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Friday, March 27, 2020

Dat show-through doe

Mike over at ToP pointed us to this book: Entrance to our Valley which has some very nice things in it. I'm not super interested in the TIS editions, though. This was originally self published, and the video runthrough Mike cites is of that edition, and you can watch it here: Video of Entrance to our Valley.

The self pub edition was printed on a Risograph, on of all materials, newsprint.

Risograph is basically a mimeograph machine packaged in a photocopier-style box. The thing makes a stencil from your material, kind of like a photocopier. This stencil is then used over and over to make copies of your source material in a single color, whatever ink you select. You can do multiple colors by doing multiple passes with different inks, but the registration is iffy. It is this feature, ideally, which makes Riso cool.

Anyways, Risograph is super-hip and legitimately kind of cool, but whatever. The point is that the self-pub edition is on newsprint.

Watch the show-through as pages turn. You can see a fairly obvious shadowy outline of the previous page, verso, on every spread.

I don't know if it's on purpose, and I don't know if I am just seeing structure where none really exists, but I'd swear that, as often as not, that shadowy picture verso contains some graphical echo of the main picture recto. It strikes me as a very clever riff on Walker Evans style sequencing.

If so, it's just a gimmick, but it's a good one. An effective and unexpected use of materials, I'd say.

While I don't really want a copy of the TIS edition, I do rather covet a copy of the self-pub edition.

1 comment:

  1. "Risograph is super-hip and legitimately kind of cool, but whatever."

    Excellent summation.

    ReplyDelete