The dragon begins to stir

Today I met my last editing deadline for the year, and yesterday put the finishing touches on my latest letterpress project, which should go in the mail any day now. Here's a preview:

In case it's not obvious, my new favorite typeface is Keynote.

Speaking of favorites, here's an awesome piece hanging in the studio, pulled off by Em Spacers Rory Sparks and Kyle Durrie during a residency at Wisconsin's Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum. It never fails to blow my mind imagining wood type that huge, much less the machinations required in printing on that size paper.

I love the attribution.

Happy birthday, Blog!

This week marks five years of writing this blog, my little content monster. Post something, and moments later it's hungry again. Still, it's a good companion as I make my way trying to use (and polish) my skills and learn new ones. That gaping electronic maw, yearning for posts, helps keep me working, whether it's making stuff, photographing stuff, or writing about it.

So far more than 19,000 people have visited my li'l stoop along the infobahn. Judging from the key words they use, people all over the world (from Lesotho to Lithuania, and Laos to Peru) are hungry for Chinese bookbinding, all the more reason to get the last two-thirds of my bookbinding manual-adventure tale out of my mind and onto the page or, uh, monitor.


With the sale at Em Space over, I'm on to the next gigs, including:
• teaching a free bookbinding workshop at the Northeast Community Center
• more book editing, for a title coming out next year from Oregon State University Press;
• working gallery hours at Em Space; and
• scheming on dragons, featured animal of the coming Chinese new year.

The Em Space event went great—I even sold a L'Invitation! It was wonderful to see everyone, meet new people, make sales, and share in the great adventure of finding the place. Now that the construction around Em Space is mostly over I have better directions: Take Southeast Seventh all the way to Division, turn left, then first two rights, then left after passing under the fancy new overpass. Em Space is a few doors to the right.

I have a few items left from the sale (including some of the clamshell boxes shown below), so if you missed it and are yet hankering for some chiyogami goodness in your life, get in touch and we can set up a studio visit. Given how tough that vintage San Francisco bookcloth is (half my fingers were bleeding last week), I probably won't be making any more just like this anytime soon.