Throughout 2026, many of the artists at Phoenix Rising worked on prints to illustrate a number of haiku written by local poet Fred Andrle. These prints were then bound together along with the text of the related haiku into an art book, “sun & shadow.” I was the typesetter for the book. My role was to set all 22 of the haiku in metal type, prepare them for printing, lay out the pages, lock up the letter forms on our Vandercook press, and oversee the printing of an edition of 40 prints for each poem. I printed many of them myself, and the rest were printed with my supervision by a team of dedicated volunteers at Phoenix.
My view on an average day of typesetting, test printing, and diagramming layouts for the book.
An example of a lockup for one of the poems. The poems were all set in forms of the same size so that the majority of the lockup remained the same for every page, ensuring that the page layouts matched. However, the page numbers were a different size for each page, so the lockup was also designed to accommodate slight variations of the page number line.
Many nights ended with our drying racks overflowing with printed haiku pages.
