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.
