Jane Goes Out w' the Scouts

Cutting the blocks for this book was extremely satisfying. I had Tamia Marg pose for the girl. She was my roommate at the time, and we used to spend afternoons up at Grizzly Peak at her folks, swimming, playing etc., when they weren't around. These images still evoke those afternoons, and her small, fit self, very active and compact. The letterpress type doesn't seem to have been mine -- I have no recollection that I ever owned such an elegant face. But I can't remember where I did the actual letterpress printing. I did buy a press and move it into the warehouse, but I'm not sure if that was before or after I produced this book. My guess is that I printed at Betsy's, in the barn, since she and Jim had moved to Ninth Street by that time. The type was easy, especially as there was so little of it. The text is three-layered (headers, body, small text) in order to mark the register of different tones on the page.

Design Features

typographic: Century and century italic, almost a schoolbook face, very classic, very clean, and carefully set, though the lower-case "f" in that size and font was so vulnerable that finding enough with their upper loop intact was difficult.

imagery: Silhouettes in linocut, black, sexy images of a very young female form, almost pre-pubescent.

graphical: The pages are structured with a clean, letterpress layout in which text and image are each discrete, each printed in accord with their own aesthetic.

openings: The book is short and has only one printed sheet, as well as an endpaper in translucent vellum or tissue, so only the middle spread creates any significant dialogue across the gutter. There the girls in the cuts have a playful relation to each other.

Detailed Analysis

The text, like the images, is highly suggestive, but never explicit. The sense that something occurs in the story is made clear, but only a setting out and a return from the woods is actually mentioned, with a peculiar hiatus in-between in which actions and confusions are registered. At the level of composition, this allusive quality shows.