AND BOOKMAKING

1 January 2025, High Noon  | Two days after the Black Moon

Black Moon?

That’s what I said. It’s a new term to me, and if it’s new to you, too, here’s your lesson in lunar terminology to kick off the new year: Surely you are familiar with Blue Moons, the name given to the second full moon within one calendar month. A Black Moon is the second new moon within one calendar month; the new moon opening the cycle of the upcoming Wolf Moon happened to fall on December 30, twenty-nine days after the new moon of the 2024’s Cold Moon. Now you know.

Wishing you a belated winter solstice holiday season (our household is the Christmas variety), here is your update on the past lunar cycle’s activities…hoping to keep it brief, though I am fully aware that I have a tendency to provide more detail than some might find necessary, if only to satisfy those who appreciate it.

Regarding the opening photograph, these vehicles were parked at the entrance to one of our county parks on 10 December, when I went for a mid-morning hike with our neighbor, Jack (84), who enjoys getting outside and walking around in the fresh air, and our dog, Izzy, who enjoys the same. It is easy for me to appreciate the Amish pace.

HOLIDAY TIME

Just about everything gets back-burnered during the second half of December, and this year it may have been more severe than ever with two daughters coming home for Christmas through New Year’s Eve. It was wonderful to see them both in good spirits after challenging semesters and to have their energy back in the house.

The documentation here really ought to be about Vicki’s mastery of the fruit cake over the past few years. Yes, fruit cake, the very last treat I would ever eat over the holidays in years past has turned into the thing I cannot wait to get in my mouth with a cup of coffee in the morning, all thanks to Vicki’s research and thoughtful preparation of ingredients and the patience required to create such a masterpiece of holiday baked goods. I never dreamed I would ever get excited about fruit cake, but I have become its number one fan. Maybe next year I will crowd Vicki in our tiny kitchen to do that documentation for you.

What I can show you is my humble attempt at shortbread cookies. I found the recipe to be perfectly simple, the directions easy to follow, and this neat old-fashioned ornament-shaped cookie cutter to be just right for my aesthetic sensibilities. Merry Christmas to all.

CUTTING CONUNDRUM CONQUERED

All of the excitement that led up to the Big Day left the day after Christmas completely open for other activities, and the first on my mind was to make some progress with the Hail, Holy Queen rosary book. The eighteen printed sheets, as shown in the photograph above, which you saw nine months ago in the Pink Moon edition of The Monitor, has been waiting to be cut into individual pages, and adhered to panels which will be linked together with copper chain. It has been quite a while since locking up the form to print this sheet, and if I had some plan in mind for cutting them down when I printed it, it wasn’t recorded anywhere and I couldn’t remember it when it came to cut. This kind of thing causes mild anxiety until I figure out how to do it, but I’m used to that by now, because figuring out how to do something that has no instruction manual and has not been done before is fundamental to the creative process.

My first instinct was to cut the pages into horizontal strips, and then figure out the exact width of each page (by dividing the overall length by the number of pages). This proved to be challenging because the type, leading, and furniture in the bed of the press are measured in picas and points, which do not exactly translate to fractions of inches. Based on measuring from center to center of the crowns that head the Hail Mary pages, each page was calculated to be 1 and 19/32” wide. That is not a mark on the table of the cutter, nor on the ruler at the top of the cutter. As you can see on the cut pages above, especially the colophon page at the far left, the results of my cutting according to the red tape jigs applied to the table were absolutely terrible. It didn’t help that I couldn’t figure out a way to make the first cut precisely. Strike one.

Next idea was to use a centering ruler to mark the mid-point between the two longest lines, use this piece of chip board as a square to mark each cut with a pencil line, and then use that pencil line to determine an exact width (sure enough, 1 and 19/32”). That would allow me to mark and cut the left side of the left page (“Song birds’ eggs…) precisely, which would then allow me to place a singular jig at 1 and 19/32” from the cutting blade to cut every page the exact same width.

You can see in the top two rows above that this was clearly the more precise method. This is one of those moments when the artist mutters, “Duh,” to himself.

But then it comes to mind how nearly impossible it is going to be to square up the long cut of the horizontal strips on the paper cutter (the first strips were cut using pencil marks and an Exacto knife, which takes a long time and yields inconsistent cuts), and how much smarter it would be to square up the shorter vertical cuts. So that’s strike two, and now I’m back to step one, which is to use the knowledge gained to make new jigs on the table and cut all 18 sheets the short way. The goal here is an edition of 11 books, so it’s important to be pretty confident that it will be possible to measure and create jigs for the next cuts before committing. It took a couple deep breaths and mental sorting before I committed to it, but ultimately I did, and  then it took four sheets to dial it in the precision, so now I’m down to fourteen usable sheets to make the 11 books.

By this stage in the game, jig-making is getting kind of fun, and I figured out how to make one jig on top of the other, which allowed me to make all the necessary cuts on the 3-up vertical strips during this final step. There were a total of six cuts at three different points, and explaining that is too much detail for anyone but me .

The photograph I failed to take is the one illustrating that my measurement for length of the printed pages was slightly too long on the printed sheet, resulting in the top and bottom margins of the maroon panels being about 1/32” thinner than the 1/16” margins on the left and right when cut into equal thirds. Those may seem like fractions too small to cause concern, but everything is relative, and they are painfully obvious at this small scale. This meant that in addition to cutting the 3-up strips into thirds and trimming the extra paper off the top edge, I also had to shave 1/16” off  the bottom of each page to create equal margins when they are mounted on the panels (evidence photographed below). That’s actually an explanation of the reason for the six cuts that I said you wouldn’t get in the previous paragraph. I cannot believe you are still reading this.

And in the photo below you can see the result of three sessions in Der Klubhaus between Christmas and New Year’s Eve: all printed pages for 11 copies of Hail, Holy Queen cut and stacked neatly in four piles of imperfectly centered pages (one pile = one book), thirteen piles of what I’m considering near-perfect usable pages, and then one set of all fifteen pages for one book spread out in the two bottom rows.

This is all a huge relief, because there is an upcoming exhibit of artists’ books at Baylor University titled Rituals—Could there be a better title for a exhibit to submit a book about the Rosary?—and the application is due 24 January.

EXPECT TO RECEIVE SUPPLEMENTAL UPDATES REGARDING THE PROGRESS OF HAIL, HOLY QUEEN IN THE WEEKS AHEAD.

I am also hoping to be able to exhibit and sell copies of this book at the Pages Artists’ Book Fair at Leeds Art Gallery in England this coming March. That application has been submitted and I will find out whether or not I have been accepted before the next New Moon Monitor.

Stones Watch in Silence by David Steingass is also at the top of the priority list this month. There are no updates on the progress of the book at this time, but I intend to work on that book simultaneously in the weeks ahead.

Sadly, none of this is typesetting or printing work, but there will be time for those activities in February and early March. Another reason to get down to business and get things done.

PREPARATIONS COMPLETE FOR WINTER IN HOLY HOLLOW

New ladder! The ladder inside Der Klubhaus, which hangs on the ceiling above the desk and below the entrance to the attic storage, is an aluminum extension ladder. It has been utilitarian for the past eight years but I have always longed for something with more character. I imagined a wooden ladder, with round rungs, just the right length to reach safely into the attic without having to be a two-part extension ladder. I often thought I would have to find time to make one. Imagine my excitement when I found the ladder of my dreams in the fall of 2023 with a for sale sign on the front lawn of a house in Elroy, Wisconsin. It was actually an extension ladder, with an asking price of $40. The seller was happy to sell it for full price, but a little less happy when he found out he was only getting rid of half of it.

This ladder has been waiting patiently for a full year under the main building because it is quite old and well-used, and therefore required a thorough sanding and a good soaking with linseed oil in its dried out fibers. That finally happened the afternoon of the 9th of December. This ladder not only looks better than the aluminum extension ladder it replaces, it feels better, smells better, sounds better, and if you were going to eat one or the other, I imagine it would also taste better. Dreams can come true.

Also on 9 December, tens of thousands of native prairie seeds were broadcast on all freshly prepared areas around the perimeter of the main building, and up at the top of the existing prairie below the woods’ edge. This final land maintenance task of 2024 wrapped up just as the sun set on the eve of a four-inch snowfall. For those lacking knowledge or experience with the cultivation of native plants, germination of many native seeds requires freezing and good contact with the soil, which means great timing is always the goal. Nailed it!

7-8 December 2024, 8:55 pm-11:00 pm  | The evening before and of the first quarter of the Cold Moon
Surely you have been watching this Cold Moon wax wondering if you missed an edition of The New Moon Monitor. You haven’t. As usual, kind of busy paying attention to other priorities, and honestly not feeling like I have anything to report. But a commitment is a commitment and here I am, with more photos in the folder for this newsletter than any previous, so I guess there actually is plenty to type about.

DRIFTLESS.EARTH

For starters, let’s talk about holiday giving. No, first let’s talk about one of the other irons I’ve had in the fire since around 2010…driftless.earth. When we moved to Viroqua in 2004, we knew we were moving to the driftless region, but it wasn’t really a word heard kicked around town. The term has been around for decades, maybe a century…I don’t really know…but it’s a geological term referencing the lack of glacial drift in the area.

When the last round of glaciers covered what we call Wisconsin (roughly 250 million years ago), they stopped and retreated rather than flattening the topography like they did everywhere else. When glaciers retreat, they leave behind all the earthen matter they have scraped up during their slow slide across the land. That’s called drift and it fills in the valleys. We don’t have any drift here.

It was around 2009 when I met Eddy Nix, owner of Driftless Books & Music here in Viroqua. He wasn’t the first guy to use the word in his business name—the noteworthy Driftless Cafe, just blocks from our home, had been established for years—but we can say he was one of the first. And it was during entertaining conversations with Eddy when I thought maybe I could design some stickers that simply said “driftless” and sell them. The idea for the design was simple and very intentional . . . Century Schoolbook with a lowercase d, because it wasn’t a proper noun at the time (and I’m not sure who decides when a word becomes a proper noun, but my phone seems to want to auto-correct it every time I thumb it in) , and I wanted to convey the idea of a dictionary entry. It was designed to be all about the word, and nothing more.

It was a little bit surprising how well it worked. Between the original driftless sticker and the driftless trout sticker (which came a year or two later by the suggestion of our neighbor) I’m pretty sure I’ve sold more than 25,000 stickers over the past 15 years. Can’t make a living on it, but it’s good supplemental income, and since 2017, 7% of sales (not profits, sales) is donated to organizations that work to enhance or protect the driftless region.

Once the cemetery season wraps up in mid-November (which it has), the focus becomes merchandising retail spaces here in Viroqua (the Viroqua Public Market, the Viroqua Food Coop, and Noble Rind Cheese Co.) for the gift giving season with t-shirts, prints, greeting cards, stickers, glassware, mugs, and of course, stickers. Sell, sell, sell!

Now . . . back to gift giving . . . either for yourself or someone you love . . . how about the 2025 lunar calendar from driftless.earth? This year it includes the new glow-in-the-dark lunatic sticker shown at the top of this newsletter. I have been designing these calendars annually since 2012 and sell between 50 and 80 a year. Apparently not doing it for the money; I might make a couple hundred dollars off the effort. I guess I just like the idea of making them available for the people who like them. You could order one today from driftless.earth or Etsy and you would get it time for Christmas. Sorry, no promo codes. I’m trying to make a living over here!

Or maybe one of these beautiful large format, 18 x 24 limited edition giclee prints now available through the Etsy store or at Noble Rind Cheese Company in Viroqua?

Or maybe someone on your list is the typography type and would like a beautifully printed copy of the Desiderata. Maybe a copy of For Dust I Am? Or really anything else at all from driftless.earth or Etsy. Every little bit helps support the enterprise. Thank you.

Sales pitch over.

IN SEARCH OF DRY STACKED STONE WALLS:
DOOR COUNTY

If you’ve been following these newsletters, you know there is a book project high on the priority list titled Stones Watch in Silence. This is a book of stone-themed poems by Madison-based poet David Steingass, who also wrote Native Son at Home, the first book published with The Heavy Duty Press imprint in 2000. A friend of David’s, Brent Nicastro, has provided the bulk of the photographs to illustrate the book, but we have been in need of a good photograph of a dry stacked stone fence, or wall, to complete the layout. Brent recently took a special trip to the Sheboygan area (eastern Wisconsin, north of Milwaukee) to take photographs of stone walls he knew of there. The effort was greatly appreciated, but in my mind, the walls photographed felt too new, too clean, to illustrate the poem. And therefore, a special trip to Door County with Vicki (celebrating our 27th anniversary at the same time!) on a quest to photograph the stone walls I recently learned exist on the peninsula.

Before we get to the dry stacked stone walls, let’s talk about the Door County peninsula. For those not from Wisconsin, Door County is the thin peninsula on the eastern side of the state, on the western shore of Lake Michigan, which separates Lake Michigan from Green Bay—the actual bay, not the Packers. Maybe it is the current awareness of a changing climate and rising sea levels, but when I think of peninsulas I think of Florida, and how it is like a giant sand bar that will eventually be entirely underwater. It has been nearly 30 years since Vicki and I last visited Peninsula State Park, and it seems I had forgotten about the majesty of this beautiful peninsula, or perhaps thirty years ago I wasn’t as interested in the geology of Wisconsin as I am today. The peninsula is not just a Silurian Dolomite escarpment...it happens to be the western termination of the Niagra Escparment.

Our first stop, of course, was the observation tower, from which you get the photograph above of Horseshoe Island in Green Bay. Beautiful partially clouded blue skies, but it was a pretty chilly day in the middle of deer hunting season, and hence the orange vest on Vicki in the photograph of the escarpment behind her. This peninsula is not going underwater any time soon. You can see in some of the other photographs along our hike how the dolomite, in nature, almost appears to be stacked by hand, and how beautiful the dolomite becomes after being tumbled and washed by the waves for thousands of years.

The soft white stones along the shore inspired thoughts of making carved bookends with them rather than granite, as originally imagined. I couldn’t help myself from picking up a couple to take home to see how they would carve. After a few calls to local quarries to find out where I could buy some of this gorgeous dolomite, I learned that I can forget about it. The stones on the shore are protected, and I might have been caught on camera, and if I get a letter in the mail telling me I’m in trouble, I promise I will take them back. As for buying dolomite from a quarry, it won’t work for making uniform bricks because of the very nature of it. Nature has already broken it down into irregular shaped bricks, and until you tumble and wash them for thousands of years, they are going to be rough and grey. I suppose I could get a giant rock tumbler and a very expensive saw.

Onward with the quest to find the stone walls. They are all around the county. They can be found on the edges of agricultural land, where they have been placed as the land was cleared by hand for planting crops. They can be found along the highway, dividing it from private residences. And they show up in the landscaping of businesses and their parking lots. There are quite a few styles, made with differently shaped stones, with some resembling the handiwork of Mother Nature (as above, and I imagine these are built with quarried stones) and others more human (as below, made with stones picked up off the land).

After three days of taking photographs, I realized I had forgotten a simple technique to capture a shorter depth of field and thus give more depth to my photographs, but I remain hopeful that I can transfer these into Brent’s hands and he will be able to edit them as black and white images to match the tonal quality of the rest of his photographs for the book.

Stones Watch in Silence will not be finished by the end of the year. But it will be finished by spring. And the same is true for the Hail, Holy Queen project. The reality has set in, as always, and I simply will not have time to focus on these projects until after Christmas.

SOMEONE GROTTO FINISH THIS THING

On our drive home we tried to locate a cemetery north of Brussels, towards the bottom of the peninsula. It was one last top on the stone wall quest. Vicki had taken out a book about Door County cemeteries from our local library system, and one of the photographs showed a stone wall in a cemetery in the area. We never did find it, but we did come across this grotto, erected in 1935 and made with stones contributed by all the local farmers of the parish, in the cemetery of St. Francis & Mary Catholic Church. A red granite slab inside the grotto serves as a memorial for the pastor at the time of its construction…

…which remains unfinished. And now I am giving some thought to calling the church and asking if they would like Viroqua Stone Lettering to come over there with the van to finish Reverend Jerome’s year of death.

AN OXFORD BOOK FAIR BUMMER, BUT. . .

News of the announcement of the Oxford Fine Press Book Fair came in sideways, via an email from a librarian asking if I would see her at the fair in Oxford in May. I then learned the dates of the fair, 3-4 May 2025, were announced via Instagram, and without an Instagram account I knew nothing of it. So I quickly made contact giving my intention to participate and lined up my lodging, but again, reality set in. Our older daughter, Katrina, will graduate from the UW-Madison in May (an art major, just like her proud father) and the ceremonies will be held the following weekend. Trying to squeeze in a leisurely trip to Oxford the weekend before would simply add too much stress to the household, and therefore I shall have to take a pass this year. Sorry to disappoint all my fans.

This is a personal bummer because I  mentally committed myself to participating in five consecutive fairs after my first trip to Oxford in March 2022 . It was a good experience and it seemed pretty obvious that you have to do these things multiple times to get acquainted and meet and engage with collectors. Beyond that, I just love being in England.

Not one to be easily defeated, I began looking for other book fairs in England in 2025, and found one in March featuring artists’ books at the Leeds Art Gallery. Now it seems like getting forced out of Oxford 2025 may have been a Godsend. Why not show my work to a slightly different audience? And maybe my books fit better into the artists’ books genre than the fine press genre. So I shall apply and wait to see how the curators respond to my work.

WOOD, DIRT, AND SEEDING AT HOLY HOLLOW

This is the part of the newsletter where you find out why I haven’t had any time to start working on any book projects yet this winter. I know it’s hard to keep track of everything, but take a minute to think back on the Flower Moon Monitor. That was when I told you all about hiring the guy to come and take down the three silver maples on the east end of the property. They were just too big and too old and too threatening to every vehicle and person in the driveway and parking area.

Those trees were like octopi, each having multiple trunks, most of which were bucked up for firewood before the growing season went gangbusters and hid them from sight. And now that we’re back in the cold and quiet season (thank goodness) the mess has revealed itself again.

upon recommendation of my friend Paul, who is a neighboring woodsman and manages the township dump, I purchased a new lighter weight Fiskars M27 Super Splitting Axe with fiberglass handle last week to replace the 8 lb. monster that was gifted to me by my city neighbor, who told me he got it from his recently passed friend Homer, but he himself thought it was ridiculous. And it is. It is like swinging an anvil. The M27 splits like a dream…

…which is good because there is quite a bit of wood to split before the snow falls. Vicki and I are planning to do it all by hand, you know, for the exercise. I will be the splitter and she will move it, an hour or so at a time. And thanks to the M27, I will be dreaming while I split.

This one is for the other wood burners out there. Maybe you’ve already seen something like this, but it’s new to me. Granted, I am a city-boy-turned-country only twenty years ago, and I have a lot of catching up to do.  Two fence posts and a cattle panel (it feels really great when you get to tell the cashier at the hardware store that you need to buy a couple cattle panels) make a brilliant bank for split wood. No stacking necessary yet keeps things tidy!

And another note for all my fellow countrymen (and countrywomen, of course), before you start chuckling about how I am still so country green that I don’t realize my three trees worth of silver maple is a quantity of inferior quality: I feel very fortunate to have been connected to a local fellow named Larry who cuts and splits firewood for therapy and delivers pallets of clean white and red oak at an extremely reasonable price thereby getting paid for his therapy. Smart guy—country smart. This $40 worth of firewood will add plenty of BTUs when blended with the silver maple this winter. Incidentally, Larry is also happy to help unload and restack the pallet (for the exercise and the conversation), and we talked a lot about a book he is writing about his family history. . . going back eight generations.

Speaking of deliveries, here’s three yards of dirt that were delivered the other day. Why on earth would a guy who is sitting on four acres of land need more dirt delivered? Well, for one, that would be a lot of shoveling of hard packed ground, and two, I don’t have a tractor or an excavator but I do have a wheelbarrow. Speaking of wheelbarrows, here’s another country tip if you don’t already know it: you can buy a great tire for your wheelbarrow at the Viroqua Tire Shop (this tip also came from Paul at the dump) to replace the worthless one that comes on your wheelbarrow when you buy it.

Absolutely no regrets. Moving dirt with this new tire is almost as great as splitting firewood with my new Fiskars M27. And to answer where or why I am moving three yards of dirt, it is in the name of providing a good bed for prairie seeds that will be sown just before the first snow falls.

If you look at the roof of the building behind the dirt pile three photos up, you will see the gentle slope of the roof drops all the rain (and melted snow) along the southern bank below it (above). The intention has always been to seed it with prairie grasses and flora, which grow incredibly deep and thick roots, thereby stabilizing the earth below while adding natural beauty above. It takes time for things to rise to priority, but this project finally has.

The bank fills in every year with an absolute mess of invasive plants, and most of it is a low-growing creeping vine. 2024 was finally the year to kill off all the vegetation along this bank, around the perimeter of the building, and on the east side of the the well (behind the new wall discussed in the Pink Moon Monitor) to create a clean bed for prairie seed germination, so they need not compete for sun with non-native, early season invasive species.

However, once everything was dead and raked off, it revealed another impediment to the germination of any prairie seeds sown: lack of dirt!

In the photograph above, you are seeing five wheelbarrowsful of fifteen shovelsful of dirt. That was the first day, just to get warmed up. Yesterday I finished the bank with fifteen more trips with the wonderfully tired wheelbarrow, and today and tomorrow I will perform another thirty trips to finish spreading the pile—before the temperatures dip back into the 20s (F)—over all areas to be seeded.

THANK YOU

Thank you again to Vicky Stewart of Vamp & Tramp Booksellers for placement of more books over the past lunar cycle: Alchemy and 8t Bags About the Natural World in the Special Collections of the McKeldin Library at the University of Maryland, Understanding This Book in the Special Collections of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Columbia University in New York, and another sale to the Fleet Library at the Rhode Island School of Design: For Dust I Am. And then thank you, as always, for your interest in what I have to share, and your support of The Heavy Duty Press.

I hope you will have a lovely winter holiday season under the Cold Moon, and if you are so moved, please send me an update of your own, or just an email to say hello. I think I have finally replied to all emails received, and it’s wintertime, so correspondence should come a little easier for a few months. It’s the most wonderful time of the year.

MARK YOUR CALENDARS

WHAT: “The Heavy Duty Press: Adventures in Slow Media from Driftless Wisconsin”
WHEN: Thursday, 12 December 2024, 5:30 pm
WHERE: The McIntosh Memorial Library of Viroqua

Enjoy the Full COLD Moon December 15TH

This edition The New Moon Monitor wrapped up at 10:54 pm, Sunday, 8 December 2024, spanning two days of typing and editing with breaks for eating, sleeping, and labor at Holy Hollow. Please excuse typos and misspellings. Thank you.