Moving Again

Over the next two weeks I'll be moving shop for the tenth time since 1999. My new studio will be in the former Pfizer laboratory on Flushing Ave in Brooklyn, a hulking mass of a building peppered throughout with food prep kitchens, designers, and an NYPD training facility. The studio I am moving into is three times the size of my current studio and has an enormous 16,000lb freight elevator directly in front of the door. Last year my landlord replaced the freight elevator in my current studio building with a small passenger car, forcing me to move my Vandercook Universal III into storage. Since then I have been printing on the FAG Control 405 press that I imported from Switzerland in 2011. The FAG is a good press but it's just not my Vandercook, it's unknowable somehow and I don't think we like each other all that much. After a year of printing with it, the FAG still feels like a stranger whereas my Vandercook is one of my oldest friends. I'm looking forward to our reunion.

Beyond the Vandercook, the move is necessary in order to print my forthcoming book, Interstices & Intersections. The book will require the storage and organization of 6,000 sheets of paper as they are printed, dried, curated, folded, and collated over the course of six months. So far I have received 5,000 sheets of the paper and it has rendered my current studio unusable, filling every shelf AND one of my two table top surfaces. There is no where to work and there would be no way to effectively edition a book in the space. The new studio will have two additional work tables and three times as many shelves. The shelves are critical because we will be printing two sets of state and progressive proofs for the entire book as well as printing the standard and deluxe editions on different papers. Organizing and keeping track of that many different sheets of paper, while keeping them off of table surfaces, is a huge task that does not usually figure into my plans for a new book. With Specimens of Diverse Characters this lack of consideration really tested the limits of the studio, as well as my and Nancy's ability to function in it. [See the last picture on this post] To give an idea of scale, Specimens required half as many sheets of paper as Interstices.