Alice in Wonderland Sneak Peek

As you may already know, 2015 marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of one of the greatest pieces of literature of all time (subjective opinion but I'm not alone in this), Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. A perfect combination of nonsense, adventure, math, and card gaming, it was a tale I could never resist. Nor could I resist doing a letterpress project to celebrate this anniversary.

Now, I'm only going to give you a little glimpse into this project right now but, suffice it to say, it will be a bookmark set containing hand-set quotes equal parts from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and it's chess game sequel, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. The sets will be editioned in 150, to tie them back to the anniversary.

I know the coasters were a bit deceiving; they were a warm-up exercise, if you will, that I did with some of my letterpress students to get the Alice juice flowing. Also, in case you haven't read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, or it's just been a really long time, Project Gutenberg has it ready to read!

Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) isn't the only man celebrating an anniversary this year... 100 years ago, after about 11 years of preparation, Albert Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity. I might just have a project floating around with this in mind as well. 

(if you want work-in-progress images of what I'm up to book, letterpress, food, and cocktail-wise, follow me on Instagram)

Making Summary

I had to make a last minute trip back to Connecticut earlier this month and so I haven't been able to blog for a while. Before I left, I took 2 classes on bookmaking. Here's a brief summary of what I did.

First, I took a short course from Jennie Hinchcliff of Red Letter Day Zine on basic bookmaking, so I could brush up on my zine making skills. 

There was shredded money, Michigan map and bingo card paper, so we broke out the stamps and made some single sheet books.

Next, I took an altered board books class with Courtney Cerruti. We started out with regular old children's board books and, with the handy help of gesso, acrylic paint, rubber stamps, washi tape, words and glue, turned them into books of our own creation.

Handwriting Typography Round 2

Handwritten book colophon

Friday was the second, and final, session of my handwriting as typography workshop at the San Francisco Center for the Book. Our project was creating a small book from a 500 word prose in our own handwriting. 

Chapter II of Through the Looking Glass

My prose was an excerpt from Chapter II, The Garden of Live Flowers, in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. As most people know, both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Glass are mainly composed of dialog which, it turns out, is quite hard to layout in handwriting. Our instructor, Georgianna Greenwood, helped me decide to make the dialog run-on so it would look like prose and be easier to layout.

Ruling pages

Before we could get down to writing, we had the tedious task of ruling all the pages. 

Cover

I was thrilled to see the flower and paisley print cover paper Georgianna chose. It fit my prose perfectly.

Opening/half title page

The first page you see when you open a book is called a half title or dedication page. Because my excerpt began in the middle of a chapter, I chose to use the first sentence of the chapter instead.

Title page

My title page came out a little crooked, it's hard to center your handwriting when you don't have a computer.

Title image

Title image and chapter opening spread

There is often a title image or ornament next to the chapter opening,traditionally on the right. I chose to do a line drawing of a house and garden for the title image because, in the beginning of The Garden of Live Flowers, Alice tries to get to the garden but keeps being lead back to a house. 

Double page spread

It's hard to tell from the picture but, every time the flowers speak, the text changes to green. I did this to make the run-on dialog a bit easier to understand.

This book wasn't perfect but it gave me many ideas for future art projects, especially because I love writing and literature so much.