Ars Combinatoria.
N.p., 2010. Item #3942
10 x 8 in. cloth over boards clamshell box, housing 18 "auto-pressure" letterpress prints, along with 24 pp. booklet produced with laser printing and three-color offset lithography.
From the artist's statement:
"Ars Combinatoria is an exploration of the graphic possibilities of a single piece of wood type—a thirty pica Clarendon R—and a restricted set of operations—positive and negative auto-pressure printing with only one inked impression. This technique enables the top of the wood type to interact with the bottom and itself. With aesthetic and technical constraints there are eighteen prints," for which Mellis has created a special system of notation to document the permutations and combinations of this procedure.
Mellis describes the process of "pressure printing" at greater length:
"The variable pressure between the paper and the printing surface does not have to be created by a low-relief paper collage. It can also be generated by a relief surface on the paper itself. In Ars Combinatoria, blind impressions of the top and bottom of the wood type R are the relief surfaces for pressure printing. The forms of the top and bottom of the block can thus interact with each other and themselves. This method of pressure printing converts the surface of the wood type from relief to planographic. I call the technique of using one block both for the printing surface and to create the low-relief paper collage, auto-pressure printing."
A PDF of the explanatory booklet that accompanies the project is available here.
Printed on a Vandercook Universal I at Columbia College Chicago’s Center for Book & Paper Arts, on Crane’s Lettra. The booklet was printed on the Center’s Heidelberg GTO, with title and cover page printed letterpress and laser-printed endpapers.
This is from an edition of 30 copies. As new.
Price: $850.00