I created the potato prints to spell out the name of my dog, Daisy, and used a paring knife to carve into potatoes from the little potato company. Although the process was fairly straightforward, carving the letters in a way that differentiated between upper and lower case letters proved difficult with such small potatoes, so I opted to make all of the letters upper case. It was also difficult to achieve a consistent size or style, so as to give the impression that the letters belonged to a deliberate font. Furthermore, I had to repeat the carving process of several potatoes due to a badly aimed stroke of the knife, and because I forgot, when it came to the practical application of something I knew theoretically, that the letters would appear in mirror image when printed. I didn’t figure this out until I carved the “S”, as the “D” could be turned so that it could still be used to print even if it wasn’t intentionally carved as a mirror image from the start. I was able to print the duplicate words with fairly consistent spacing and the only notable differences between the two prints are the pressure with which each letter is stamped, which led to varying imperfections in the letters. The entire process from start to finish took me about 10 minutes.

This process was not time saving or an improvement, from and efficiency standpoint, on existing typing methods. However, it offered an artistry of sorts that is missing from typing on a computer. In the video Upside Down, Left To Right: A Letterpress Film by Danny Cooke (2012), the speaker talks about the care that is put into each traditionally typed piece and that he feels that people can recognize the quality of it and value his traditionally produced printed works. Although, I am fairly certain that no one will value my rainbow “Daisy” in quite the same way that they value his products, I developed a certain attachment to both my potato stamps (they are still in my fridge) and the product itself, in a way that I wouldn’t have using methods more commonplace methods. There is value in more traditional processes, ones that require more labor and greater connection between the creator of the text and the product itself. 

Carving five letters was time consuming and I can only imagine the labour that it took to carve entire pages from wood or other materials as they would have done before the invention of movable typeface. Although I am very much in favour of the mechanization of printing, using typeface that is not made out of produce, and all of the more advanced technological methods that exist today, I believe that all of these advances in printing have to take into account what is lost in increasing efficiency. Gutenberg, as noted in the readings, was not necessarily trying to change the product of hand-written manuscripts being produced at the time with his movable typeface but was trying to make the process “more economical”. With new printing and reading technologies we still try to keep practical advancements from taking away from the connection that the reader has with the physical book itself. Many readers, for example are advertised as having screens that look and feel similar to pages of a book rather than the screen of a tablet. Mechanization of writing was necessary for a highly literate society but this doesn’t mean that handwriting  or early printing practices need to be completely erased as new technology emerges.

References:

Cooke, Danny. [Danny Cooke Freelance Filmmaker]. (2012, January 26). Upside Down, Left To Right: A Letterpress Film [Video]. YouTube.