What fun! The Museum of Boulder asked us at the Book Arts League to set up a pop up letterpress event at their historic location on the Hill in Boulder. The Museum has over 3000 cuts in its permanent artifact collection — all of which were donated by the Daily Camera. There were so much historical and weirdly interesting cuts we were over the moon about what to print. And what some of the various images were and could have been used for is anyone’s guess. From art deco abstracts to mountain scenes to shifty characters to ornate borders to church announcements and songs — we had plenty of fun things to print while barely scratching the surface of the entire collection.The Cat seemed to be a crowd favorite — resembling the evil twin of the Cheshire Cat. I suppose if someone had a couple of years they could rummage through the Daily Camera archives and try and find all the imagery in the old newspapers. But it might be better to leave it to the imagination.
They pulled out a few dozen cuts for the workshop participants to choose from and we let them print away on an assortment of proof presses with a few colors. We used red for pop, black for its timelessness and metallic gold for the sharpness — the gold worked out well as we were blocks away from CU, who happened to be playing a home game. In the photos you can see a CU logo that fellow board member, Greg, pointed out still can be seen in the interior of Macky Auditorium. And while we were all so busy printing and oogling over the amazing collection there were tons of other cuts not pictured, such as Macky Auditorium.
We are fortunate enough to be one of the last events the museum hosted before moving to their new downtown location. With about 25 folks printing and creating new ways to combine cuts on the presses, BAL members were busy for the entirely of the event trying to keep up with the creative minds of the new printers!
More pictures here!
