Home press experiment

July 10, 2011 | Filed Under Experimental imaging, prints | Leave a Comment 

Several years ago I purchased a whole pile of old 10 cent pocket edition books at a used book store in Chattanooga. They were marked for clearance in a large bin for something like 25 cents each. So I bought them all. They have made for excellent reading over the years, even now the intro to Plato is in my glove box as back up reading material. Some titles are a bit more strange “electricity and life”? the publication dates range from 1920 to 1924. What has fascinated me the most is the paper, I love to buy badly damaged used books just to extract the vintage paper out for various projects. These 10 cent pocket editions are 3 inch by 5 inch, or standard index card for a modern printer. So using some ink wet plates from my ongoing study of Marietta Square I ran three artist’s proofs printed directly onto some of the blank pages from each book. The paper is nearly 90 years old and is aged to perfection, each is so unique in color and wear. Anyway here is the first run I am pleased with this first result and will work on some more formalized ones soon.