Word: presse
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Hunched up to waist level, the Vandercook flatbed cylinder proofing press is massive and precise. It has the dull gleam of steel measured to minutiae. Its cylinders, slick with ink, curve and whirl like the combs of the brain...
...Arrow Press was founded 22 years ago by James Barondess, then a student in the house. At that time presses printing from handset type were being cast off by newspapers, and type foundries were closing. Barondess went around the country buying up type and collecting the materials needed to start a press. Since then, it has been running quietly--almost secretly--in this basement under the care of one of the Adams House tutors...
...initiates of the press is Sarah Hulsey '01. Hulsey is a Linguistics concentrator, but she has always been attracted to the art of books. When she was a child, her mother used to entertain her by sewing pages together on a sewing machine. Hulsey's current projects, however, are much more advanced. She is collaborating this semester with poet Susannah Hollister '01 in creating a broadside of poems. In the spring, armed with a grant from the OFA, they will also print a book of ten to twelve of Hollister's poems in an edition of about fifty copies...
...composing stick'. Almost all the surfaces in the room are piled under with tiny spears of lead, each tipped with its own character. The tables look beset by a plague of silver locusts. When the letters have been collected they are laid flat on the bed of the press, where the text is meticulously spaced out and held together by flat strips of metal called 'furniture'. The arrangements of this spacing material form the almost invisible choices of margin and indentation--these are the most crucial work of the printer. As Hulsey puts it, in setting a line...
...Because of the complex and painstaking nature of printing, student work takes the form of a sort of one-on-one apprenticeship with the Adams House tutor in charge of the press. Hulsey is working now under the mentorship of Katherine McCanless, a non-resident tutor in Adams House. McCanless is unabashedly passionate about the literature she loves to print and insists on working "from the text out." Her own recent projects include the printing of eleven lines from a new translation of 'Beowulf' by Seamus Heaney. McCanless has been delighted with the enthusiasm of her students, but laments that...