The Color of the Tiber

A couple of weeks ago I finished printing Swan & Hoop 2: A Roman Inscription on Santi Giovanni e Paolo al Celio. Like Mediæval in Padua before it, A Roman Inscription features a map that has been paired down to the essential landmarks that are discussed in the book. Unlike the map in Mediæval in Padua, though, the Rome map is entirely black with one red structure denoting Santi Giovanni e Paolo al Celio and a curving bluish line where the Tiber River bisects the city. All of this seemed straight forward enough until I began mixing the ink. The trouble with urban Italian waterways is that the water in them is green (or brown when it rains). This presents a host of problems when printing maps of Italian cities. I have never considered myself a realist but to print the Tiber in a bright aqua would be visually confusing to anyone who has walked along the river's banks. Despite its status as an ever flowing source of myth the Tiber is simply not blue. And therein lies the rub. To print a river in muddy green ink, however accurate, would throw off the visual balance of the map, disrupting the legibility of the image and causing the viewer to momentarily miss the point. So the goal was to make a color that is at once blue and ambiguous, evocative without being sentimental or misleading. My solution to this was to mix a blue that is actually a blue interpretation of brown, an ink composed of blue, green, yellow, red, black, titanium white, and transparent extender.

April 20th Talk at Columbia University

The first copy of Æthelwold Etc

There is nothing that compares to the melancholic exhultation of opening the first copy of a new book. Years of thought and labor that you believed were entirely your own are distilled into an object that, once bound, is no longer yours. It takes time to get acquainted with the whole thing that had previously been separate parts. As you turn the pages, you experience a mixture of déjà vu, recognition, and surprise, as if remembering something that has only just been born.

Book with Deluxe Edition Box

Deluxe Edition Box with Book, Color Diary, and Portfolio

A is for Arrangement

K is for Karissimi

O is for One

P is for Prometheus

Page spread of notes

Page spread of notes

Pages spread from color diary

Page spread from color diary

Æthelwold Etc. Title Lettering & Inks

Title page lettering in Johann Titling and Cancellaresca Milanese capitals



29 inks for the final 7 letters of Æthelwold Etc.

Update coming soon. I am currently in the throes of finishing the printing.

R is for Rimbaud

The letter R from Æthelwold Etc.

P is for Prometheus, F is for Fanciful

Please Note: Prometheus is spelled wrong in this proof.

Leitura Primeira of Joaquim Jozé Ventura da Silva

First Sample Setting

Throughout Æthelwold Etc. there are repeated references to the work of the pre-Victorian Portuguese writing master Joaquim Jozé Ventura da Silva. Ventura worked in that vibrant period of lettering history between the Romantic and the Industrial eras. While his immediate (Spanish) predecessors, notably Servidori and Torio de la Riva, utilized a thorough pedagogical approach, Ventura seems to have been hell bent on having fun. As such, his work, particularly his manual Regras Methódicas para le Aprender a Escrever, is suffused with an enthusiasm lacking in the work of both his elders and his contemporaries. In the Regras there is a small specimen of Typo Portuguez nestled between examples of Ventura's incomparable Bastrdinho hand and his fantastically ornamented capitals. The specimen is a sober pause in the manual's kinetic exuberance and it displays seven optical sizes of a roman alphabet from the large Parangona I to the minute Breviario Primeiro. ¶Since I first encountered Ventura's manual I have developed a kind of inexplicable lust for his lettering which I allow to play out in Æthelwold. The digital rendering of his Leitura Primeira (above) will be used in the Æthelwold I to set To Ianthe by Lord Byron at a miniscule point size.