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Sandy Tilcock lone goose press
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About the Beaverdam Press
Earle Henness, Proprietor of The Beaverdam Press, printed the old-fashioned way; from lead type, hand-feading the paper to Chandler & Price platen presses similar to the one shown here. At the turn of the century, everything was printed on presses like this: books, newspapers, art, posters, broadsides (posters with text and sometimes images), business cards and stationary. Now off-set presses and computers have taken over the commercial printing market, but around the world, lovers of fine printing still search out the book makers who painstakingly print books on letterpress machines and bind them by hand. |
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Producing books this way is incredibly time consuming, but the results are truly worth the effort. There is nothing to compare to a well-printed letterpress page or the way a finely bound volume sits in your hand, waiting to be opened and read.
Among the books and broadsides produced by The Beaverdam Press are the following:
Books
Printers on Morris edited by John J. Walsdorf, illustrated by Barry Moser. A miniature book in an edition of 326. Printed in 1981.
Dibdin's Ghost by Eugene Field with frontis engraved by Rudolf Milpacher. A miniature book in an edition of 135. Printed in 1986.
Elrae, The Littlest Printer written and illustrated by Bob Griggs. A miniature book in an edition of 225. Printed in 1987.
The Syd Glasso Spey Flies Introduction by Deke Meyer, illustrated and hand-colored by Richard Bunse. Quarter vellum and boards, spine gilt-lettered, in an edition of 100. Printed in 1989.
Brutus Goes to the Seashore by Marilyn Burkhart with woodcut illustrations by the author. A sewn pamphlet style book with embossed cover in an edition of 60. Printed in 1992.
A Suite of Appearances by Mark Strand, dedicated to Octavio and Marie Jo Paz. A sewn pamphlet style book with hand-made paste paper cover in an edition of 150. Printed in 1993.
Voices from the Oregon Trail, various. A sewn pamphlet style book with woodcut printed cover in an edition of 600. Printed in 1993.
Excerpts from the Diaries of Roderick Haig-Brown edited by Valerie Haig-Brown in a tribute edition of five volumes plus a sixth volume of photographs. Illustrated by Richard Bunse. Quarter bound in Harmatan goat skin with hand-made paste paper over boards by Sandy Tilcock, in an edition of 150 plus fourteen sets for the use of The Beaverdam Press. Printing completed in 1993.
The Emperor by Charles Simic, illustrated with drawings by Erik Stotik. Black cloth-backed patterned boards with gilt decoration in an edition of 101 copies. Printed in 1997.
Broadsides
Roderick Haig-Brown Broadside with quote from his diary, illustrated by Richard Bunse. Printed in 1990.
The Book as Vessel for The Oregon Book Artists Guild. Printed 1991 in an edition of 75.
The City of Granite by Anna Akhmatova, printed for Charles Seluzicki, Rare and Fine Books. Printed in 1992.
On Angels by Czeslaw Milosz, printed for Charles Seluzicki, Rare and Fine Books, illustrated by Charles Seluzicki. Printed in 1993.
In Art School I Studied Anatomy by Sandy Diamond, illustrated by the author, in an edition of 75. Printed in 1994.
Books and broadsides printed at The Beaverdam Press are held in many private collections and libraries, including The Multnomah County Library in Portland, OR and libraries at Florida State University, Brigham Young University and Western Michigan University. The Beaverdam Press is now closed.
For a project the size of Excerpts from the Diaries of Roderick Haig-Brown, a team was formed. Earle Henness was the printer and publisher. Roderick Haig-Brown's daughter, Valerie Haig-Brown, was editor. Richard Bunse, an excellent artist/illustrator who happens to be an avid fly fisher, agreed to produce the illustrations. Alex Prentiss came on as the printer's devil and helped with various jobs around the shop. One of the finest edition binders in the U.S., Sandy Tilcock of lone goose press, also agreed to be part of the project.
The team decided upon a set of five volumes with a format echoing that of the actual diaries. The books are fairly small, as if they could be carried in a coat pocket. The sixth volume, containing twelve photographs taken by (or of) Roderick Haig-Brown, and a reproduction of a map of the Nimpkish area drawn by him, completed the set.
After editing by Valerie Haig-Brown and careful proof reading, the text was sent to the Harold Berliner' type foundry to be set in Original Old Caslon type. When the type was ready Mr. Henness drove from Salem, Oregon to Los Angeles, California and carefully returned with all 800 pounds of type in his car.
Using proof sheets of the actual type, Mr. Bunse set up sample pages, leaving space for the illustrations he would create. Sandy Tilcock created binding mock-ups. Once the binding design was decided upon, she editioned the paste papers that would cover the boards of the book. This century's old technique involves painting a colored wheat and rice flour paste on paper and working patterns into the paste. The soft colored designs chosen reflect the natural world Haig-Brown describes so movingly in the diaries.
Thousands of sheets of off-white 100% cotton Rives Heavyweight paper were ordered and cut to the correct size. Using the mock-up books made by Mr. Bunse, the type was divided into pages and made up into units called "forms." Finally the printing began.
Fine letterpress is a very precise and exacting craft. As each form is put on the press and printed for the first time, it is carefully and thoroughly checked for damaged type, consistency of inking over the entire page, and evenness of the lines of type and margins. The process becomes even more demanding when printing the flip side of a page, since each new line of type must now line up exactly with the lines of type already printed. This means innumerable trips to the light table and very delicate adjustments to the way the press holds the paper. Once the press is ready, each page is hand-fed through the press.
Because of the different amounts of ink required by the size of the type, the text, footnotes and illustrations all had to be printed separately. Therefore some pages were hand-fed through the press as many as four times. On a good day, Mr. Henness was able to print five sets of pages on one side.
The last task was printing the illuminated letters. Each volume begins with a large letter surrounded by a frame of Northwest wild flowers or leaves. The flower/leaf design was first printed in black. These pages were sent to Betsy Cluff who painstakingly hand water colored each design, over 1,000 pages in all. The initial itself was then printed with gold foil.
On May 5, 1993, the printing was complete. Now the pages had to be hand-folded and gathered into the proper order, proofed one last time, and sent to the binder.
The books are quarter-bound in dark forest green Harmatan goat skin leather with paste paper over boards. The binding process itself requires thirty seven separate steps, from hand sewing the sections of the book together, to hand sewing the headbands, to rounding and backing each spine, and finally to flattening and foiling the gold volume number on the leather spine. A slip case is then made to hold the set.
The binder is continuing this painstaking work now, and it will be some time before all the sets are finished.