Loaded Guns

A Derringer engraved with Aesthetic Movement ornament by Otto Carter

 

Images from The Handy Book of Artistic Printing. 
 Aesthetic ornament came out of the British design reform movement of the early to mid-19th century. Aesthetic design is eclectic, features exotic motifs (especially Japanese), and geometricized natural elements. Later in the century "artistic" became the shorthand, often commercial shorthand, for any design even remotely Aesthetic.
These are specimens of artistic printing—commercial letterpress printing's foray into Aestheticism

Recently, my business partner Doug received a phone call from a man in Abilene, Texas, named Otto Carter. Carter had stumbled upon our book, The Handy Book of Artistic Printing, in his online research for ornament. After finding us through our ornament style guide on the Vectorian site (Vectorian offers collections of historical ornament in clean digital vector form) he became a big fan of Handy and of Aesthetic ornament in particular. So much so, he wanted us to know, he was using it in his work engraving guns. Yes engraving guns. Carter also works on other "bro"-centric items, like knives, vapor e-cigarettes, motorcycle parts, even golf clubs—virtually everything I know nothing about—but his concentration appears to be guns. While I dont agree with gun culture and hunting, which Carter also embraces, I got over that fairly quickly in the name of design*. I was so taken with the fact that we'd made a dent in this completely foreign niche industry I decided to find out a little more about Otto Carter and custom-engraved guns.

First I must tell you Carter is damn good at what he does, which is to work metal by hand with a graver. No machine templates, no laser etching, this is all hand work. Carter has a background in art and specialized in decorative sign making and gold leafing for many years. In 2002 he took a week-long course in engraving and found an entirely new calling. It was slow going at first, "Engraving has a huge learning curve," he said, "I don't care if you're Michaelangelo, your work in the beginning is not going to look good." Well past that stage now, his gun commissions—working, shooting, guns— each take about 2 weeks on average to complete and cost several thousand dollars. Each is virtually encased in ornament.

"I have always been a student of style," Carter says, "and sort of bounce from one to the other.” On his site traditional scroll work, tribal and quasi-Celtic geometrics, Renaissance Revival foliage, religious scenes, even Aztec motifs are all in evidence. “I also did a lot of pin-striping on cars and motorcycles,” he explained, “and was really influenced by the Kounter Kulture types like Ed Big Daddy Roth.... So some of my engraving has a lowbrow look to it.” (I'm assuming he's referring to the odd skull and crossbones hidden amidst the gems). "The planets aligned" when he tried out Aesthetic ornamentation on an e-cig and then a derringer. “When people see the derringer they react to it like nothing else.” A derringer, I found out, is a remarkably cool, vintage-looking "palm pistol." The erroneous spelling of 19th century arms manufacturer Henry Deringer's name has come to stand for any small pocket pistol. Put artistic ornament on the derringer and you've automatically got a piece straight from Gangs of New York.

I asked why he thought the Aesthetic ornament seemed to be so popular. “I think people like it because it is full of surprises. It is rich with unexpected elements. Traditional scroll work is rhythmical and predictable. Also, all the unique cuts of the Aesthetic motifs lend themselves so well to chisel work. It is truly the engravers style.” Which is apt since the ornament in artistic printing was all cast or carved in metal to begin with. “Right now I'm doing a traditional scroll piece and I'm not very excited about it.” he lamented. “I'm hooked on Victorian!”

Watch a wonderful little video on Carter created by an e-cig company.

All gun images © Otto Carter

Renaissance Revival foliate scroll work

Aztec

tribal-Celtic geometricized scroll work

*(I couldnt quite get over the gun he engraved for Rick Perry)

Seeing Color/Printing Color

APHA conference poster by Doug Clouse of The Graphics Office

Typographer Nick Sherman will speak about 19th century chromatic wood type— typefaces made up of separately registered components which were printed in two or more colors. These types were designed so that the color overlap produced a third color. Nick will focus on William Page's 1874 specimen book, a tour de force of Victorian typographic fantasy. Images by Becca Hirsbrunner

The American Printing History Association's annual conference on all aspects of color printing— antique and modern, fine and pulp comic book style, from practical technique to color theory—is coming up October 18–20. Keynote speaker is Dr. Sarah Lowengard. Her brilliantly written and richly detailed monograph, “The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe” (online here) covered "color as an idea and color as the outcome of technological processes." In other words: arcane cultural tangents and obscure chemical distillations, adroitly presented. Coincidentally I had posted about Lowengard three years ago (with lots of pix!) in a meandering commentary on color.

Dear reader, depending upon your point of view, upcoming APHA talks will either sound like parodies of eggheadedness or give you a frisson of excitement at having your esoteric niche interest celebrated thus: “American Currency: Three Hundred Years of Color Printing,” “Chromatic Type and William Page’s Magnum Opus of Multi-Color Typeface Design,” “Adding Color: The Business of the Stenciller in Twentieth-Century Publishing,” and “Worlds, Dot by Dot: Four-Color Process in the Age of Pulp Comics,” among others. This last talk, by designer Gabriella Miyares, sounded so cool it almost highjacked this post. Instead I'll give it it's own spotlight, next.

Scrapbooking: mishaps and object lessons

The scrapbook is pretty large, about 15 x 17. Each linen page is pasted back and front with scraps of printed woodcuts and engravings hand-colored with watercolor paint.
The whole thing is dirty, creased and coming apart— but its fabulous.

At last years Ephemera Fair, Doug, Sam, and I bought a large scrapbook of brightly hand-colored printed illustrations. Culled from a series of British children’s chapbooks, the scrapbook’s most recent image appears to date from about 1837 but many of the images are “cuts” created years, even decades before. All the clippings are affixed to pages of linen edged in red silk and are bound in a now-disintegrating cover marked “Juvenile Scrapbook” and “B. de B. Russell.” 

“B. de B. Russell”? Was that a business, place, or person?

Person.

We discovered what we had purchased in Connecticut in 2012 was a scrapbook created 175 years ago to mark the birth of a little tyke with a preposterous name. It turned out Blois de Blois Russell was born at the very start of the Victorian era, on June 6, 1837, near Birmingham, England. He rowed crew for St. John’s College, Oxford, and, according to a sniffy email response from the Oxford registrar’s office, he was most certainly matriculated as a “commoner” (not nobility or even a “gentleman-commoner”). We also discovered he died under unrecorded circumstances in 1860 just before his 23 birthday. He seemed to have come from compromised stock as his brother and a sister both died very young as well. Whether being saddled with the name Blois de Blois Russell had any impact upon his health is unknown.

And now, a bit of background on the chapbook: Stories, ballads, rhymes and popular tales of piety were passed down through the generations verbally. These oral transmissions started to be written down and printed in the 16th century as broadsides, leaflets and booklets called chapbooks. These were popular, cheap, and cheaply produced texts of instruction of any sort, typically from 8 to 32 pages and sold by itinerant peddlers called chapmen. “Chap” is etymologically related to an old (Middle?) English word for “trade” (see place name Cheapside in London), and by extension, cheap. Chapbooks in the form of manuals of instruction and entertainment specifically for children became popular in the mid-1700s. These small chapbooks and other printed matter proliferated and gradually took the place of the medieval educational form of hornbooks—the alphabet carved on a wooden paddle and literally covered in a transparent sheet of horn. Chaps were sold plain as printed or colored for an extra cent or two. Who did the coloring? Surely women and children. Pure speculation, but what a Dickensian thought: little waifs with their paint pots working in the dim glow of a lamp, so other, more cosseted children, like B. de B. Russell could enjoy their handiwork...

Balloon Ascensions and fireworks: Happy 4th

I'm sorry to say I dont have a specific credit for this great photo, but I found it here.

I wonder when the last baby given the name Ebenezer (or Zenus) was born

The real Gashlycrumb Tinies

because it's perfectly reasonable to use beer and coffins to teach the ABCs

A late adaptation of "The Tragical Death of an Apple Pye"

A chapman (also called Running, Walking or Flying Stationers)— an itinerant book and broadside seller

Oh dear, someone's let the Elephant into the room again.

Ephemera Fair 32 this past weekend

Obsessed.
Doug, Sam and I went up to Old Greenwich for Ephemera 32, the antique paper and printed matter fair held by the Ephemera Society of America. It was more paper, posters, postcards, business cards, autographs and advertising than you ever thought could possibly survive the decades, priced from a couple dollars to several thousand. There we stumbled upon a large and (to a bottom-level ephemera collector) breathtakingly expensive scrapbook of brightly hand-colored woodblock illustrations seemingly culled from a series of British children’s books. The latest image appears to date from about 1840. All were affixed to pages of linen edged in red silk and were bound in a now-disintegrating cover marked “Juvenile Scrapbook” and “B. de B. Russell.” We were unable to get it out of our minds as we drank our tepid coffee in the lunch area.

Dear Reader, we bought it. More on the scrapbook as information surfaces.*

Now, on to some background research: Stories, ballads, rhymes and popular tales of piety were passed down through the generations verbally. These oral trasmissions started to be written down and printed in the 16th century as broadsides, leaflets and booklets called chapbooks. These were popular and cheap—and cheaply produced— texts of instruction of any sort, typically from 8 to 32 pages and sold by itinerant peddlers called chapmen. “Chap” is etymologically related to an old (Middle?) English word for “trade” (see place name Cheapside in London), and by extension, cheap. Chapbooks in the form of manuals of instruction and entertainment specifically for children became popular in the mid-1700s. These small chapbooks and other printed matter proliferated and gradually took the place of the medieval educational form of hornbooks—the alphabet carved on a wooden paddle and literally covered in a transparent sheet of horn. (There were folding cardboard items called “battledores” that were also used as instructional items in the early 1800s. Named after the paddles used in the game of shuttlecocks, the ones I've seen dont actually look like paddles and dont seem to offer any benefit from having this more complicated folded form. A wash if you ask me.)

Certain publishers became known for this sort of printing expressly. The Newberys of St. Paul's Churchyard, London, for instance—proprietor, son, stepson and nephew— published a couple of thousand titles over the period 1740-1814, including A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, Little Goody Two-Shoes, and The Newtonian System of Philosophy Adapted to the Capacities of Young Gentlemen and Ladies.

Just about everything captivates me about these things: their small, beautifully worn and weathered form; the texture of the printing and hand coloring; the elliptical, incongruous, sometimes morbid text; and of course, the strong, graphic illustrations (The celebrated engraver Thomas Bewick and his brother started out carving woodprints for children’s books in the mid -late 1700s. These illustrations were copied, reused out of context, and adapted for decades).

You may have already noticed more than a passing resemblance to the work of Edward Gorey. I wonder if he amassed an actual collection of these? Or was he just proficient in the curious ways of the chapbook... 

All images from these sites:

Ball State University Digital Media Collection

Banbury Chap Books and Nursery Toy Book Literature, 1890 from Google books
The Historical Children's Literature database at the University of Washington—worth hours of perusal!

*In doing feverish research since the Saturday purchase we’ve discovered the scrapbook belonged to someone named “Blois de Blois Russell”, an Oxford alum who died at 22.

Atheist, Radical, Poet

Unused design for Shelley's Ghost exhibition at the New York Public Library

Proposed banner for Shelley's Ghost exhibition at the 
New York Public Library. Unused.

The Funeral of Shelley by Louis Édouard Fournier, 1889
A romanticised view (painted much later) of Shelley's friends burning his body on the beach in Italy after he drowned.(Walker Gallery, Liverpool) We used this as a mural in the show.

Shelley's water-damaged pocket copy of Sophocles' Tragedies, with him when he drowned.
Its about 3 x 5 x 2" thick as I recall. Perhaps if he had tossed this brick he would have had a chance...

Presumption-- "a new Romance of peculiar interest"
The 1823 playbill for the stage version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

"Mr. T. P. Cooke in the Character of the Monster"
—an early portrayal of the monster before he acquired neck bolts

Design for one the specially created letterpress keepsakes with quote from Shelley.
They chose not to print this one...
Shelley self-published The Necessity of Atheism at age 19. It got him kicked out of Oxford.

Four letterpress keepsakes with quotes from Shelley (designed by Doug and me!)
that were ultimately produced.
Free for the taking at Shelley's Ghost

The ghost of Shelley's Ghost...
proposed banner treatment, unused.

Proposed banner for Shelley's Ghost exhibition at the
New York Public Library. Unused.

Cover and inside cover for the brochure

The exhibition Shelley's Ghost has finally opened at the New York Public Library—
Doug Clouse, Barbara Suhr and I worked for months on the design for this show!

I had detailed some of my early thoughts and background inspiration in a post when I had just started the project:

a small but significant exhibit at the New York Public Library on the life of Romantic poet and early hipster Percy Bysshe Shelley (August 4, 1792 – July 8, 1822)....The show is related to but quite different from Oxford University/Bodleian Library's Shelley's Ghost exhibit and catalog. Some of the items in the show will come from Oxford, but a majority will be pulled from the NYPL’s Pforzheimer Collection, one of the premier collections in the world for the study of English Romanticism.

So please stop by the main library on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street and take a look. It's in the Wachenheim Gallery on the main floor. You'll find:

• the book Shelley had in his pocket when he drowned (see above)
• handwritten manuscript pages from Frankenstein
• Harriet Shelley’s last letter before she drowned herself
• bits of Shelley’s skull 
• an illustrated cast of characters (just how were all those Marys, Janes and Claire related anyway!) 
• free letterpress keepsakes we created for the show, expertly printed by Coeur Noir press in Williamsburg
• and, as they say, much, much more

We were encouraged to incorporate theatrical flourishes into the show's design... Perhaps to the surprise/dismay/delight of Shelley scholars! Let me know what you think. All comments (and constructive criticism) welcome.