Preamble
Our library, the Library & Information Center, University of Patras, Greece, participated in the Library Visits programme of the 85th World Library and Information Conference of the International Federation of Library Associations in Athens. Thirty librarians from all around the globe were registered for a trip to Patras to visit our Library and learn about its collections and services.1 According to guidelines of the National Committee, we could provide gifts that the visitors could take back home and remember this visit, but these should not be heavy or big.
So, the challenge was to provide a gift that would identify uniquely this visit, it would be elegant and rare, and it would have “shades” of Greece and libraries.
We decided to design and print a card in the traditional typographic way, which is none other than letterpress!
The content
What we should type on this card? In the modern world of social media, a ‘meme’ or a quote about libraries seemed fit to the purpose, but these two expressions neither were attached to the national aspect of the visit, neither had the “depth” and the sophistication we wanted to have. Therefore, we preferred the poetic form, in a high and elegant manifestation, by someone who could be easily identified as Greek. In this part, we had the precious help by the Professor of Contemporary Greek Literature of the Department of Philology of our University Katerina Kostiou, who suggested the first six lines of the poem “Growing in Spirit” by Constantine P. Cavafy.2 The poem reads:
He who hopes to grow in spirit
will have to transcend obedience and respect.
He’ll hold to some laws
but he’ll mostly violate
both law and custom, and go beyond
the established, inadequate norm.
The process
The card was printed in the letterpress facilities of the Panagiotopoulos press unit, Tipografio.gr, in the Industrial Area of Patras. Tipografio is a modern typographic unit and the Panagiotopoulos brothers are trained professionals of the printing industry. While they use many advance techniques, such as graphene inks, nano-materials and NFC circuits in their projects, they have a considerable collection of old printing machinery that remains in excellent condition. In fact, earlier this Summer, their letterpress facilities hosted two workshops of the 7th International Conference on Typography and Visual Communication, one by Richard Kegler and James Grieshaber (‘Modular Letterpress Explorations’) and another by Jeff Pulaski (‘Letterpress-light Workshop’).
We imagined how we wanted the card to be, we designed it and we wrote the texts that would accompany the poem. For the back page of the card we wrote a few lines -sort of a colophon- that documented the printing. There, we placed a holder for the hand written count of the cards. We forgot to mention that the printing was limited to fifty copies!
As we designed the card we felt that the identity of the library should not overshadow the poem. We wanted people to concentrate on the poem and understand that this has been manually typeset and printed; so the name of our library should be discrete. Therefore, with the valuable help of the brothers we ordered a single level copper die (or else cliché) for embossing the logo of the library on the front page.
After we examined the cases, we found the right fonts and we started composing the text. There were some minor problems with the English case, as some characters were missing, but, thankfully, these were punctuation marks and therefore we turned to the Greek case, which supplied us what we were missing. 8
The media below document the process from the first to the last stages.
Setting the types on the composing stick.
Types on the tray to be examined for spelling mistakes.
Printing the pages on a Funditor electric high end proof press.
Cutting the exceeding paper to balance the size of the card.
Folding the card in a foot operated E. Bickel Heilbronn machine.
Inspecting the card in the light of sun for imperfections.
Ending credits
A heartfelt thank you goes to the Panagiotopoulos Brothers, Aristotelis, Nikos and Panos, for providing generously the means for this small project. More important they provided their knowledge and time, an expensive gift in our days. Many thanks also to Katerina Kostiou for understanding exactly what we wanted and suggesting “Growing in Spirit”.5
Notes
1 The final number of visitors was sixteen.
2 In Greek, the title of the poem is “Δυνάμωσις”
Όποιος το πνεύμα του ποθεί να δυναμώσει
να βγει απ’ το σέβας κι από την υποταγή.
Από τους νόμους μερικούς θα τους φυλάξει,
αλλά το περισσότερο θα παραβαίνει
και νόμους κ’ έθιμα κι απ’ την παραδεγμένη
και την ανεπαρκούσα ευθύτητα θα βγει.
gtsak 