning Letters into a Typeface
Sara Soskolne

More than just creating a matching set of individual letterforms, typeface design is about constructing a system out of patterns of black and white. The rhythm created by the repeated interplay of its positive and negative shapes defines a typeface as much as any of its more obvious design details – and this is also its innate challenge.
This course will introduce the tools and principles of digital typeface design through one-on-one, no-holds-barred engagement with an individual project of your own choosing-be it the systematizing of your own lettering, the imagining of a complete alphabet from a found fragment, the articulation of that ideal set of forms in your mind, or the revival of a non-digital typeface you love. Experience with bézier drawing and some degree of previous involvement with lettering or typography are both strongly recommended.

Sara Soskolne is a typeface designer working with the New York foundry Hoefler & Frere-Jones, an as such has the good fortune to be allowed to draw typeforms all day long. She received her MA with distinction in Typeface Design from the UK’s University of Reading (really, no pun intended) in 2003, has taught the subject in the graduate program of Yale University’s School of Art, and is a former graphic designer who now has the annoying zeal typical of a convert. Warning: it could happen to you, too!
 

Considering Text and Image
Inge Bruggeman

In this course we will examine the multiple relationships text and image can have on the printed page. An image can illustrate a text, detract from or complement, or even contradict it – in like manner a text can describe an image, detract from or complement it, or have its own, separate visual significance. We will explore ideas like these using hand-set type and various image-making techniques suitable for letterpress printing, which may include photopolymer plates, linoleum blocks, collagraphs and monoprints. Students should bring several favorite tests, poetry and/or prose, from which they will chose one to use for several different projects. As we work on our image-making, we will re-contextualize the text with each technique while exploring the dynamic relationship between printed text and image. 

Inge Bruggeman lives in works in Portland, where she teaches Book Arts at the Oregon College of Art & Craft. She makes a variety of text-based artwork and runs Textura, a letterpress printing business that published limited edition, fine press artist’s books under her imprint INK-A! Press. Her work has been shown here & abroad and is owned by a variety of institutions including the Getty Research Institute, British Library, Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, and New York Public Library. Her artist’s books are in collections at Yale, Harvard, and Stanford.
 

Boxed In: Creating Custom-built Enclosures
Anna Embree

Boxes serve both aesthetic and functional purposes: they house and protect just as they present and enhance. In this class we will create custom-built enclosures with an emphasis on dynamic and complex forms. We will explore basic box making techniques such as measuring, fitting, covering, and casing; these will be considered also in connection with more complex components like partitioning and layering. We will discuss aesthetics in the context of overall design as well as selection of materials and structures appropriate for specific applications. The structures we will construct will be suitable for housing individual objects or for more complex applications such as accommodating items with unusual shapes or larger collections of materials. Our goal will be to construct sound, imaginative and exciting boxes.

Anna Embree teaches bookbinding for the MFA in Book Arts Program at the University of Alabama School of Library and Information Studies. She previously taught at the University of Iowa Center for the Book, where she completed a 4-year apprenticeship in Bo0okbinding and Rare Book Conservation. She has worked in conservation at the University of Iowa Libraries and as a studio coordinator for the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina. She and Steve Miller have been taking their Alabama book arts students to Cuba for collaborative work there for several years.