Paper selections and decisions

 As I continue along my merry way with preparing this small book; the next step was the cover selection. I had bought this beautiful grey Magnani paper recently (when I was culling all my other papers) because I had planned to use it here. When I discovered a scrap of other paper I had left over from putting together the paper sample book, I wondered if that might work better. The planned grey was cool; and 300gsm. 

The opportunistic grey was warm, and 250gsm. Here they are with the Magnani Map paper between them - warm at the top, and cool at the bottom. I cut mock up covers of both of them and came down on the side of the warm grey, mostly because it just folded and felt better.

And so I cut 50 covers...there will hopefully be two books, each in an edition of 21, with a couple of spares ready in case I muck things up along the way.

There are so many preparations to making a book in an edition like this, and whilst I had done this for the first book, I now needed to do a type count for the second book. Just to make sure once again, that I would have enough type, of the typeface I wanted to use, to print all the words I had to print.

This isn't an issue when you are using the computer. There you have a never ending supply of every letter. When using traditional letterpress techniques however, one really is limited to the number of the letters you have in your tray. So if a quote needs 10 lower case es for example, I need to know I have 10, not nine; otherwise I can't print the full quote.

It is a time-consuming and mind- numbing process, but again if you don't do it, then you get halfway through the printing and have to change direction in a hurry.

I don't mind random moments if that is part of the design of the thing; but when you are going for consistency and accuracy and exact reflections of the words of others, then I really need to know I can make all the words.

So here we are...counting each letter off.

And yet after such a large amount of eye-tiring, inside work, there are flowers...