Home Sweet Home Goodbye published

I founded Precariat Press in the spring of this year with the publication of my first chapbook of poems in mind; My husband, James Hayes, designed the logo for me after an evening of brainstorming. The cover design is based upon my earliest existing piece of "art" - a goodbye card I made for my grandparents when they were returning to Ireland from a visit to Toronto in 1967. I talk about that in a previous blog, here. This was the first time I met them, and the card was found in my grandmother's handbag after she (my Oma) died in 1980 and it was returned to me.

I have spent the months in lockdown (the first one!) designing and printing up the cover, which I have blogged about here and here, and choosing the final poems to be included. The chapbook contains a mix of poems previously published in other journals (which I acknowledge) and work that I think are deserving of publication! They are a mix of oldish poems (probably revised somewhat) and newish poems - spanning 40 years of writing poetry.

I have bound Home Sweet Home Goodbye in the traditional chapbook binding style, i.e., three-hole bind, with cotton thread. It contains 17 poems over 25 pages of poetry, and the cover is a monochrome linoprint. It is approx A5 in size, a standard chapbook size. I have blogged about the book mockup and binding here, here, and here. This is a limited edition publication, with 50 copies only. 

printing chapbook covers

A lot of work went on before I was ready to print the chapbook covers, which you can see in previous blogs here (the initial sketch & press founding), here (the design origin story), here (design, lino-cutting & first test print), and here (creating the chapbook mock-up).

Last fall, I had mixed up a really nice colour using a bright pink ink and a blue ink from Speedball and tested the colour on another lino block, so I had a fair idea that I wanted to use this purply colour for my chapbook covers. Just as I was pulling out the inks and a jar to mix up a large batch, I found that I had already ordered a violet ink. When I looked at the ink I realised I did not have to do any mixing as this was indeed the colour I had in mind!

As I knew from last year's linoprinting, a heavy card "window" had to be custom made in order to facilitate relief printing on a regular flatbed press. In addition, the "window" was made to the size of the paper I was going to use for the covers so registration is automatic!

I was thrilled to start printing, and though my enthusiasm led to over-inking on the first print, everything else was going according to plan.

This is the first batch of prints drying on a blanket on the living room floor. I have borrowed an ancient book press from another artist friend and will flatten the covers when they have dried.

This is the third batch of prints, and I am quite happy with the results. My living room is fairly small, and the drying area takes up all the floor space, so with this in mind I have a schedule of printing in batches every couple of days.

Home Sweet Home Goodbye - chapbook

In a previous post I spoke about founding a press to produce my first chapbook (info here) and in another post I spoke about the card I made my Grandmother in 1969 (info here), which has inspired the title and cover design for this first chapbook of poems. To get a better idea of lino design, I used a black marker to create sketches for the cover design sketches. This allowed me to immediately see what changes I needed to make before proceeding.

In a later sketch I also used a white pen to make contrast more apparent.

To transfer the design onto the lino block, I used the simple, old-fashioned technique involving tracing paper

and graphite.

Once the tracing paper was ready, it was affixed to the lino block using masking tape (ie, the tracing paper was taped down on the other side of the lino block).

This picture shows the ready-for-cutting lino block beside the template sketch.

This picture shows that I have started cutting into the lino! NB the picture was taken at an angle in order to see the groove marks that cutting makes.