East London Line & The Whitechapel

Here is a limited edition typographical print which I've been producing to launch my new poetic photobook The East London Line at the Whitechapel Art Book Fair at the end of September (last weekend: Thursday 23rd to Sunday 26th). The large-format softback book, under my imprint Altazimuth Press, will be in a limited edition of 100.

I've been producing the print on my wooden 'common press', a replica of an 18th century press (see my Tom Paine Printing Press blog and website), and as the press is a two-pull press and therefore has a small platen I have to pull and wind on two or three times to obtain one print.

The print is composed in metal type and wood letter on the stone bed of the press. I will have some for sale at the Whitechapel, along with the book, and also a few copies of my limited edition typographical map, printed in black, red and blue, also entitled the East London Line. An image of this map is on my Tom Paine Printing Press blog.

New & Other; Creative Typography

Two photos of type-cutting, typesetting and printing work I've just done at my Tom Paine Printing Press in Lewes High Street. Printing was done on the wooden 'common press' which I use all the time. The Valentine is printed using wood type on Khadi hand-made paper from India, and is about a foot (i.e. 30cm) square. The large capital 'E' print is from a woodcut which I'm in process of working on. I traced a large 17th Century capital 'E' (mine is about 4.5 inches high; or approx. 324 point, or 27-line pica) from Moxon's book, transferred this tracing to the wooden block, and cut out the character using a Stanley knife and wood-carving tools (gouges and chisels). It's very soft and grainy plywood, and clearly I'd get a much better result from a typographic point of view by using fruit wood. The three smaller 'E's (two caps and one l/c) above it are from different founts; the caps show very distinct differences from Moxon's, particularly in the serifs.

Artwave, artist's books nearing completion - Rosenberg & East London Line

Isaac Rosenberg - see Rosenberg artist's book below


Whitechapel UndergrounD Station - see East London Line artist's book below


I'm demonstrating the printing press (the wooden common press) in the Market Tower, Lewes, during Lewes's Artwave Festival every afternoon from Friday 28 August to Friday 4 September inclusive.

As well as the Tom Paine material, I'm also using the press to print the text and blocks of some of my own artist's poem & image books, including Rosenberg (the Whitechapel poet and artist, who was killed in the First World War), and The East London Line (inspired by the current redevelopment of the old East London Railway from Shoreditch through (or rather under) Whitechapel, Shadwell, Wapping, Rotherhithe and Surrey Docks to New Cross and New Cross Gate).

Tom Paine Printing Press

The pic shows a typical wooden 'common press' of the 18th century - the type (!) on which Tom Paine's writings were printed. In Lewes, William Lee, a local bookseller and publisher of the Lewes Journal, had a print-shop in the High Street at the time in the 17760s and 1770s that Paine was in Lewes (before Paine went to the American Colonies and took up the cause of the Colonists against the oppressive Brirtish government of George III.

Watch this space for information about the Tom Paine Printing Press which I'm setting up this year for the Tom Paine Festival in Lewes in the summer of 2009, to commemorate the bicentenary of Tom Paine's death in 1809. On the press I'll be printing some of Tom's key writings, including The Amerian Crisis No.1, Common Sense, and The Rights of Man, plus some of my own work and also some contemporary radical stuff. The press will be set up somewhere in central Lewes, but the location has not yet been decided. The overblown state of the British housing market over the past decade has meant that artists studios and workshops have been squeezed out as every available property gets converted into housing units (how many second homes are there in the UK?). Time for a good rant about private ownership, greed and government policy? I'll leave that for my own crisis papers . . .