Printer's pie

'Printer's Pie' - a jumble of spilled type.

I took my graphic design degree for all the wrong reasons - I barely knew what it was, but I was in one of THOSE relationships where at the time you would walk down the street with a sock on your head singing 'la-la-la I'm a banana', just to please someone who's main concern was where the next pint and smoke was coming from, especially if I were paying for it. And he wanted to move to Newcastle because he had once played drums at a pub there and thought he 'might' like it there. And if I didn't go, (I had been about to apply to Central St Martin's in London) he was going to leave me - again. For the hundreth time in two years...*

So instead of the fine art or illustration BA I had aimed for, I found myself confronted with projects about leaflet design and biscuit packaging with the odd illustration brief thrown in. I hated it. I loathed it. And then I found the type room. It was in the early 1990's when the print and design industries were changing over from hot metal to Apple Macs, and all over the country trays of old lead type were literally being skipped, and melted down for scrap. Tales of colleges clearing out entire studios, and students in tears scrabbling in dump bins to salvage what they could.

But my college, in a city with a proud tradition of industry, made a point of keeping its type room, complete with vintage presses and oily smellng inks. Before any student was allowed on one of the tiny, precious new Macintoshes, we had, at the very least, learned the basics of typesetting, leading and spacing using the old composing sticks and chases, getting our hands dirty and kerning by using slivers of lead, not tapping a keyboard. Something clicked, and running my hands over a page and feeling the indentations in the soft paper, I knew I had found some small comfort in this strange, cold world of design.

I entered a magical kingdom and learned to discern the tiny differences between a dozen serif founts, where Gills Sans was the acknowledged king of typefaces and discovered that less is often more; ornate is tempting, but simplicity is tasteful. Later, when I had got to grips with computer typesetting, I would learn to love Quark Xpress for the same reasons; books. My gargantuan, bottomless obsession with all things bibliographic. I had done a little book binding in my foundation art year, using my own pictures and stories, and if I hadn't been walking down the street with a sock on my head (as it were) I would probably have developed this and who knows, I might even have had a decent career from the word go instead of crawling up the cold and treacherous mountain slope of freelance illustration. However. One of the biggest wrenches when I graduated was leaving the type room. I sniffed its dear, oleaginous air one last time, and waved bye-bye to that part of my life. By then I had an understanding of what design was, and doing that hated course turned into the most useful of learning curves.

Now I am glad that I have a decent grasp of layout, typesetting and composition, and it has shaped the way I illustrate. But I always dreamed that one day I would have my own type room and make my own little art books. It was always just that - a dream. Money and space - God, the space! I can barely fit in my studio to paint, let alone accommodate the paraphernalia that comes with the average printing set-up. And I realised also that I was in danger of spreading myself too thinly with all the techniques I was interested in. So reluctantly I packed away my lino cuts, my sewing machine, my needlepoint, my collage. I stuck to painting, which I was never that good at, but I had set out to be a children's illustrator and the rest seemed just a distraction. I knuckled down and devoted myself to being a half way decent painter. It took longer than I imagined. But in the last year I've been hankering to do a bit of printing again. I even picked up this old nipping press from eBay last year - the poor thing has been gathering dust while I waited for a spare moment.

And I think - I think - I finally have the discipline to juggle a few techniques at once. In between starting some new paintings and getting the new set of Red Flannel Elephant cards set up, I've been buying up tiny bits of decorative type, and even a whole minute set of Gills Sans. I cannot tell you - and only another type nerd would understand - the excitement this little block of letters gives me; EBay has become dangerous territory.

Next time the pennies flow in I am hoping to get an Adana desk top printer - Lord knows where it's going to go. (Who needs a bathroom anyway?) Ideas are filling my head for stationary sets and note cards. With a fresh pile of lino and inks, and a virgin roller just begging to be inked up, I am finally returning to my old love, albeit in a Lilliputian fashion. It's going to be good to get ink on my fingers again.

This week's horoscope for Cancer - I hope I can live up to it.

This time represents the culmination of your efforts to expand the domain of your activities. There is more and more that you want to do, and you resent anything that narrows your freedom and limits your scope of action. The challenge of this influence is to be conscious enough of yourself and of what you are doing so that you can plan intelligently and work effectively with enlightened self-interest as opposed to pure selfishness. As long as you stay within your own limitations - that is, your inherent limitations as a human being and the limitations of your situation or circumstances - you should be extremely successful. The sense of timing of your actions may leave others amazed and sure that you are lucky. But really you have succeeded because you have a complete understanding of the situation.

from Astrodienst horoscopes, the best I have found on the net - if you like that kind of thing.

*(it's OK, I dumped the rat a few months later and started walking out with my Andy, so in the end it was all for the best).