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The DownStairs Press
George Roberts
When I was five I received a toy typewriter for Christmas. It had a disk with the letters of the alphabet stamped around the edge. By turning the disk to the selected letter and then pressing down on the print lever, the letter was transferred to the paper. This seemed magical to me. It took several days to type my three sentence thank you letters to relatives. The meditative pace, the solitude, the alchemy of words appearing on blank paper all entered my subconscious mind and took up residence there. Now fifty years later, I own a couple of somewhat fancier presses, but I am still devoted to the joys of that slow dance of moving ideas onto paper, into books.
The DownStairs Press is a “whole book” studio dedicated to the ancient book arts of papermaking, letterpress printing and hand book binding. The act of making a book—from that first vision of what might be possible, to presenting the printed and bound final version to the intended audience—contains so many decisions, so many problems to solve, so many design elements that spending a year on completing an edition of ten copies of a single book is not unusual.
Handmade Paper
My teacher, Rebecca Alm, asked the most important question. "What are you going to do with the paper you make?" Paper making is so sensual, so inviting, it is possible to get caught up in the process itself and end up with stacks of beautiful, colorful, textured papers sitting on your shelves gathering dust.
Because the art I practice is book making, I began looking at paper as the first doorway into the text. Fingertips, our sense of smell, and the way our eyes respond to texture lead us into that part of reading a book we often miss.
These handmade pages, made from old cotton sheets, provide the foundation for a project called MOON BOOK. The pages are pulp-painted, using unpigmented pulp and welded moonphase shapes, to create a "lunar month" of pages. Pulp painting introduces other-colored pulp onto the newly couched [French koosht] and still wet sheet so that when the sheet dries, the colored pulp is an integral part of the formed sheet.
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MOON BOOK purports to be the journal of a woman astronaut who sequestered a couple of Morris Graves' Instruments for a New Navigation on board her mission ship. While living on the surface of the moon for twenty-eight days, she discovers, with the aid of these instruments, an entirely different astral body than the one she set out to
investigate.
Paper can be made from any organic source, old blue jeans, cotton sheets, plant fiber. SOLANA BEACH HOUSE is an attempt to give a feel for what it was like to visit my daughter in Solana Beach, California. I wanted to give the flavor of the place without imposing words at all. So I made paper from the local palm tree leaves, used the same palm tree's branches as support, and created a "house" shape that conveys my sense of the unique qualities of that place.
THREE SHEETS TO THE WIND explores the 'layering' method of papermaking by couching [kooshing] sheets of various colors one on top or the other into a single piece of paper. An embossing process, placing a piece of heavy cotton cord with the wet sheets as they were pressed and dried, creates the white line drifting through the piece.
Combining Handmade Paper with Silk Screen, Linoleum Cut, Rubber Stamp and Letterpress Methods
One of the strong interests of the DownStairs Press studio is to explore the interplay of various printing techniques and to use handmade paper in the process. Silk screen, linoleum cut, rubber stamp and letterpress printing all invite the special qualities of handmade paper into the foreground rather than consigning them to the role of invisible second cousin of the printing process. The aim is to combine language and image, word and gesture, into a simple, single piece of art. Sometimes the image takes shape as a two-dimentional print, sometimes as a three-dimensional book.
I WISH I COULD HAVE KNOWN EARLIER... combines hand letterpress printing with a silk screen image. The goal is to find a balance between the screened image and the printed one, between the 'weight' of the color and the 'weight' of the words.
HAND SET TYPE explores the interaction of the linoleum cut with the interplay of three separate texts about printing, books and art. Color, size, font, placement...all play a part in the overall sense of the piece.
RED LETTER DAYS commemorates a few unusual events which occurred during an otherwise ordinary week in a summer not long ago. The rubber stamp lettering
process slows everything down...way down.
Attention to this letter-by-letter meditation, to the gradual filling of the page with shapes, letters, that accrue meaning gives the whole process a luminous quality. The meanings of the words begin to glow, the surface of the paper does too.
UPSIDEDOWN, INSIDE OUT, AND BACKWARDS further explores the marriage of rubber stamp lettering and hand made paper. This Japanese style bound book, using Kozo cover paper and Suminigashi end papers, plays with the phrase "Anything worth doing is worth doing wrong a few times."
This page is from a collaboration, THE CIRCLE IS ONCE AGAIN COMPLETE, made by five book artists. Each of us contributed a single word, then created our own page images and page text using the five words as a starting point. We agreed on size, and on creating the cover paper with leftover pulp from each of our paper projects, and
then went our own ways until we assembled the book.
This page is a 'layered' sheet, several very thin sheets couched one on top of another to produce a substantial yet supple page, just right for receiving the silk screen images front and back. The text is a phrase, constructed with the five words, which 'dissolves' into another phrase at the bottom of the page. The image is individually screened, front and back, using different colors to create a "bleed through" feeling for
the text.
Our cover for these pages also uses handmade paper. We made the binding paper by combining the leftover pulp of our individual paper projects. The end pages are handmade paper marbled with the same pigments as were used in the paper making work.
Collaboration
As shown with THE CIRCLE IS ONCE AGAIN COMPLETE above, DownStairs Press is committed to working with other artists, to making the DownStairs Press studio available as a locus for collaboration. Homewood Studios, the DownStairs Press's home, has five studio work spaces and five artists in residence. One of the intentions of the Homewood Studios project is to bring artists from the neighborhood together to investigate the possibility that one plus one equals three.
THE BREATHING BOOK is another example of this kind of book art collaboration. Six artists decided to work together, to explore the notion that reading a book is somehow like breathing. We each made an original page in response to this notion and made five copies of our page. Each of the other artists then altered one of each of the other's pages. The resulting chapters, an original page and five altered pages, comprise the book - an infinitely changing examination of breathing/reading. A folio binding was designed to allow for an endless arrangement of pages, thus inviting the reader into the process of 'discovering' the text each time it is read.
Handmade Books
We often hear the phrase 'writing a book.' Usually this means putting words down on pages that, eventually, someone else will transfer into a physical object called a book. Traditionally the writing process has been limited to creating the text and its ideas. The responsibility for placing those ideas into a physical environment usually belongs to another person.
Conceiving and writing a text, and then envisioning a proper home for that text...including paper textures and colors, type faces, page design, binding style and cover design...is quite another matter. At this point, writing becomes designing, becomes art making. The book becomes something much larger and more complex than that invisible object which houses words. It becomes a piece of art itself.
I WAS SINGING—EVERYBODY WAS THERE employs a dreamlike text by my brother,Vietnam vet Glenn Roberts, with visual images I created in response to his text. An open spine, wire and thread woven binding was designed to allow the pages to lie flat, to allow for double fold pages (in the Japanese style), and to give a sense of a journal
or notebook rather than a normally bound volume.
A STORY OF EMMA is the first whole book project from the DownStairs Press. The text was written to Emma, a young girl with diabetes, to encourage her good habits in living with the disease. The letterpress printing, hand drawn and colored images, binding and cover were all done in their turn. First a dummy book was finished, to make
all the necessary mistakes.
Then the original was completed and sent to Emma for Christmas, 1992. This practice of conceiving an idea for a book, then following through with all the decisions and writing-printing-binding skills necessary to complete the book comprises the main
thread of what I hope to do at the DownStairs Press.
Book Binding
Learning to 'hold everything together' and to do it in the most appropriate, the most artistic, and in some ways the most invisible manner, are the charges of the binder. The western codex, the binding form we are so used to we rarely think about it, is simply the jumping off point for many other styles of binding.
JULIET AND HUGO used the concertina (little accordion) style binding, handmade paper, marbled paper hinges and 'exploded' xerox images to tell the story of a young woman's ordeal on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas as hurricane Hugo passed directly over her apartment. The almost limitless expanding possibilities of the binding form support the image of the lull-storm-eye-storm-calm pattern of Hugo.
The Japanese CHITZU, a notebook or diary with separate case, is made from mulberry paper, Japanese silk cloth, and hand-printed flower design paper. The notebook is bound in the traditional Japanese style with the binding thread visible on
the outside and with each page double folded and the folded edge out.
The geometrical pattern on the case creates balance and tension with the floral pattern used for the notebook cover and end papers. The next step for a book like this would be to imagine the appropriate text to live in such an elegant house.
DownStairs Press welcomes inquiries about commissions for book making projects. Contact Downstairs Press.