I’m one of the artists in this session of the LMCC Swing Space residency on Governor’s Island. I’ll have space there till the middle of December to work on new and exciting free informational pamphlets. I just started this weekend and it’s glorious.
I love that I can go there during the week when it’s not open to the public. I remember that the first summer it was open, I went and was amazed by the abandoned ghost town quality of the place, which is disappearing now, what with the dance parties and teeming crowds of families and the carnival rides. But it’s quieter during the week, even with construction and rehabilitation of the old buildings going on.
Here’s some photos of the buildings on the island leftover from its time as a military base:
In honor of this week’s heat wave, I bring you some fresh-off-the-press news.
Bam! New Pamphlet, in the mail, despite the fact that I think I’m getting a heat rash.
Escape Wheel is the New Informational Pamphlet for Summer 2013. Escape Wheel concerns time: biological, mechanical, relative, and narrative. Why don’t you go to work in the middle of the night? Why don’t we still use water clocks? Who’s more useful, an inarticulate engineer or a dodgy astronomer? What is a sextant? And many other pressing questions, both of our time and the times of others. Includes diagrams, rants, and useful knowledge for many occasions.
And that’s not even all! I bring you the new home of all things pamphlet-related:
Yep, my babies have their own home now. Come on by for occasional paranoid rants and old-timey technological excursions by your very own contemporary pamphleteer. I made it myself!
The first batch of new pamphlets are in the mail. Action at a Distance, the Fall 2012 Brain Washing from Phone Towers Informational Pamphlet, is an exploration of Isaac Newton, the Principia, and the beginnings of the Royal Society in London. Math! Plague! Mean Anonymous Pamphlets! Kids, the seventeenth century had it all.
I upped my edition size and increased the size of the recipient list this time around. So, if you’re new around here, welcome. Do you have some questions? I’ll try to answer them as follows:
What is this?
Clearly, it’s a free informational pamphlet. Like this one:
I got a new camera. I’m pretty excited about it.
Why did you send this to me?
Why not? I have a strictly whim-based distribution system.
Less evasively, I like to share the surprise. Printmakers like printmaking partly because it comes with a surprise inside; we spend lots of time making a plate, but we’re never quite sure how it’s going to look when we pull a print off of it, so when we do, bam, it’s a surprise. But people looking at the print later don’t get to have that experience, they just see a piece of paper. Anonymously mailing pamphlets to people is one way to spread the surprise around.
I have a list of people I send these things to, which changes for each pamphlet. Some people are always on the list, some people are sometimes on the list, some people just get one copy. It changes. Usually they are people that I’ve met or worked with over the last year or so, but sometimes they are strangers, or almost-strangers.
Why is it about Isaac Newton?
The real question is, why aren’t all of my pamphlets about Isaac Newton? He didn’t make friends until he was 45. He argued with almost everyone he met. He invented calculus and didn’t tell anyone. Cranky loners, that’s my favorite kind of people. Did I tell you about how, when he worked for the mint, he used to hunt down forgers and have them drawn and quartered?
Why does it look different from the rest of my mail?
It’s printed letterpress, that’s why. From genuine metal type and woodblocks, just like the original edition of the Principia. Like this:
There’s more information here and here and here about how it was made.
Also, the rest of your mail is just bills and credit card offers. So it’s way better than that.
Why pamphlets?
I’ve posted this before, but I just love it:
“The pamphlet is a one-man show. One has complete freedom of expression, including, if one chooses, the freedom to be scurrilous, abusive, and seditious; or, on the other hand, to be more detailed, serious and ‘high-brow’ than is ever possible in a newspaper or in most kinds of periodicals. At the same time, since the pamphlet is always short and unbound, it can be produced much more quickly than a book, and in principle, at any rate, can reach a bigger public. Above all, the pamphlet does not have to follow any prescribed pattern. It can be in prose or in verse, it can consist largely of maps or statistics or quotations, it can take the form of a story, a fable, a letter, an essay, a dialogue, or a piece of ‘reportage.’ All that is required of it is that it shall be topical, polemical, and short.”
-George Orwell, in an introduction to the British Pamphleteer
Brainwashing from Phone Towers? What’s that all about?
Well, generally it has something to do with the distribution of information in a paranoid context. Less generally, but more tangentially, it has to do with this seminar I had to go to.
As a Professional Arts Administrator, I often get sent to Professional Development Workshops, because funders don’t just want to give us free money, they want us to do something called Capacity Building, which in my case usually means sitting through an hour long presentation about Why Your Organization Needs to Use Twitter. The last one I had to go to stuck out for me because the presenter was this guy with a headset on, like a drive-thru window headset, and he just kept walking back and forth and back and forth on the stage really really quickly, and shouting at the top of his lungs about his smart phone and about his twitter feed and his social media fan base and on and on and on and he just kept on yelling about how we all needed to be doing this because this is the most important thing that we all have to be doing, because this is all that matters, because this is the future.
And honestly, I have nothing against social media. I spend a lot of time with social media. Here I am, writing on the internet! But I have a lot against being bulliedinto using social media.
Also, you know all those studies on cell phones and brain cancer? The ones that say there’s not a link are all funded by the telecommunications industry. Just so you know.
Why don’t you just blog? Why bother printing something at all? Don’t you know it’s the future?
Because if I just blogged no one would read it. My mom’s the only person who reads this blog. And if you did accidentally stumble upon this blog for some reason, you’d get halfway through one post, then think to yourself, all of those words, all in a row, and then get distracted and go watch a cat video.
If you send someone something in the mail, hand addressed to them, printed letterpress so it’s all nice and special, people read that. That’s the truth. And most of the people I send these pamphlets to later reach out and say, hey, thank you for sending me that pamphlet. That was nice. And so for a brief moment in time I get to live in a civilized society. I enjoy that, I really do.
So in this week’s episode of ridiculously-time-consuming-acts-performed-in-my-limited-free-time, I give you pamphlet, side two:
My favorite thing about letterpress is the fact that you have to build up something three-dimensional to print something two dimensional. So it’s sculptural and flat at the same time.
This can be something you carve:
Or something you assemble out of thousands of tiny pieces of metal:
Or something you improvise:
But it has to hold still somehow. The image on the second side of the pamphlet is based on this one:
Which is a woodcut, and I had to decide when I carved my block if I wanted to bother carving the letters or if I wanted to use metal type for that part and print it separately. I went with the second option.
So far, so good. Except now I have to build a forme around it to hold all those letters in place.
Ok, that’s a start.
Better.
Best. See all that stuff around the letters? That’s empty space. One of my favorite things in the world is when two contradictory ideas are simultaneously true.
Every time I start a new pamphlet, I pretend that this one won’t be so wordy, but clearly I’m failing at this.
If I could just restrain myself, I’d be done by now. When I bought the type I’m using for the series, it was just about enough to set the whole thing. Those days are long gone. Each pamphlet gets wordier, which means more type. When I run out of letters, I have to print what I have, put everything back, then set the next bit, etc. At this point, I think I’m going to have to set, distribute, set, distribute, and set, distribute, set in order to get this one done.
Which is ok, I mean, obviously I like setting type. This is what I willingly did with my holiday weekend. I hope yours was just as pleasant and productive.
I started making pamphlets because I live in New York, and something that we have a lot of here are people who stand out in public and scream and yell about something, the thing varying, but the tone of voice generally similar. And when I pass these people if I am not paying much attention I generally find myself agreeing with them, at least in intention, if not in detail. There are many reasons for this, some of them being:
1. Aesthetics. I come from a family that is full of mentally unstable alcoholics, who spend most of their time shouting and gesticulating wildly, so when I come across strangers in public acting similarly, it’s like home.
2. Often, what they are shouting about is generally related to Our Imminent Death, and How We Should Think About These Things. Which I really do completely agree with, even if I’m totally paying attention. I’m 100% behind the idea that we are all going to die really soon, and we should all be thinking about that, because that’s really important. I think I probably come to different conclusions that they do on the subject of what to do about that fact. But still.
3. They often have printed materials that they would like you to read. This one really gets me: Because usually it’s religious printed materials, which means that they are trying to give you a pamphlet because they think it is going to save your soul. Think about the level of faith in the printed word that that demonstrates. I love me some print, but I have never run something through a press and then taken a look at what I have done and thought, Now this is going to get someone into heaven.
I really have only half the amount of faith in print that the average proselytizer has, but in honor of that staggering leap of faith I make free informational pamphlets. I’m working on a new one right now, based on the 17th century, a heyday for the pamphlet in many ways. Hopefully it will be done this fall, fingers crossed.
“The pamphlet is a one-man show. One has complete freedom of expression, including, if one chooses, the freedom to be scurrilous, abusive, and seditious; or, on the other hand, to be more detailed, serious and ‘high-brow’ than is ever possible in a newspaper or I most kinds of periodicals. At the same time, since the pamphlet is always short and unbound, it can be produced much more quickly than a book, and in principle, at any rate, can reach a bigger public. Above all, the pamphlet does not have to follow any prescribed pattern. It can be in prose or in verse, it can consist largely of maps or statistics or quotations, it can take the form of a story, a fable, a letter, an essay, a dialogue, or a piece of ‘reportage.’ All that is required of it is that it shall be topical, polemical, and short.”
-George Orwell, in an introduction to the British Pamphleteer
The fifth in a series of Free Informational Pamphlets is fresh off the press and about to go out into the world. Produced with the good graces of the Paper Fox Printmaking Workshop at Lawrence University, and the kind support of Benjamin D. Rinehart and his students, Escapism for Amateurs is an investigation of the life and times of Harry Houdini, favorite son of Appleton, Wisconsin and pioneer in the realm of escapologists, who built his career on demonstrating the ability to escape from a huge variety of restraints and difficult situations. Escapologists escape from handcuffs, straitjackets, cages, coffins, steel boxes, barrels, bags, burning buildings, fish tanks, and other perils, often in combination. The possibility of failure and death thrills their audiences.
Escapism for Amateurs includes a graphic timeline detailing the life and times of Harry Houdini in an international context. Produced in an edition of 82, half the edition is going back to Appleton, Harry’s childhood home, to support the activities of Paper Fox, and the other half is going in the mail to lucky selected recipients. Huzzah!
