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Phil: We rehearsed what we were going to say this morning because on a previous occasion with Julia Ferrari we had a go at one of these conversations and it was a bad recording, probably my bad with the equipment, too much static in the recording. Just before I turned the recorder on you were saying something about another situation, mentioning the history of the press, and interestingly about a week ago I made a photo essay with William Hays and he also talked about the history of the press, with a small p - all presses, regressing through European presses and Gutenberg’s movable type to Japanese Hanga printing and even earlier ones from China with carved wooden blocks. Multi color images from registered individual carvings. He said that the prints might have disintegrated since they are 3000 years old, and you couldn’t tell how many had been made, whether 2 or 3 prints or 2 or 3 thousand. The prints were never numbered and it was not a reduction process where you lose the original image from a lino-cut. These were wood cuts, very durable used over and over again. In the history of civilization so far, Julia, you come in in the 1400s with Gutenberg and moveable type.
Julia: Yes, … basically at the time when the use of calligraphy as the means of communication changed. It had (previously) been a period when one book at a time was hand copied in a monastery somewhere, in beautiful ink, and then came the revolutions in print and reading information. The revolution started with the physical world of technology but also revolutionized people’s learning and education.
Phil: From about 1400 to about 1960 people used similar technology, and then came offset printing an intermediary surface of a rubber drum which then imprints the paper, and more recently we have everything digital. In our previous conversation you were saying that you were one of only four presses now in the entire United States to continue with this earlier tradition where paper is pressed directly against raised-type — could you describe that process for people who may not be familiar.
Julia: Just to qualify that statistic, there are plenty of people who work with type on letterpress printing machinery in a variety of ways, but then there are people who make type — more than one method of making type (monotype, linotype), —and again one step further back in time you go back to Gutenberg in the 1450’s, where they were making type by a sculptural process called punch cutting. They were jewelers and they were goldsmiths and they would be cutting just as David Walters does — in his back room he has an object known as a pin, a wooden work surface which is exactly like what punch-cutters use, the same essential art working with metal and engraving, filing, making an image. I don’t know the jewelry making process that well but I am sure you heat and cool things as well. In making type you create a punch then you anneal it. Heat it and cool it. That hardens it and takes it from a relatively soft metal and makes it hard, so that you cannot cut it any more. When I say 4 people or so in the US, that references letter foundry work, —still making metal type for sale with nineteenth century equipment. So in the United States in terms of punch cutting it is one of two. Stan Nelson from the Smithsonian also cut-punches as well as my shop.
Phil: Is the difference between punch cutting and other movable type that one involves pouring metal into a mold?
Julia: There is a mold involved in both but the mold of the nineteenth century version is mechanized, part of the industrial revolution — a way of going from hand-setting type from a drawer which some people could do very quickly to them figuring out how to actually make the type as needed. Linotype and Monotype were two ways that they cast the type with molds for a book or a newspaper. That was the revolution that happened in book making and typography. But essentially it was the same — it does go all the way back to the 1400s —since it is still a relief process.
Phil: It is fascinating that I said to William Hays that what he was doing was the same as Durer. Then he said, O, I have a Durer. He showed me the print later. Then I said that in terms of his equipment, there is a computer on the desk and there are electric lights in the studio, but that he was making ink from the same materials — a flax linseed base, and using a hand-roller for inking the substrate, the press is not electric, you are winding it through by turning handles — essentially the same as has been done for five or six hundred years, and even further back in Asia. Is your press electrical, or do you hand-wind the paper.
Julia: There are all states of in-between. There is not much electricity involved in the nineteenth century process, one with compressed air, and that air would blow through this amazingly complex machine — it had a keyboard which was six times bigger than my regular computer keyboard. It was huge, big iron and steel, with bars underneath it configured for each typeface. This is a very physical world instead of having a chip, you have a 12 x 18 inch part you would pull out and replace for different typefaces. It was heavy, twenty pounds or more. Everything has lightened up and gotten smaller but it is the same stuff, it is the same thing. You are still making the type — in the past they would pour type and use a hand mold and shake it into one letter, making one letter at a time, and that was after this process of punch cutting, of making a matrix and making a mold. Then they would cast it. In the nineteenth century they speeded it up adding machines that would cast metal into the mold. It was still very skilled; you had to be able to listen to what was going on — not like just plugging something into a digital machine that would then do it for you. You would have to pay attention and use some skills. Not much has changed, you are still running it through a press; you are still using a relief process. You are still inking, you are still having to listen to the sound of the ink on the press; the sound of ink on the rollers indicates how tacky it is.
Phil: Tactile interaction with the machine and materials.
Julia: Right. I think it requires more skill of the physical body — you have to be able to see & listen, because you are the one getting the ink, paper and type together, you are the one controlling it still. On the computer unless your printer is malfunctioning there is no interface of you within that process except for the design, and there are still parameters put into the computer which are the programmer’s to a certain extent. That’s the difference, letterpress is more in the physical world where your skill set or physical body has to meet the challenge.
Phil: I think we have lost something there and last time we spoke we mentioned this very thing — but I am currently conflicted because I would like to ask you more about your letter foundry and why there are only two in the USA, but in passing we said something about when you have to exert your muscles in interaction with machines it is a more conscious use of your will, You are controlling consciously, whereas if you are only pushing buttons or keys, it is more like the computer program is doing it and less aligned with your own energy both physical and muscular — and this is something a lot of people don’t do any more.
Julia: I think there is a growing desire to become more connected, since I think somehow that is what people seek in their deepest levels, because to do that is to be truly alive and when we take that away we are always seeking more - maybe that’s why people do bungee jumping or climbing, some dangerous sports since sometimes there is a thrill of actually being responsible and alive and in the moment. This is partly why we are here.
Phil: And determining things by your self. There is an enjoyment in that, and before the mike was turned on we were talking about playing chess where there is no luck, it’s massively complex and all the time are problems. You either like solving problems or you don’t play chess. That’s how it is. Nevermind winning the game there is a delight in determining things, you saw this and you saw that and you solved them, or maybe not all the problems – that level of determining something all by yourself with no level of chance in it — that is unusual, and where else can you do that? Possibly cooking?
Julia: You are somehow engaged fully. And yes, we don’t get to do that much. We live a life where we “kinda sorta” do, and where we have an ideal to engage but there can be all these things between us and an actual engagement.
Phil: One of the striking comments I read about the Wall Street collapse came from these interviews where people actually made these weird trades and they said ‘what did we do? We just made this trade punching buttons,’ and the result of this very speculative trading practice which caused the markets to collapse was that the very people who did caused money to disappear from people’s lives, people you can’t see from a tower block on Wall Street, and these people who operated this system genuinely didn’t think they brought the financial system down — there seemed literally ‘out of touch’ with what they were doing. The agents of it had that degree of separation.
Julia: Yes, this sort of muffling that happens. In a way that speaks to the fact that everything we do has an effect in the world and yet if we are less connected to see the cause and effect of things, the further we get from that, people can do things without thinking or having some kind of consciousness about what they are doing and how it effects other people in the world and how big that can affect other things in the world. As individuals we have become sheltered from that sense of disconnection. As you said, the repercussions of that touched everyone else. It was done in a place where the concept of that, the responsibility for that, … there was no contact with it.
Phil: Like people in a fog who didn’t think they were doing anything, did not feel responsible. Just like the laws of physics, how about the laws of trading; how could they not know they were doing something so destructive? They brought down all the finances of the western world. Yet when it is just you and the machine it is more like the chess anecdote - no one to blame, though there can be external factors, … damp weather and the paper won’t feed, too much static, or too much dust… but much of this can be controlled and is — having the print come out just so is very consciously determined by one person’s human intelligence, and you have known all the stages of making it and will perhaps work on more stages, cutting the print, binding it into a book. A sense of holding some integrity for your intention to achieve a result, which was utterly missing from the crash. If you look at what happens in companies you might pay the bills, but what are you paying — is it an invoice or is it water or paper— a compartmentalization. The guy who does the trash never gets to see a bill for trash disposal and might even work in a few buildings without really knowing what happens in them.
Julia: If you think of it that way we are getting further and further separated from our lives. I guess convenience or whatever it is, is separating us further and further. Or stuff comes between. It was interesting when you said about the humidity, the dust and the chance which comes in, since I think that is a part of it — I think managing those —comes into it, managing the environment and having to respond in the moment to any one of those things. In the world of printing, if it’s humid your rollers will swell up and suddenly you will start having a real difficult time printing. But you can’t walk away you have to solve the problem.
Julia: Whatever it is, you are solving that problem and solving whatever else is going on — that is vital too, you are not solving somebody else’s problem, it is part of your world and you solve these little things and bring those into sync again, again because they are never in sync, nothing is ever perfect. One of the things you are doing with printing if you think about it, is putting ink onto a surface from these pieces of type in the physical world, which have been hand-set or by a process in which human beings have touched those letters and arranged them — you are making a page up, not just something a computer coughs out with a plate, it is actually metal type, a result of the process which has gone though the complexities of dealing with the now, in the physical world. Perhaps here is something in the paper that will go through and break that piece of type — so you are printing and looking at each printed sheet just like with a wood or lino cut. You have to look not just stand there and have a machine produce 50 or 100 of them, you are actually looking, depending on the speed of your press, and if you are hand cranking checking each one quickly, but you see that broken letter, and as soon as you see it, (and maybe you didn’t see it before, …you are looking at something that is maybe,12 inches across by 12 inches high, … with small type), then you have to stop the press and unlock everything. Go in with tweezers and pull that letter out and replace that letter, lock it back up exactly the same way using your physical memory and your senses of things — not just push a button and it’s locked. You have to hand-crank gradually each side.
Phil: We have a conversation here about the physical act of printing which has flowed naturally into a philosophical conversation — which is not separate from the physical description, and with a sense of a person being responsible for all the stages of producing a product. When I look at the world sometimes I think ‘how can anyone have intended that? The result seems not to do with any conceivable original intent but nevertheless bad things have happened. Could be anything, an idea from government to benefit people in a particular way … and I wonder how this is possible? Some act of human consciousness is missing, unlike the process you are describing of being continuously conscious of things all the way through. A Wall Street fog descended somewhere, and people did things without being conscious of the result or the intention.
Something is gone wrong, and in the manner of the work you were discussing, doesn’t go wrong, you intercept it. The difference between what people do these days and what they used to do when things were more manual and connected … one result is that there can be this fog such that you don’t even know things have gone wrong.
Julia: There is something about intention there too, isn’t there? When someone is doing something and they don’t think it is affecting the world — but it does have ramifications. What is the intention behind the original act? Is that really what’s moving out into the culture and having that ramification? Is that intention something which benefits the whole society or really something small and insular and — what is going on at the root there? Why aren’t they thinking how that affects everyone? There is the possibility that they could be thinking about the greater cause and effect, but no, it’s one dimensional for example that event on Wall Street — it’s like, ‘how can I get this for myself?’ And yet it is never one dimensional. It will always have these layers and layers so that something big like that started small, but since it was being done over and over again became big, without intention, without people thinking about what kind of effect that had.
Phil: Another intention or corollary is when there is a good intention, which could happen from say, government, but by the time it gets from DC to San Diego or Vermont on the street things aren’t working out well. Perhaps that is because there is compartmentalization so that the initiator doesn’t see it through to subsequent steps, and the original becomes degraded or watered-down by intermediate agents. This is not what happens in a chess game or in your work, which has a tradition over 600 years in the West so that constant attention is applied — you complete that original intention with integrity.
And this means at a qualitative level throughout, rather than ‘this is good enough.’
Julia: Right, and you are tempted to. It’s not like you are living in a space where… you constantly have to face that question — whether you are going to go the extra mile on something — since it is in the physical world it is not easy, it is not fast… whenever you see it’s wrong you have to say to yourself, well — I am going to ignore that because I only have 25 more sheets and it’s finished, or you say, I am going to stop the press anyway and take out that letter and fix it because those 25 last pages are important. They are just as important as the first 25. You have to discipline yourself to go the extra mile — I had to do this, I was trained in the way that if there was 1 page left you have to stop the press and fix that letter — that’s hard because part of you is saying ‘I want to get done here’ have lunch, have a coffee break, but you can’t because the reason why you are doing it is because the technology is not current, it is not about speed anymore, you are not doing it for that reason. I wrote down the word ‘integral’ from when you were speaking earlier and it’s the reason why you are doing it. You are not doing it for all the traditional reasons that people are usually doing this in the world. You are doing it because you want the challenge, you want to have to do the slower method, but because you are challenging yourself — and those are the parameters you are setting for yourself — the goal is doing this in a particular way.
It is not about ease or easiness, there is a whole different reason you are doing it. You are challenging your physical self to do something that is harder, and everything involved with that you want to do … the best you can. That is its own reward, as you said, when you spoke about chess, you thought it through, even when you lost there can still be an exhilaration of having done your best. It’s a subtle, quiet exhilaration, but it’s there nonetheless. It reaches your life.
Phil: In terms of the difference between quality and quantity every day, newspapers in the US have to produce a million new words to full up a fixed amount of space — you have to do it, you can’t have blank pages, you must fill the space however worthy the content is. Whereas electively not choosing to write just any filler we would think instead that of all the things I would like to print, what would it be? That is where if you could actually choose material of worth, the qualitative aspect emerges, then … doing right by that. I can see you are stimulated by this idea.
Julia: I suddenly had this vision about the world being inundated by too much information, reading the New York Times or whatever; there is just so much there. I have talked to people who are proud that they can get through the New York Times on Sunday morning. They know how to skim through and they know what’s important. I was just thinking how amazing it would be in the world if there were this reality where only things that were really, really worth reading could take up space on paper. You didn’t have to wade through all kinds of stuff which was just not so.
Phil: There is a novel by Doctorow where a character is creating a perennial or perpetual newspaper — just one edition, but some essence of everything is in it. If you buy this newspaper it assuages all your need to ever buy another one. Of course this is very difficult to do and a crazy conceit that you could do it, but it’s sympathetic to something real since really on a daily basis all that changes are people’s names and locations. Joe Smith didn’t do it, Mary Smith did it, and she didn’t do it on a mountain but in a valley. The paper would have everything from the thrill of new archaeological discoveries to what happened in fog on the interstate. It copes with all appetites so when you have a copy you never need buy another newspaper. Of course it is mockery but it does go to the question of how interesting new news is of itself? In these recorded conversations this is maybe number eight-five, I have asked people where they obtain their values, for example, from the news? No-one has yet admitted that the news forms their values. People respond that values come from considerations of quality of life rather than a myriad of ephemeral events. It’s a peculiar thing when all this communication does not figure into how people will act or feel, except from some momentary excitement, or even schadenfreude.
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Julia: I would think it affects people in a way because maybe we are learning how to live in a world where we are distanced from things.
Phil: I can’t hear you I was on my iPod. If you get the train from Alewife into Boston you see all those kids wearing ear-buds abstracting themselves from where they are.
Julia: I was watching the state of the union and I had to keep making myself wake up to listen in a certain way since I think we take things sometimes so for granted, there are layers of things keeping us from direct contact. I am writing my next essay for In-Between and it has to do with this event I went to — people had corsages they were wearing, and the thing became about who wanted to wear it and who didn’t, how hip or not hip, and at the end of the event people were throwing them away. For me that was a symbol of something, of how we can’t appreciate the real things that are around us and the things become symbols, which can be discarded. It is this layering that goes on; this is something someone did to honor people but it is just a symbol so let’s drop it in the trash. And yet the thing itself is a thing of beauty.
It’s beautiful, simple, the simplicity of a flower, and yet for me to see someone drop a flower into the trash at the end of an evening, because the evening is over is a shock for me. I wonder if that relates to our distancing topic, of people not really being present when they are in the world. What do we value, how far away are we from things that are happening? Does the news affect us personally or are we jaundiced to these things really happening in Washington.
Phil: It’s happening in Washington but is being presented to you while sitting on the couch of your own home. If you are on the cell phone all the time or have those ear-buds in you, seems to me, are not having an organic interaction with where you are, but in some abstract world — so you don’t pay attention to bodily clues to your immediate neighborhood, to local environment, not by accident but by deliberation about not being here, now. In that sense, with television news or a drama you are not being at home either, nor in current time but in some world which seems important somehow but in these recorded conversations people never reference the news in respect to their values, never mind the kind of drama where people are committing murder or sundry heinous acts in your living room.
Julia: It comes in other means in a way; we are not actually seeing someone speak and are we looking at it as if we were watching a video? A film that is not real. How do we begin to know the real from the non-real, or a sense of becoming connected to the real from the non-real?
Phil: As if you really don’t want to be here now. It is a form of deferment. You have convinced yourself that your tuning in elsewhere is more important?
Julia: I had an experience with the Internet and checking email: before that we would work in the shop and we would work all day and had a connection with everything that was immediate and in that world — being very absorbed in that world. Then when email came in we would check our email and I remember noticing that this was an interruption actually, in the feeling of being in my shop, and it was a physical thing which took me away, a separation from being in that place. More than once I said that I am absolutely not going to look at email all day and I am just going to be here in the shop and do the stuff that I normally do, and not be tempted to go into that other world. And I did it, and it was back! Here it is, this amazing feeling of being in this place with this lovely rich feeling of being alive fully. It was interrupted by the presence of email and the internet, that other world coming in and having its place, its own little one which could occupy your mind — but when I was in the print shop both mind and body were both engaged in that world.
Julia: It was very different and a good thing to have experimented with. I like that, when I was not going back and forth – liked it so much better. It was hard not checking your email every day, a real discipline but it was real, an actual physical thing I detected and felt.
Phil: This all reminds me of an anecdote from thirty [laughs] perhaps thirty-two years ago at the Findhorn Foundation. A guy showed up at an annual conference and he was head of The Foundation of the Inner Light, sounds a bit California though I think it was in the Carolinas, but this guy was not playing the guru or anything, and he told a story: he had found this
Bonsai gardener, and became very interested in how he was working and he would work at length work with him as an apprentice, do what I say, please pay attention — and eventually he watched the man work and became more informed about bonsai and after a while the speaker said to the Japanese man, “you are not just a bonsai teacher, you are a spiritual teacher!” The Japanese man looked really pained at this remark and replied, “How dare you separate those two things!” Where you were addressing your attention to work reminded me of that anecdote — a spiritual practice is not something you go and do in a little room near the attic on a special mat — nothing against the mat! [laughter] Instead here is something integrated in the same space as everything else, not an add-on, or a life style, or an option — and this subject is fascinating since we are indulging our speculations and perceptions in this conversation of why there is a fog, a distancing between any now and intention and current activity. This seems to recommend not just a differing quality of goods but also of soul — especially if we think that that happens otherwise. I thought you were saying less explicitly, but nevertheless, something like the Japanese bonsai man.
Julia: Just now I hadn’t made that connection but working in the print shop has been, and will continue to be, almost — unspoken, because if you are doing it you don’t speak of it much — but there is a level when you are working with the skill of the body, there is something of a spiritual pursuit involved. It’s been said that when you make something, that the item itself contains the energy of the person who made it, and whether you were conscious or unconscious when you did it. If you were conscious when you were doing something then the thing itself resonates that consciousness. This resides in the article itself, whether a book or a beautiful wooden object … whatever it is, that is made by hand, not just the object itself but actually reflecting the spirit in which it was made. That is why people are drawn to beautiful things, because it is a connection to the inner beauty as well as the outer beauty… more than one dimension. Hearing you say that there is something interesting to that process, a granular process where you are in a place doing something and how interrupting that would of course interrupt the consciousness. Not that that you have to be meditating when you are making your books, but there is something … where you are pulling into sync all of your skills and trying to be awake and aware of what you are doing.
Phil: A commitment of a fuller self into work makes for a different resonance than if you have to, (dread word), multi-task. To do something differently than “whatever” or without any consciousness or even concern about what happens as a result of what you are doing.
Julia: Or caring if something looks good or kind of like looks good, but is not truly done well. There is a dedication to something, which is not just about the surface, but about the depth. There are surfaces everywhere and we have become all about the surface in our society.
Phil: To attend to the now and your local neighborhood surface even, this is also removed, not an abstraction of whatever place. And places change in time and need attention. If everything comes from somewhere else or you are consulting things which are not actually going on in your neighborhood, this removes attention from where you are and how you are — you could be said not to even be there.
Julia: if you say local I am on my local historical commission. Going back in time there is a sense of being more in the world than just an artist and one’s own simple quiet pursuit that is insular — it’s important to open out into the world around us too. A period of time back I got involved with politics, local, state and town, in a very non-descript way. Right now there is a debate going on about if we want to sustain the place like it was, which conflicts with people who want to destroy houses for personal gain, for money, and the whole fast moving modern world. So when you are talking about working in one’s environment I am trying to bring it into thinking like that. So are you saying in that environment … are you talking about engaging in local environment?
Phil: I think it means a natural horizon. We are indoors at the moment and I can see inside the house and out the window, and this is my current environment — and here I am not thinking or experiencing being somewhere else but putting my attention here. I am also being necessarily responsive to what’s here, and maybe responsible too! If you don’t care to be where you are, can you be responsible for yourself, as if you are operating from somewhere else or from some abstraction or idea — not a current interaction with any here or any now. Perhaps that lets people pave over historic districts or maybe you will wind up with a flyover in yours. Lovely! And so people can do things which are not in tune with where they are and the results clash with and degrade what there actually is to experience. Apart from suggesting that we should send this transcript to Parabola Magazine when you have edited it — though it is far too long for their publication as is, but to wind up, would you like to address the future of your work in terms of the school or do you think of it as being an institute — your ideas for involving other people.
Julia: I don’t know what it is called yet but I think of it as a school — a name that has come to me is an International School of Typography and Letters, something to help me think about it. For me, the idea of having the craft be able to continue, in a world in which things are moving fast and are separated from our skin, from the tips of our fingers — this is important since there are only so many people on the planet who still connect, who have learned skills, many skills, and this is one of those places, and I have spent thirty-some years of my life doing it. It feels like a responsibility at this point. And I am very keenly aware of having lost my partner, he was just sixty and when that happened he was a person who was extremely skilled — we were equally involved in the press and the book making, and it was always a shared adventure — and it was always about the adventure. The reason for being alive was to be able to do something like this. Fighting to push beyond people saying, “Oh, you can’t do that.” Yet you can, and many things you can do in the world, of course, but people don’t think it’s viable any more. I have this idea that it is important to carry that on; all the materials exist and all the skill sets exist and all the parts exist in one place, are available, therefore there’s almost an equal vacuum on the other side, of opening to that — I can feel it as a physical thing. I am looking for a vision in this new direction after coming into a place where a boulder hits or change suddenly happens. The world has opened up in a way where it is not predictable any more. I was able to function in a world that was craft-based, but that now has to change because the fundamentals of people and partnerships involved has changed. It hasn’t changed the basics but the road in front has changed. Now it is up to me to create that road. I can say that the road has stopped … or the road is continuing. I prefer to make a new road. You don’t just do something like this for thirty years and then just stop. It’s what makes you alive.
In searching for a vision it has come to me that this (school) is one of the ways, besides making books in the world. — Before it was about two people interacting with poetry and art and then bringing in the third factor of the spirit — seeing what would happen when you bring everyday skills into moments of creativity. This is moving that idea, in saying “open it to other people, what about being the other part of this circle of creativity?” If it is about the effect of (what happens) when a certain amount of energy comes together to create art or things of beauty and merit … you need partnership. My partnership is no longer, … has shifted and moved to this other dimension where the partnership is no longer with my partner Dan Carr but is now with the world. I am keenly aware of that and I need to do that. It is not about all the usual things like trying to make money and being an entrepreneur, it is really about making sure that this knowledge carries on and that it continues in time and space, since it is shocking to see the endings of things in time and space — and yet nothing ends, at the same time, and it is important to keep something alive and grow other people’s souls.
Phil: A fascinating thing to say of time and space — and we have spent maybe forty minutes of this conversation wondering if people’s time was taken up in a good way at all, and if they have and can access any internal space — you remind me very much of the energy of William Morris of the Arts and Crafts movement, not just the externals but also of his philosophy. In order for people to find that space in themselves would you say they need some discipline in order to provide a structure or conduit, and your work would provide a means to do that. As my favorite philosopher Jake Needleman says, “you can’t have more democracy outside than you have inside you.” An example of an inner to outer relationship. With all this clamor for our attention it is progressively harder to find the means to make that space, to allow some intention to dwell in, some inspiration. Another observation — this is sexist, but all old Chinese sages were sexist in stating what is active to be masculine — if you are a master of something then you can’t move on until you give up what you know to your students. Which is making a space in you to receive something ‘new’.
Julia: Like what happened to Buddha in a way, sifting out of having everything, to what was truly everything — going from the physical world that we live in by letting go of it, gaining truly everything.
Phil: A greater turn on the spiral, those sorts of things.
Julia: I want to do that and it feels like the time has the possibility; it vibrates.
Phil: Do you think people reading this can understand the kind of space you have experienced? Do you think, horrible term, there is a market for it? We an all address what’s wrong but what practical way is there to do right by yourself and others — is it so evident? Could people of thirty-five years appreciate this having seen enough of other things?
Julia: This would connect to the digital world of typography but also to the physical world of letterpress and bring the two together so that one shines a light on the other. By doing that it connects to part of the world we are living in. And younger or whatever age people can connect that way, and then another layer can potentially happen by getting involved in the physical world of type, which can’t even be expressed in words — but to have the opportunity to feel what happens when you engage in something physical like that.
There are multiple layers of that, which could be available. Not that you can say, “come in and get charged up!” it’s there to find if they are willing to find it.
Phil: Something perhaps that you can’t teach but you can learn.
Julia: Yes.
Phil: An environment sympathetic to learning.
Julia: It happens despite the world, in other words, this intersection of the modern and the craft — when people get involved in craft all the time they experience that world, but by pulling the two things together it gets to people who are not just interested in something old — this is not about being interested in something old, at all, and some people will say to me “Oh it’s this dying art,” and I will always say that it is not about a dying art, it is very much alive. It is very much present and it is a part of the future. That’s how I think about it; it’s about the future. That’s what I would say to why people could be interested. It pulls together the skills involved with craft and moves it into the future. And moves it into the intangibles of the world — these two things coming together. The current present and typographic with the past, into the future. That is something that is needed and exciting and people will have many different ways of contacting that — some will be drawn to the physical side, and there will be people who will find more things available.
Phil: Yes, a receptive environment for activities. Is that a good wrap?
Julia: Yes, that’s good. I am looking at my notes, of things I jotted down during our conversation: … ‘when chance happens intention guides you,’ … ‘responsibility is integral, and — why you do it.’ …
In conversation with Julia Ferrari
September 5, 2014 at 1:42 PM