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>>Male Announcer: Hello Everyone. Thank you so much for coming. This talk is part of the
Authors @ Google Series. We have a couple of other talks going on this week, they are
both actually tomorrow. Um, we have Gail Soalid talking about communication and positive limit
setting with young children. And we have a conversation with Nolan Bushnell tomorrow.
You can learn more about these at go/@google. But today we have Patricia Curtan and we are
proud to present her. Patricia is an artist, designer and print maker. She has a long association
with Chez Panisse Restaurant in Berkeley as a cook, a cookbook co-author, designer and
illustrator. She has designed and printed letter press and linoleum blocks, special
occasion menus for Chez Panisse for several decades. The menus have been collected into
her recently published book Menus for Chez Panisse, which will be on sale in the back
for fifteen dollars. In addition to cookbooks and specialty printing Patricia has designed
images and typography for logo identity, wine labels, product packaging, calendars, note
cards, book covers and tattoos. Please join me in welcoming Patricia Curtan.
>> Patricia: Hello, Thank you for inviting me. It's really exciting to be at Google.
I came to talk to you about my book and before I get into exactly showing you all these things
I want to tell you a little bit about my background and relationship to Chez Panisse, how this
came about. I actually started working at Chez Panisse the first year it was opened
in 1971, which was forty years ago. The restaurant just celebrated it's 40th Anniversary. And
at the time I was an intern at the print shop of poster artist Davis Lance Goines in Berkeley
and that's how I come to know the people, Alice, and the people at Chez Panisse and
ended up working there in the dining room. And so for a time I worked at the day time
at the print shop and in the evenings at the restaurant. And then I got very sort of swept
up, and very interested in all that was going on at the restaurant. The incredible food
and the energy there, what was going on and I sort of started spending less time at the
print shop and morning then in the pastry kitchen and then in the other kitchens and
eventually ended up spending up most of my time in the kitchen and cooking. Which was
a great, wonderful, adventure. And after a time I ended up then starting a family and
wanted to change that and so I stopped cooking. And about that time Alice started getting
contracts to doing cookbooks and we worked on the first drawing. And then I just sort
of flipped over from cooking and went back to printing and design and cookbooks but still
working with Chez Panisse and still working with Alice. The, it's all still about the
same thing which is really about the beauty of food and but now I work mostly in two dimensions.
In printing and designing and in making images. So this book, um, here's the dining room at
Chez Panisse about 5:30 before dinner begins. It’s a little small place, its very intimate
and these menus that are collected here were made for primarily the downstairs dining room.
For special occasions such as birthdays, I'm going to come back to these images, but birthdays,
anniversaries; there is an annual Bastille Day dinner; there's New Year's Eve celebrations.
And the book is organized chronologically, so the menus start actually in 1972 and alongside
the menus are short text that tell sort of different stories about maybe the events or
the person it was made for or some visiting luminary or some other occasion. And, uh,
before we get into me really showing you those menus I want to tell you a little bit about
the process of how they are made. There are letter press menus and I have a beautiful
old cast iron letter press that is called the Chandler and Price, C and P, and it is
a, it has a clam shell action that sort of opens and closes like this. And the paper
is fed into the press by hand, it sits on the area called the platen, it's a flat area
of metal and that's the part that closes and meets with the block or the type or whatever
is being printed. You can see the block there vertically. It's a one color press, prints
one color of ink at a time. That's the ink plate and the rollers are spreading the ink
on the ink plate and the ink plate slowly turns with each cycle of the press and will
distribute that ink evenly. Then it comes down and rolls over the surface of the block
and the press closes and prints and paper comes out and new paper comes in. And [clears
throat] it was built, and this press is about one hundred and twenty years old, still as
solid as the day it was made. It was mainly built to print type, metal type, hand-set
and this is a sample of a little bit of type setting. Um, and that's a process that is
pretty much outdated now, purists still do it but it's putting the type together letter
by letter, space by space, space between the lines, very, very laborious and handmade.
But recently, the last twenty years or so, the advent of polymer plate technology has
really regenerated and revitalized letter press printing. And that is still the same
principle of relief printing, printing from a raised service-like type. But this material
is a thin layer of metal and on that is another layer of polymer material that has a photo
ground coating on the top, and to make the plate digital type setting or some other form
of image that can be output as a negative. The negative and the polymer plate are sandwiched
together, it's exposed to light and where the light hits the photo ground on the polymer
surface it hardens. And then the polymer plate is washed in warm water, it's a great thing
because there is no toxic photo chemicals, it's a pretty benign process. And then the
softer polymer material just rinses away and you are left with that relief surface, so
it's a very wonderful, easy technology that means you don't have to set type and put the
type all back in the box. So it then locks up in the press, it sits on a magnetic base
so that thin layer of metal on the back sits on a magnetic base and then those two things
together, the base and the plate equal a measurement that is type high, which is the universal
height of type, metal type. And so that means anything you can make a plate out of you can
lock that up in the press and print from it. So a lot of small letter press shops have
come up because you don't have to have all the equipment and all the type and all of
that, you just need a press and access to a plate maker and it's done something pretty
wonderful. But how I make images primarily is linoleum
block and similar to the polymer material, linoleum block is a thin layer of linoleum
mounted on wood and it's approximate type high. I usually have to build up the back
of it. And linoleum is a natural material, this kind is called battleship linoleum. It's
created out of powered cork and linseed oil, it was developed by the military just before
World War II to use as flooring for their battleships and submarines. And which, you
know, it's impervious to water and it's soft enough to stand on so your legs don't get
tired and it has a sort of a little porous surface. It's not flat like metal or polymer
and so when it's printed it has a sort of stippled texture that I find really beautiful
and you can really identify linoleum from that look once you know what it is. And the
process of making them, the prints, the blocks themselves, is I start with a drawing and
then, a pretty simple drawing like this as you can see. And then you have to, I use drafting
paper, turn it over and trace it on the back because when you are working in printing you
have to work in reverse. And then I put a sort of graphite crayon on the back and taped
that onto the block and then trace through the drawing onto the block and that leaves
something that looks like a pencil line on the block. And I do that for, one block for
each color in the print, cause press prints one color at a time. And so if the image has
four colors then there are four blocks and then once that drawing has been transferred
to the linoleum then it's cut and carved and that's a process of removing all the negative
space in the print. So as you can see with this leaf the block on the bottom, you can
see the lines of the gouges where the linoleum has been removed so that only that part that
I want to print is there. Here's an example of this violet image, the image is made from
four blocks and the first one on the left is the dark green leaves of the image so that
was printed first. And then the second block is of the area under the leaves, just the
solid, and that's a lighter green so that's coming through the lines that are cut in the
first image, the veins and inside the stalks there. The third one is another line image
of these, sort of outlines and interior lines of the violets and then the last one is the
tint, the purple tint color of the violets. So those are printed one at a time. There
is also a little bit of an orange that you will see in the image that is the center of
the flowers that I just added by water color, it's a little hard to cut those tiny little
spaces and get them in the right place. So that's the basic process , here's the finished
menu that that was made for, a New Years Eve menu. So usually when I am making these menus
that have text I will print the image first and the last thing that happens is the type
is added at the end, a separate run. So, as I say, the organization of the book is the
menus are chronological and the first ones that I made early on were really typographical.
I didn't know how to do this linoleum work at that time, so I was setting this by hand,
and metal type and using little type ornaments and that sort of thing. And another aspect
that is sort of fun about this book is reading what's actually on the menus. There, it's
kind of a snapshot of the history of Chez Panisse as well and really what was being
served when and in this case for how much. It's pretty astonishing, homemade pastries
for seventy five cents. Lindsay Shere , who was the pastry chef, the starting pastry chef
at the restaurant, made fantastic, fantastic desserts and you could just go in and get
wonderful little cappuccino or a cup of coffee and a slice of her almond tart and pay one
dollar which is pretty amazing. When the restaurant first opened with their four course meal,
and they just became famous, I don't know if you know about Chez Panisse but they became
famous for serving one prix fixe dinner menu a night. So it was either four or sometimes
on weekends it would be five courses, but when they first started it was four dollars
and fifty cents for a four course dinner in 1971. Of course they were losing a lot of
money so [audience laughs] after about six months I think it went up to six fifty or
six twenty five or something like that. But now it's far from that. So I didn't really
start making too many menus until after I stopped cooking. I would dabble in it a little
bit and I did acquire a press during that time but I didn't really have time, I was
too busy in the kitchen. But then afterwards when I started working on the books and I
wanted to print more and I wanted to add images to the type and so I decided I maybe I would
try to do learn to do this linoleum work. So this is one of the first blocks I cut,
a single color and it's really pretty simple. But I was thrilled by it and I thought maybe
I can do this. And the other way that I was making menus at the time, was in collaboration
with my husband, Stephen Thomas, who is a print maker and prints etchings and Intaglio
printer. And so we would collaborate and I would do a drawing on a copper plate that
he would etch or something else and then combine it with type and so these are etchings. And
when we were doing these, because it's a really time consuming process printing etchings,
so it was usually a small number for maybe that particular party, one table of four or
six or eight or something. Very small number. This menu on the left, the menu for the potato
king was for a friend of ours who had an absolute obsession with potatoes and he always wanted
potatoes with every meal. It wasn't a meal unless there was some kind of a potato dish.
So for his birthday we made him a menu that had potatoes with every course and put together
quickly just this little menu in a couple of days and Stephen printed it. The other
was for a dinner for James Beard who didn't often come to the restaurant but he came this
one spring and it was a time we were just harvesting green garlic, the young garlic
that you only get right in the spring. At the time that was a really new thing, now
you see it in all the farmers markets but that was kind of a big deal to have this young
green garlic so that's what decorated the menu. And Stephen and I did a number of New
Years menus together for a few years in a row and we liked to focus on the celestial
theme, sort of the big picture. And took some inspiration from some photographs, NASA photographs
that were coming back of the Earth from space for this one. Here's another etching, its
a mezzotint actually and this was an astronomical occurrence of a blue moon, the second full
moon within on calendar month. And it was that night of the New Years Eve dinner so
we couldn't resist that. But then I started working on this linoleum thing and I tried
to get better at it doing, getting a little more ambitious and the images start out very
simple. These are sort of just shapes with a little line work in them. And often the
imagery that I would do is, I was working at the limitations of what I could manage
so they had to be simple. But sometimes they were inspired by literally something on the
menu that was an ingredient or something being served. Or often times it would be something
that represented the season or the time or the moment. This one is kind of both. And
here is another sample of the kind of menu I would do sometimes and often times if there
was somebody special coming in, there was two days notice that Elizabeth David or Richard
Olney or Julia Child or someone was coming and Alice really wanted a special menu. So,
in those cases, I would do something very fast, just set the text in type and print
that and then do hand decorations. A little drawing and in this case a water color filling
in, for just that small group of people, that table of four or that table of six. This was
a special lunch for Richard Olney again, he is no longer with us but he was very influential
cookbook writer, an American, an ex-pat who lived in France for most of his life and wrote
about French food and wrote for an American audience. He wrote about the Cuisine du Bonne
Femmes, which is just the ordinary wonderfully household cooking of French homemakers. And
he elevated that and really broke it down really fantastic books. So here, this was
an important breakthrough for me, this particular menu because the imagery is really simple
but I drew it from life. Hadn't been doing that and I got these leaves and I wanted to
somehow get this color and so I drew the leaves and figured out this composition and then
I had this kind of light bulb go off and thought well maybe on my press that has this ink plate
that turns around and spreads the ink, maybe I could disconnect that. I disconnected the
device that turned the ink plate and then mixed different colors and just spread them
on the ink plate by hand and then just let the rollers blend them a little bit so that
if you picture this menu turned on its side so that the block is ninety degrees you can
see stripes of color; red, yellow, orange and then more yellow. And so with one pass
through the press, all these different colors on the ink plate, it was like, wow this could
work. And it's a little rough, you can see where those lines aren't there and they are
not blending perfectly, but it was really an exciting moment and I thought this, this
could really lead to something. I could play with this. So then I decided I need to get
better at this drawing thing and I have always been very influenced by both typographically
and with images and visually by older books. And I really, really loved old botanics and
herbals. This is an image from John Gerarde's Herbal printed in 1633 which was the height
of a scientific text at the time of identifying plants and what their properties were and,
um, huge, big book. And these are wood cuts, so single color cut from wood, same process
as linoleum only wood instead of linoleum. So I used to pore over these and look at these
and think, try and figure out how to do it. Maybe I could do something like that or I
would do very simplified versions of them. And so I started trying to do that sort of
thing of this, like the garlic, bunch of garlic here. Which again I was starting to draw from
life because that's what I wanted to see on the menus. I couldn't find something directly
to sort of immolate or copy so I was just trying to use the style but trying to do that.
And like this, you can see the direct influence of those Herbal wood cuts. But I wanted also
to add color to them so then I would do the line work in black and then cut a block and
add the screen, to get a tint. The purple in that turnip is a little handwork that was
put on with water color. The other source of imagery that I really, really loved is
Japanese woodblock prints and that whole tradition. This print was made by Utamoro in a book called
Song of the Garden that combined his images with the text of Japanese poets, very popular
book at the time It was printed in 1788. And I loved the composition of these are so lyrical
and beautiful where, and the combination of the text with the image and the space in there.
And I was also looking at like these leaves which had the line and the color and so graceful
and trying to think how can I sort of incorporate that in that too. So I started immolating
that and here is an image made about that time. This was actually a card that folded
in the middle, so it had a front and a back, but really conceived of as one image in that
Japanese woodblock style. [pause] Here's another very simple bu, for me, kind of markers of
the time because I was breaking these into different colors and being able to put them
together and without necessarily the black line, but composing an image of these separate
blocks just with color. And then using the space like the beautiful spaces in those Japanese
prints. And this is not anything literal about the menu, this is flowering quince. But again
it's about the season, about just a moment, here's where we are right now. Another homage
to Japan with the fade at the top. One of the things that has always been very interesting
in the studio and satisfying is to keep pushing the limits of the medium and keep pushing
the limits of the press itself. What can I do of this particular machine with these particular
materials? And how one discovery leads to another and the emphasis to try something
new. So I had been making some of these special menus for the downstairs restaurant and Alice
really wanted to have something every night in there. Which was very difficult to accomplish,
especially with the changing menu every night, and then it was always right until the last
hour really that that menu was getting determined. So I worked out a system where using an 8-1/2
x 11 sheet I could print on one half of it and then they could set the menu for the evening's
dinner on the computer, output that and then put these in the copy machine and photocopy
that onto the interior and then fold it and then there would be this combination of up
to date menu but something pretty and printed. So I started making these as seasonal imagery
and printed them for about a year and a half or so, you know like two or three thousand
at a go. But which was just not sustainable at all so eventually I designed something
that could be printed offset and they could print multiple thousands and that would do
for awhile. [pause] Nowadays they still use that same system and
they reproduce images from illustrations I made for some of the cookbooks of fruit and
vegetable illustrations. So about the time, about the time this menu was made I was working
on a book called Chez Panisse Vegetables where I really, this is where the sort of drawing
really had to get better. And my task was to very specifically draw certain vegetables,
fifty different ones and made prints of these. And so I really started drawing from life,
going to the garden or brining material into my studio and I didn't have, that was so consuming
I couldn't really spend too much time making the menu. So some of the images I made for
that I incorporated and just said "I can do a menu if it's got this on it." But these
are images that were made for that book actually. But I found that just by doing it more and
doing more and doing it more I did get better at it. Here's another example of that split
fountain so-called technique of the multiple colors in one pass on the ink plate with the
leaves of this image. These are, these two were for the then First Lady Hillary Clinton
and trying not to be intimidated by the First Lady I went in just the absolute opposite
way and went very, very simple. The one on the left was a lunch and they were trying
to serve as many, gather as many ingredients as they could from edible school yard in Berkley
to impress upon the First Lady that the beautiful food that could come from these school garden
projects. [ pause ] This is a New Year's Eve menu, those are always celebrated in a some
kind of gala way at the restaurant and extra effort was put into those menus, the menus
for that event and others, too. They are really souvenirs and people take them home and it's
a way to remember something as fleeting as a wonderful dinner, it's quite a reminder
and the experience of being there at the restaurant. Here's some more Japanese influence of space
and text and image combination. These are white dogwoods. Carrie Glenn was the florist
at the restaurant for decades and she was very, very extraordinary woman. She made these
amazing floral arrangements and this was her goodbye party. Dinner with Mikhail Baryshnikov.
[pause] Here again is that use of that multiple color technique and this time instead of one
block it's three blocks, so you can--,. It then becomes more interesting where you can
put them right next to each other. And you will see in some areas where the leaves overlap
there is a little line, well that is the double ink of that that instead of cutting a line,
like a drawn line, it's just where they overprint they make their own line and it helps to separate
one leaf from another, it's kind of a nice way of subtly doing that. This was a dinner
for his Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales, who visited the Bay Area and he's very involved
in Brittan in the organic food movement there, and schools, and school gardens and organic
farming in general in England, it's pretty great. So when he came to the United States
to visit he wanted to come to the Bay Area because there is such a great movement here
and he wanted to visit the Edible School Yard which they did. It's very exciting. And then
there was this big dinner for the both of them. This is direct influence from Japanese
bird and flower prints. This was made for the wedding of a very close friend, he and
his partner were married just before Proposition 8 passed on the ballet so they were legally
married in California. And the two birds on the branch, they are red-winged black birds
and that, black birds the only the males have the color on their wings, the females you
know are just all one color. So on this branch are two male birds. And here's another wedding,
this one has quite a bit of detail with rosemary flowers and this is a combination of printing
and then I went in and I filled in the color and then the little tiny detail of those flowers
by hand. So this is really quite enjoyable to do that kind of handwork actually and you
can do things that are otherwise too subtle to do it on the press. Another wedding menu
that Chez Panisse did on a dinner on an island, the wedding was on the beach. So I wanted
somehow to get sand on the menu itself and, through some trial and error, I figured out
that if I put some vermiculite in a little Cuisinart and then broke it up and then put
that on the wet ink when it came out of the press it would stick to the ink and then actually
made something that looks very much like sand. And that is the summary, so thank you I would
be happy to answer any questions if you have any to talk about that.
[applause] >> Male #1: What was the main influence of
your choice of that particular press and mechanism? Was it it's availability or did you seek it
out? >> Patricia: Well, um, that's actually the
press I first learned to print on when I was in David Goines' shop. Someone he, he prints
on an offset press but someone had given him this press and I was one of a couple of the
students of his and so an older friend of his, a journeyman printer, came and taught
us how to operate this press and how to print. And I just fell in love with it. And I've
operated a few other presses but I really loved that one. I loved the size of it and
the simplicity of it. These presses are like vintage cars where you could open the hood
and you could still how the whole thing works. It's sort of the opposite of a computer but
it has, it has a very graceful, wonderful mechanism that kind of fits the body. It's
not a huge big thing but it's good and solid and very capable and, um, so I, when I decided
I wanted a press I started looking around and I found one at a used equipment, printing
equipment place and there was that same press. I thought, well that's for me.
>> Female #1: Have you ever had any typos? >> Patricia: [giggles]I can't even count how
many typos. Yeah. [laughs] happens all the time.
>> Female #1 : So when you do is it like "Oh well" or do you have to redo everything?
>> Patricia: If you catch it in time, you can change it. But after it's printed it's
"Oh well". But I always try and employ the services of a friend who is a good proofreader.
You have to have somebody else look at it. You just, because when you are setting, once
you start printing or once you set it, you sort of stop seeing it as information, you
see it as shape and where it is on the page. Proofreaders are a special group of people
to be able to catch that and I am really prone to typos. Something I have to watch out for.
>> Female #2: Hi. For your menus that aren't for special events, what is the lifetime of
the menu? How many times can you repeat them? >> Patricia: I'm sorry I didn't hear the question
>> Female #2: What's the lifetime of a menu? So how many times can you give it to like
a new customer before it gets bad or you know? >> Patricia: You just use it once, they just
use them once. >> Female #2: Oh, you just use them once?
Do they get to take it home? >> Patricia: Yes, absolutely they get to take
them home. >> Female #2: Oh great, ok.
>> Patricia: So that's what I mean. The restaurant doesn't advertise, they have never advertised,
they have never done anything like that and from very early on Alice knew about good printing,
knew about fine printing and she always loved that. So that is something she wanted as part
of the restaurant. So like in the very early days she would get local printers, and in
the Bay Area there has always been a real printing community in the Bay Area. A lot
of letter press printers, there still are. She would get these printers to make a special
menu or a week of menus or something like that, very cleverly, in exchange for food
and wine. [audience laughs] So they were so ready to do this and then there were always
these printers hanging around late night dinners, a whole table of printers, drinking and drinking.
So it just became really a part of the signature, the look and the style and the aesthetic of
the restaurant. But the ones that they use now they have a, just kind of an inventory
of maybe twenty images on that 8-1/2 x 11 sheet. So then they can select for that night
what seems appropriate for that menu or this season or that time of year. They print out
one for every dinner. >> Female #2: Sorry, to follow up; what percentage
of people do you think bring home the menus as opposed to leaving them there?
>> Patricia: Um, I would say on a nightly basis maybe half. Of the special menus, you
know that hand printed menus, people catch on to that and they take them home. One of
the things about letter press, if you are familiar with it, is it has this very tactile
handmade quality. You may not know anything about the process or you may not be familiar
with letter press really, but when you hold it you know something has happened. This is,
it's handmade and you can tell and it communicates something. And it's intimate, it's personal.
That's one of the things I love about the medium is it's called letter press because
it punches the impression into the paper so it has a kind of textural, sculptural aspect.
There are shadows where the letter forms are and it's quite beautiful. I brought some for
you guys to see after its--. [pause] >> Male #2 : So on the multi block projects,
how do you keep the registration correct? >> Patricia: Yeah it is tricky. I work very,
very methodically. I mean printing is a methodical process, it's not spontaneous. You have a
plan and you work step by step and so you have methods of working. But I start with
that drawing you saw and when I put it on the block and I trace over the drawing, that
part of the drawing for that part of the image, I'm very faithful to that line. So then the
line is on the block and then when I am cutting again I am very faithful to that line that
is the real line, not near it, not next to it, it's the line. And then if you get everything
sort of on the blocks in the right place, then you have the potential for registering
it on the press. Then it's a matter of printing in a likewise methodical way, but it's just
being very careful at every stage. And you know, my opinion, there are lots of ways to
go about this. Many kinds of printing it's not such a tight registration, it's looser
and colors overlap and it's a little more impressionistic looking. But my particular
style, my particular aesthetic is for really close registration. I always kind of go back
to early botanicals and how beautiful they are, those often were engraved or etched or
printed in one color and hand colored. A lot of the really ones you might be familiar with.
But I am trying to do that on the press, I am trying to kind of figure out a way. So
it's really just working very carefully. >> Female #3: Do you have a favorite menu
or a favorite story from the menus in your book?
>> Patricia: Um, it would be hard to pick, it would be hard to pick one. The one I showed
you with the leaves where there light bulb went off about the multi-colors, that one
is a favorite for me because it opened my mind about what I could do on my press. And
I think there is a principle at work there which is, that partly comes from learning
about cooking at Chez Panisse cause when the restaurant first started, we really didn't
know what we were doing. There was a desire to achieve something and cook fabulous food
but most of us were not trained. And so Alice would make up these menus and put dishes on
the menus that we had never cooked before. And there was one chef who came to work and
stayed for a long time, Jean Pierre Moulle, he was classically trained and he was French
and he could like bring some hardcore information and technique into the kitchen. But we would
just put things on the menu and then try it. And one thing we figured out right away, and
you, because it's one menu, one night, you are not duplicating the same thing over and
over again, you are always, there is always the next night and new things. But if it didn't
work, if we were unsatisfied with that dish, the thing is you were just like let's put
some version of that one the menu next week. And we would do it again, and we would do
it again until we got it and then we had that technique or we had that dish in the repertoire.
Same thing with something that worked fabulously well, we would do it again soon so that we
wouldn't forget. Because when things are changing so often it is hard to remember, you know
you're just moving all the time. So that same way of, that same approach I took into the
print studio when I stopped working in the kitchen, which is go for what you want to
see. I would try it and sometimes it would work and sometimes it wasn't but then I would
try it again, try it again. And eventually you would kind of get there, so for me some
of the memorable menus are the ones where I really, I really discovered something.
>> Male #3: Thanks for coming, I love your work. I have a mimeograph machine, I am terrible
at using it. But I have a series of realizations like, oh it matters what ink you use, oh it
matters what paper you use, but I missed the beginning of your talk. I was curious about
how far down the rabbit hole do you go with the particular paper? I know people who, like,
they are not happy with what's available so they try to make their own. I was just curious
like do you enjoy that part of it and how far do you go to get it just to your specifications?
>> Patricia: That's a good question. Very, very far down the rabbit hole. [audience laughs
lightly] Another tremendous pleasure in printing and I thinks it's one of the things that really
hooks people, especially letter press printers, is paper. A paper is just beautiful, beautiful
stuff, quality papers. And they all print differently, they all feel different, they
have slightly different textures and colors. So you have to make adjustments for all of
that and you know when I would be conceiving of a menu, making a plan, part of that is
what paper, what color is the paper, what's it's going to do in the press. And because
not all papers are suitable for block printing or letter press printing, that kind of limits
certain things. But fortunately most fine papers are really, really good. I don't make
paper, but you know we have done all kinds of things like print an image and then make
a fan out of it. Cut it and glue it to sticks in order to get a printed fan, and then you
just, there are all kinds of things possible. You build up your knowledge of materials and
inks and mixing colors and what happens when you put one color on top of another and what
are you likely to get and all of that. It's a cycle, it's trial and error, basically no
rules, you just keep, you do it until you get what you want. Yeah, yeah, but that's
the fun of it. That's what I was saying, that discovery is, um, you start in one place and
you just keep adding to that and you get into all kinds of new places. [pause] Anyone else?
Thank you, thank you very much. >> Male Announcer: Ok, can we get one more
round of applause for Patricia.