Mind Your Ps and Qs

Mind Your Ps and Qs was a recent exhibit held at NSCAD's Port Loggia and Treaty Space galleries in Halifax, NS. This exhibit was a celebration of the Dawson Printshop and Bindery and all the amazing work that has been created by folks who have studied and worked there over its many years as a focal point of book arts education in this city.


As a Dawson alumnus I was thrilled to have a couple of my own books included in the exhibit alongside the 15 other artists. The scope of work included traditional bookbinding, artist's books, letterpress printing, printmaking, and tool making. The photos above provide a glimpse of some of the other work in the show by (top L-R) Charles Salmon, Em Doucette, Joe Landry, Odyssean Press, (bottom L-R) Robin Wolfe, Katherine Victoria Taylor, Em Tremblay, and Nat:Shaw.

Congratulations to the Dawson Printshop and Bindery for its enduring influence on the local book arts community and to Odyssean Press and others who helped to make the exhibit a success. An extensive review of the exhibit has been posted on the Nova Scotia Book Arts Group blog.

Woodblock Letterpress printing - 3

During our third class I was able to print the second colour on the cards that I started last week. Here's one of the cards coming around on the print roller, with the silver text now printed on top of the black.


I also got some pictures of the bookbinding gear that lives at the Dawson Printshop. You know you want a paper cutter like this one. It can cut through anything - paper, book board, arms...


More gear, presses, hot stamping machine, finishing press... imagine having such equipment at your disposal!

Beautiful Books & beautiful baby!

Earlier this week, I visited the Anna Leonowens Gallery, which is an art gallery at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. There were two concurrent exhibits that I wanted to see.

The first exhibit was all the winning books of the 2010 Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design in Canada. Thirty books were selected for the awards, chosen from 252 entries published in 2009, from 108 different Canadian publishers.

It was nice to see so many beautifully designed books all in one place. I especially liked one of the children's books City Alphabet by Joanne Swartz, which received an honorable mention in that category. It is a modern abcedarian using imagery and words captured in our urban landscape. A couple of the books in the reference category were among my favorites too. Living Proof: the Essential Data-Collection Guide for Indigenous Use-and-Occupancy Map Surveys is a gorgeous book. The title may not sound very exciting to some, but the presentation of the content is irresistible - even if you don't have a penchant for reference books!


I was disappointed to find that the winners in the Limited Edition category were not on display, boo! I would have liked to see those. If you are interested, there is a full list of the winners on the Alcuin Society's blog.

The second exhibit, was Tactile Notebooks and the Written Word. This was a collection of journals filled with all manner of text, image, object, etc, that were created by NSCAD students in a class where their goal was to "to heighten their sensory experience, expand understanding in unexpected directions, and deepen their artistic vision." It was fascinating to flip through these books and see and feel what each of the artists conveyed.


This visit to the Anna Leonowens Gallery was refreshing since I have been just a little out-of-touch with the book world over the past few weeks. Obviously, since I haven't added anything to my blog for over a month! Apologies for that. As some of you know, my little girl Mallory was born on June 20th so she has been distracting me! As we settle into a new routine, I plan to get back into my bookbinding studio occasionally.

Introducing Mallory! Born June 20, 2010

The Dawson Print Shop

The first bookbinding course that I took, was at the Dawson Printshop. At that time, it was located in the Killam Library at Dalhousie University. There was a bindery room set up for classes, but primarily it was full of antique printing equipment with over 1000 cases of wood and metal type.


I was reminded of my time at the Dawson Print Shop recently becuase I am running low on hard drive space. I suppose I should explain that a bit better.

While I was at Dalhousie and taking bookbinding classes at night, I was more officially a student at the School of Information Management. One of the projects I worked on as a graduate research assistant, was the History of the Book in Canada project. Specifically, I was the computer nerd making the databases work for the HBIC Electronic Resources component of the project. (And just having visited the website, it appears the database search interface isn't working...is it possible that Lasso is not compatible with new browsers? what a shock!) So, anything computer-related or website-related was handed to me. During the development of the project website, I was given a key to the Dawson Printshop and sent off to take photographs of the equipment so that we might use them on the website. So, I was alone in the print shop with a camera, poking around taking pictures!

This is a replica of a 17th century Plantin-Moretus common press.

So recently when my C drive complained about being low on free space, I went through some old folders looking for stuff I could delete since I tend to save everything. One of the things I found, was a folder containing some of the photographs that I took that afternoon.


The Dawson Printshop has been moved to the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. I have been to visit since the move and the new space is much more vibrant compared to the no-window zone of the Killam Library. I discovered some photos of the new Dawson Room, on Nik's blog, who has been fortunate to work and study there.

A Workshop on 3rd Century codices

I just spent the weekend at a bookbinding workshop with Susan Mills, offered through the continuing education program at NSCAD (Nova Scotia College of Art and Design). This is quite exciting for two reasons: first, because there are very few bookbinding-related activities in this area so any chance to do stuff with other bookbinders is great; and second, because it was about a fabulous historical binding that I'd never seen or heard of before.

So we learned how to make Coptic Single-Quire bindings. There were 13 of these books discovered in 1945, buried in a jar in Egypt, dating back to the 3rd or 4th Century - often referred to as the Nag Hammadi codices. These would have been account books or other stationery books, where the textblock could be easily replaced whenever necessary. They were all papyrus and most were single quires.


That is the best part. These books have just one stack of pages, all folded together, up to 40 sheets. The text block needs to be pressed for a long time to get it to fold happily. The leather covers were lined with papyrus to make them stiffer. And they have ties at the top and bottom and a wrap-around strap or tie on the fore edge. The original books were quite large so they probably needed all these ties to keep the books closed properly.


I was able to finish three of these books, one is leather and the others have paper covers. They are each made a bit differently. The brown paper book was done entirely non-adhesive. The leather book is the only one with papyrus in the covers. I also added the pretty paper flyleaf to these books. And the dark red paper cover is the only one with pasted endpapers, but no flyleaf.

The binding itself consists of tackets through the quire and cover. I have tried to make tackets before and was never successful, but I mastered it today. All of the books have several tiny tackets in the corners for reinforcement so I got lots of practice.