An inkling about type

There's something romantic about setting type by hand and printing beautiful books on a letterpress the way they did 100 or even 500 years ago, so it's no wonder Caren Florance fell in love with it the first time she handled metal type.

Now she says she can't decide if she's a fine press printer or an artist who works with books, but doesn't see why she has to choose.

The Canberra artist is printer-in-residence at the bibliography room at the University of Otago Library this month. She has a compulsive love of books and text and loves the idea of working slowly and painstakingly to produce something lovely, she says as she works a 19th-century Columbian press with its iron eagle counterweight perched on top.

Her love of hand presses started when she was studying bibliography for a master's degree in English and her teacher took the class to the art school in Canberra to look at a letterpress so they could see how compositors made mistakes when setting type.

She demonstrates how a compositor would read a text and at the same time pick up the type letter by letter and put them, along with the spaces, in the composing stick upside down and back to front.

"Even when you are doing it millions of times, your brain is telling you one thing and your hands are doing another. It's like typing, really. It's just slow - it's like going slowly along a really straight road and still hitting a truck."

As soon as she finished her English degree, she went to art school to learn letterpress printing and hasn't really left since, she says with a laugh.

She teaches bookbinding and alternative book structures and book arts. She also produces her own work, has a studio with a Vandercook cylinder press, her own imprint, Ampersand Duck, and often works on collaborative projects with other artists.

In Dunedin she is enjoying the luxury of having only one thing to do for six weeks, and not juggling family, teaching and other jobs.

Here she is producing 100 copies of seven large poster poems by New Zealand and Australian poets, 2008 Burns Fellow Sue Wootton, 2009 Burns Fellow Michael Harlow, Vincent O'Sullivan, and Australian poets Sarah Holland-Batt, Les Murray, Robert Adamson and Stephen Edgar.