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Letters Eye 53
From Caroline Archer (St Bride Printing Foundation), Eric Kindel, Philip Thompson
French library under threat
From Caroline Archer, Director, St Bride Printing Foundation, London:
L’Imprimerie Nationale de France – established by Cardinal Richelieu under King Louis XIII, in the 17th century as one of the world’s foremost printing offices – is under threat of closure and dispersal by the French Government. This is a tragedy not only for France, but also for the international typographic community.
L’Imprimerie Nationale is home to a remarkable collection of typographic material, which is a unique and priceless testimony to the history of printing from the 16th century to the present. It includes the Cabinet des poinçons (Punch Room), which contains hundreds of thousands of metal types and punches for both western and oriental scripts; and active workshops that include a foundry, machines for letterpress and lithographic printing, copper-plate engraving, stitching and binding. In addition the library, set up in 1539 by King Francis I, contains over 30,000 books plus the archives of the State printing works. The Library is an international centre of academic excellence, whose collection is a record of specialised typographic know-how and expertise spanning five centuries.
But the collections, workshops and library of L’Imprimerie Nationale de France are in danger of extinction if its future is not ensured. The French government is currently selling off various buildings and businesses of the Imprimerie Nationale Group, a commercial limited-liability company in which the French state is sole shareholder. This is being done with no consideration for this historic heritage, other than packing it into crates for permanent storage. The move is scheduled for the first half of 2005.
The French typographic community is determined that the collections of the Imprimerie Nationale should not be dispersed and are calling for this wonderful heritage to remain in Paris. It is hoped that either an institution can be found that can guarantee adequate resources and capacity to house the Imprimerie, or a fully controlled, non-profit-making organisation can be established to safeguard its future and administer, develop and expand the collection.
But in the first instance the French government is being petitioned to stop its act of typographic vandalism and to consider the preservation of printing history in France. If you would like to know more about the action being taken and lend your support to the campaign to save L'Imprimerie Nationale de France you can read more by visiting: http://www.garamonpatrimoine.org/petition.html where you can also sign an on-line petition which will be sent to the President of the French Republic.
Many thanks for your support.
Unintended accidents
From Eric Kindel, London and Reading:
For readers of ‘Worlds of moiré’ (Eye no. 52 vol. 13), a clarification of several images is needed since their reproduction is not entirely consistent with their text or caption descriptions. In figures 4 and 7, a number of line tints appear to form moiré effects when, in fact, no such effects are present anywhere in the original printed work.
In figure 9, moiré that is indeed present in the original is, as reproduced, somewhat muted, and this despite several rescans. The effect can be seen more clearly in Frank Whitford’s excellent The Bauhaus, Masters and Students by Themselves (1992), where the same image is reproduced on page 240. Finally, the right two tint swatches of figure 5 should illustrate pre-formed moiré effects, but don’t because they are the wrong swatches; the correct ones can be found in The Process Engraver’s Compendium (1932), page 22, numbers 39 and 40. I admit, with amusement, that remarks made at the end of the article about the control of moiré were in part too sanguine, as some of these ‘accidents’ demonstrate.
Art Without Boundaries
From Philip Thompson, London:
Your Archive feature about Art Without Boundaries (Eye no. 50 vol. 13) was brought to my notice by an ex-Watford student of mine. Gerald Woods and I met when we were teaching at Watford School of Art around the late 1950s, early 1960s. On the staff were Peter Schmidt (Beaux Art gallery) Gwyther Irwin (Gimpel Fils), Derek Hirst (Angela Flowers), Rowland Jarvis, Mark Boyle, Ray Moore (photographer), Dieter Rot, Hansjorg-Mayer, Anthony Froshaug, Alan Kitching and visiting people like Cornelius Cardew, Brian Eno, Richard Hamilton, Edward Wright et al.
It had a very enlightened head of department – one Sandy Sutherland – who was an MA Courtauld-Institute-educated painter, looked like a bank manager, and who would interview you without any fuss if you wanted a teaching job. If he liked you, you had absolute carte-blanche to do what you liked. It was really a wonderful model for an art school and one never likely to be seen again.
I’d always been confused by categories in art from about the age of seven, enjoying cartoons, posters and fine art without concern for some hierarchical consideration. Watford was my first art school job and this heady mix of staff all doing their own thing but finding a common ground, seemed to accord with my early feelings.
It was about ten years later when Gerald and I decided to write Art Without Boundaries (a working title suggested by Mel Calman) and it was largely due to our Watford experience. As you can see, so many of the staff at Watford feature in AWB.
Sadly, Gerald Woods died about a fortnight ago. We had been e-mailing each other and kicking around some ideas for a further publication.
(A postscript: When AWB first came out, the critic John Berger wrote in New Society: ‘The intro contains a photograph of the sheet music to John Cage’s 4’33". Would that all the pages in the book were blank. I feel sorry for the people in the book; it’s much better to be out than in.’ It took him two pages to rubbish it further!)
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