Tuesday 27 August 2013

A Nearly perfect Book

A great piece HERE on the Arion Press in San Francisco - a fine art letterpress printer and publisher. 

In 1970 the Arion Press published an edition of Melville's Moby Dick:
To study the Arion Press edition of Moby-Dick today is to have an almost sacred experience of the power of physical print. Its ink is black, with wide margins and initial letters in a dark, aqueous blue. The paper is a faint blue-gray, like the surface of the ocean on a cloudy day. When the reader lifts a page to turn it, the watermark of a whale shimmers through. Because the letter w is particularly wide, Hoyem made the abutting spaces slightly narrower; every semicolon has a hairsbreadth gap before it, as if signaling the partial stop. The result is something that one would not think possible: a nearly perfect book.
an image from the book [HERE].