Now, the English department does not get a lot of money to maintain itself, because its graduates generally don't go on to make millions of dollars in oil/gas/whatnot. There are a lot of changes and improvements which just can't be afforded, but it does the best that it can, and even has a really cool room which holds the letterpress studio, also known as the TTU Letterpress Lab.
Several English professors have donated quite a bit of their own time and money to bring about the existence of this letterpress studio. There are a few different beautiful presses, including a simple tabletop proof press, a tabletop platen, and a handpress.
In the fall, I had applied to join the Letterpress Lab apprenticeship program, in which I could have worked my way up from a "printer's devil" to an actual printer and be able to print things and work in the press on my own. However, it turns out that I was a semester or two too late, as the program was going through several changes and the apprenticeship is no longer an option. Graduate students get to take a letterpress class, which I'm pretty jealous of, although there are talks of having an undergraduate class in the future (probably after I graduate, of course).
Anyhow, several really cool documents have been printed by hand in the TTU Letterpress Lab. Some of the coolest are broadsides of poetry. These are one-sided, single-page prints which are usually quite unique and beautiful.
These are a couple of the ones I've collected.The three on the left are poems by poets which were brought in to speak for the English department: Mary Szybist, Jeffrey Harrison, and Robin Becker. (We studied books by Mary Szybist and Robin Becker for the capstone poetry course I took last Fall, and it was really great to be able to meet them, hear them read, get books signed, and then get these broadsides as an extra souvenir.)
Last week, the English department paired with the Tech Book History Club (which I'm technically a part of but I haven't been able to make it to more than one meeting all year) to hold an open house for the letterpress studio. This was a chance for people to come and experience the awesomeness of hand printing that normally wouldn't have that opportunity.
We got little blocks of linoleum to print with. We came up with designs that we wanted, and carved out the white space on the linoleum. Then we went into the letterpress studio and printed with our blocks, using a small, tabletop proof press. Here you can see the prints that I designed and made.
The block was put down and secured in place, had ink rolled over its top several times, had paper placed on top, had extra filler paper placed on top of that, and then a roller was dragged across the top of the whole thing, to transfer the ink from the block onto the paper.
The whole process was pretty simple and fun. I'm going to keep looking for a way around the graduate-students only rule, but for now I have these two pretty little prints to look at.
Thinking happy thoughts while recovering from my post-finals sickness,
The Purple Writer
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