During the summer of 2005 we held an exhibit entitled Letterpress 101: Elemental Printing. One of the four subcategorys of the exhibit was “Cutting Edge Letterpress,” we showed this book with the notation: “Bold typography: paragraphs read across the spine of the book, creating wide, yet extremely legible, blocks of text.”

The artist’s website http://www.texturaprinting.com/Inka/Books/BadNews3.html, gives a description of the process of creating the book and illustrations:

 Bad News is based on a short story by Lynne Tillman. This book is letterpress printed from hand-set Centaur and Futura Medium Condensed in an edition of 37 copies. The images began as small clay sculptures that were photographed, made into negatives, and printed from hand-processed photopolymer plates. The book is bound using an exposed spine sewing and enclosed in a printed paper wrapper.

Reading across the gutter gives an immediacy to this text that mirrors the news broadcasts that are always with us, an effect heightened by a kind of “station crawl” in blue sans-serif type on some pages.  The images seem to morph as you look at them into the shapes with frightening details that we see but do not comprehend; just as the news gives us stories that Lynn Tillman’s narrator keeps trying to fit into her own experience.  The shapes are vaguely anthropomorphic, and in their intense, shadowed blueness, they are truly frightening.

Judith Klau

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