Tag / South Central Threshing Association

by ndsupress

Keeping a Close Eye on Fonts

Note from NDSU Press Publisher Suzzanne Kelley

Breanna (at right) and Megan scrutinize each font’s every twist and turn in their mystery collection.

Our 2023 Introduction to Publishing class has just returned from its Braddock Expedition. While at The Braddock News Letterpress Museum, located on the grounds of the South Central Threshing Association, NDSU students were tasked with a number of activities under the tutelage of Leah Burke and Allan Burke. The museum collection of fonts is magnificent, replete with multiple cases full of alphabet and punctuation pieces. The fonts are mostly formed of metal, but some are wooden and large. A few of the font styles are italic; some are bold. Each case contains lowercase and uppercase fonts of a single type. Previous classes and volunteers have sorted the type so that there is only one style per case, a detail-oriented task that has taken place over time in order to organize the collection. Now, students and volunteers are tasked with the detective work of identifying the measurement and name of each type style. 

Type Gauge Tool

There are tools–physical, printed, and digital–to help the students determine the size and style of the type case they are assigned. Beginning with the Type Gauge Multi-Tool, students insert a sample piece of type to determine the height of each font. Font heights are measured as “points,” there being approximately 72 points to an inch. A size 36 font is about one-half inch, and a size 12 (typically used for Word documents) measures at 12/72 of an inch, or, about 1/6 of an inch. (OK, that is enough math.) 

 

Sara, shown here using digital means to narrow down her font identity search.

A digital resource our font detectives enjoy using is Identifont, one of many free options available for finding font families. Identifont asks questions such as, “Do the characters have serifs?” If the answer is yes, then the next question might be, “What style is the upper-case ‘Q’ tail?”

Each question the students answer leads them to the next narrowing-down clue, much like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure kind of book. Students can also make use of type-face identification books held in the museum library.

Ella and Mike study a printed font-style resource.

 

Once the students identify the font style in their type case, they have the great fun of setting type, using their fonts to name the type in their case, and thus building pages for a museum catalog in progress. 

 

Some mistakes were made. It is not easy to set type to “read wrong” and “print right.” (Yes, these are the technical terms.) Here, we see that a first try at typesetting and printing the font identity and size needs a little work.

 

Fortunately, our mistakes are easily corrected. (Maybe not completely in the first try. Can you see the extant error?) 

 

Check out this brief video, where you’ll see that Anish (in the blue jacket and yellow tee) and Abby keep at the task until everything reads right.

Mission accomplished! 

Among other assignments on site this past weekend at The Braddock News Letterpress Museum, all students had their try at identifying fonts, typesetting, and printing. Our hands-on learning experience illustrated how typesetting and printing were done at the turn of the twentieth century and provided a plethora of new-to-the-students terms for the art and process of letterpress publishing. (They also learned about the magic of Gojo.)

We so appreciate our community-university partnership, teaching students (new and) old ways of publishing, while providing aid to the collection management at The Braddock News Letterpress Museum. Special thanks go to Tracy and Paula Moch–who kept us fed and hydrated (and to Johanna for her delicious homemade brownies)–and to Allan and Leah Burke, who kept the training and tasks a’coming! Leah, in all those years of running the newspaper business, you may have missed your calling as a teacher! 

by ndsupress

C’mon in! The door’s open!

Publisher’s note from Suzzanne Kelley

Here you see visible proof of why moving our chapbook publishing project from the spring to the fall semester was a good choice. Iron Man Tracy Moch, with the South Central Threshing Association, illustrates how this winter is progressing as he works to gain access to The Braddock News Letterpress Museum, located in Braddock, North Dakota. As our spring semester draws to a close, we would have been hard pressed—with snow piled high—to conduct our letterpress printing project of printing, assembling, stitching, trimming, and numbering individual chapbook copies. Instead, our students in the Certificate in Publishing program now use the spring semester to acquire our next chapbook collection in preparation for publishing in the fall.

Facing east from inside The Braddock News Letterpress Museum. Thank you, Allan Burke, Pressman Extraordinaire, for this picture and the photo of Tracy. Between his work at preserving and operating The Hunter Times (Bonanzaville, West Fargo, ND) and The Braddock News Letterpress Museum, Allan has his hands full of good projects!

 

These days, as we hunker down in the wake of more blizzardy weather, we continue the process of giving first reads to dozens of manuscript submissions for our 8th Poetry of the Plains & Prairies (POPP) Award. Students learn how the acquisition process works for literary press prizes.

The first step is to learn how to navigate our online submissions portal at Submittable, a platform used by more than 11,000 organizations. Submittable is known to poets and writers of all genres as a place to submit their work for publication consideration. In a 2023 review conducted by FinancesOnline, Submittable ranked 3rd of 253 popular apps used for applicant tracking. I chose Submittable because of its familiarity among authors at large, its user-friendly design, and its price. Submittable is an easy place for students to see how publishers (and nonprofits and institutions offering grants and scholarships) are able to receive and track submissions, and it is a place where authors can keep track of all the presses and magazines where their work is being considered.

At Submittable, we are able to design our online entry forms. Here is what the form for submitting POPP Award nominations looks like.

 

 

Once manuscripts start rolling in, students in the Practicum in Publishing—taught every spring—learn how to assess manuscripts based on the aim of the POPP Award series and the mission of the press. They will each read each of the submissions, ranking them in accord with this call for submissions:

North Dakota State University Press seeks poetry submissions of any style for our annual Poetry of the Plains and Prairies letterpress chapbook publication. While authors may call any place home, their submissions must deftly capture the feeling of, as well as the reality of, living on the plains and prairies. Authors may submit any number of poems equaling thirty to thirty-five pages in length, with no more than one poem per page.

We accept new submissions for the POPP Award every year from January 17 through March 17. Answering a series of questions about the aim and mission for each submission, students—undergraduate and graduate, coming from studies in multiple disciplines—take part in winnowing the submissions down to about seven to ten finalists. Where submission selections are close, we meet to advocate for favored collections. Thus, the experience prepares students for work at other literary presses, where interns or other in-house readers pore through what they call a “slush pile,” discerning which manuscripts should go forward for further review and acquisition. Our finalist selections are then sent to the previous year’s POPP Award winner, who serves as our finalist judge and selects the winning manuscript.

Our team of students learn about the history and form of chapbooks in the Introduction to Publishing class. They take the POPP Award-winner’s manuscript, chosen in Practicum in Publishing, and they are introduced to the line-editing process, standards for book design, selection of cover art, building a copyright page, and developing marketing and publicity plans.

Instead of printing, assembling, stitching, and trimming chapbooks at the Letterpress Museum during our chill “spring” months, the hands-on labor takes place in the more accommodating fall months. How lucky we are to have the good fortune of reading poetry manuscripts indoors, while the snow piles up around us!

For more information about the Certificate in Publishing, check out our course descriptions for undergraduate and graduate students. If you are age 65 or older, and you would like to audit the publishing courses for free, check out the option in Project 65.

Destiny Manifested, by Bonnie Larson Staiger, was our first POPP Award chapbook publication solicited through competition. The award was first named Voices of the Plains and Prairies, and—in 2019—the award name changed to Poetry of the Plains and Prairies Award (the POPP Award).

by ndsupress

Flash & the Heidelberg

from Suzzanne Kelley, Publisher, and Allan Burke, Retired Newspaper Publisher and Consultant/Operator for Our Chapbook Publication Projects

The title page for a Muddy Kind of Love is printed on 32# Southworth Naturals Paper, Latte. Interior pages are printed on 32# Southworth Naturals Paper, Birch. 27# Red Maroon Vellum tissue insert at front and back. Cover is printed on 67# Cream Cover Stock. All printing is done with 16-gauge wood-mounted dies prepared by OWOSSO Graphic Arts, Owosso, MI.

While our blog title for today sounds like a crime-fighting duo, in reality, we are talking about chapbook press operations. In a typical year, our Intro to Publishing students would be caravanning to Braddock, ND, where they would print hundreds of pages at the Braddock News Letterpress Museum. This year being atypical, however, we have implemented Plan B.

Thanks to the folks at Flash Printing in Bismarck and to operators and consultants Mike Frykman and Allan Burke, our interior pages for A Muddy Kind of Love are being letterpress printed on a Heidelberg with some regional history.

Flash Printing is the proud owner of a Heidelberg letterpress, which they usually use for numbering, perforating, scoring, and die cutting. This weekend, with two new ink rollers that Allan brought to Flash from the Braddock News Letterpress Museum (Braddock, ND), this project is Back to the Future for the press.

The Heidelberg was bought brand new by the monks of the Benedictine Monastery at Assumption Abbey, Richardton, and Flash is its second home. One or more of the Flash owners attended high school at the abbey, which once had both a high school and a college. Several of the Iron Men—from the South Central Threshing Association—who aid and abet the operations at Braddock News, also attended the abbey’s high school, and one was the general contractor for one or more buildings on the abbey’s campus. Braddock Letterpress Museum founders hold the abbey’s folder in storage, awaiting restoration.


Pictured after installing a hanging propane furnace in The Braddock News Letterpress Museum in Braddock, ND, are, left to right, Ken Rebel of Bismarck, Tony Splonskowski of Bismarck, David Moch of Hazelton, Tracy Moch of Kintyre and Dave Duchscherer of Bismarck. They are all active in the South Central Threshing Association, Inc

Today, even as we write, Allan and Mike are letterpress printing the interior pages of A Muddy Kind of Love—the Poetry of the Plains & Prairies Award won by poet Carolyn A. Dahl—on the Heidelberg press. Through the magic of UPS overnight deliveries between Bismarck, Houston, and Fargo, we anticipate having fully printed, assembled, trimmed, and individually autographed and numbered copies available on December 10. Join Carolyn, Allan, Suzzanne, and our Intro to Publishing students on Saturday, December 12, 2020, at 2:00 p.m. CST for a visit with all and a book-launch-reading by Carolyn Dahl. You can register in advance for this meeting here. Free and open to the public.

Copies of A Muddy Kind of Love are available for pre-sales ordering at our NDSU Press online store.

About the author:

Carolyn A. Dahl, winner of the 2020 POPP Award with her chapbook, A Muddy Kind of Love

Carolyn Dahl was the Grand Prize winner in the national ARTlines2 poetry contest and a finalist in the PEN Texas Literary competition and the Malovrh-Fenlon Poetry Prize. Her chapbook, Art Preserves What Can’t Be Saved, won first place in the Press Women of Texas contest and the National Federation of Press Women’s Communications contest, chapbook division. She is the co-author of The Painted Door Opened: Poetry and Art, the author of three art books, and has been published in many anthologies and literary journals. Raised in Minnesota, she now writes from Texas where she raises monarch butterflies, sending them north to Midwest habitats.  www.carolyndahlstudio.com.

A Muddy Kind of Love is the winner of the 2020 Poetry of the Plains & Prairies Award, hosted by North Dakota State University Press.

Poetry by Carolyn A. Dahl. Cover design by Jamie Trosen.

About the Intro to Publishing class:

Students—graduate and undergraduate—are able to gain experiential learning through our Intro to Publishing class, where they learn the history, business, and practice of small press publishing. The Intro is part of a series of required classes to earn our Certificate in Publishing, which is offered in conjunction with the day-to-day activities of NDSU Press. We could not take our usual class photo this year, as we only met face-to-face in small groups and at all the distance we could muster. Students from the class printed the covers for A Muddy Kind of Love on a Saturday in October using an 1890s Chandler & Price letterpress located at Hunter Times Museum, Bonanzaville, West Fargo. In light of our need to work at some distance, we invited Mikaila Norman to utilize her caricature-drawing skills to depict our chapbook project crew. If you are interested in earning the Certificate in Publishing offered via the daily activities of NDSU press, check out the descriptions here and here.

2020 North Dakota State University Press Introduction to Publishing students, instructors, operators, and consultants. Illustrations by Mikaila Norman.

Top, left to right, Undergraduates: Meghan Arbegast, Jamie Askew, Grace Boysen, Megan Brown, Jake Elkin. Row 2: Abigail Keys, Shawnia Klug, Sydney Larson, Jack Payette, Corrine Redding. Row 3: Kiri Scott, Madeline Wright. Graduate students: Lis Fricker, Oliver Sime, Elle West. Row 4: Allan Burke and Mike Frykman (Press Operators/Consultants); Dr. Suzzanne Kelley (NDSU Press Publisher/Instructor), Kalley Miller (Teaching Assistant), Zachary Vietz (Graduate Assistant in Publicity and Press Operator/Consultant).

www.ndsupress.org