ABRACADABRA

I've wanted to set myself a letterpress project for a while now, but felt I could never find suitable subject matter or content. I think I'm going to use my Unit 14 research thus far as a letterpress starting point. Since the type treatment of Abracadabra seems to be the earliest example of escalated indents with a reason that I can fathom, I am going to start with that. De Medicina Praecepta was first written a good few hundread years before the invention of letterpress, but I'm going to use the 16th century Parisian printed edition I found in the British Library as my visual stimulus as this is my only real primary research I have so far. I think I'm going to familiarise myself with the process by setting 'A-B-R-A-C-A-D-A-B-R-A' as prescribed by Serenus Sammonicus on one side of A6 card and the translation of the passage on the other. Below is an initial proof:













































I'm planning on printing it at A6 size so that I may be able to punch holes in the top of the card, and it could potentially be worn around the neck as is prescribed in the text. The design of my proof is based quite closely on the source material. The text is set in Roman capitals and italic lower-case (an old French typographic convention in itself I believe...I've seen it used in the opening credits of the film Prêt-à-Porter and on David Pearson's book covers for the French publisher Zulma) with the first character of each line capitalised, there is a drop cap, and the citation is hanging to the right in the margin. Admittedly I am quite uncomfortable with this level of visual referencing...it's a bit too close to pastiche for my liking which is definitely something I want to avoid with this project. However, this is really just to re-introduce myself to the letterpress department and, as I said, to familiarise myself with the process and with the conventions that I am interested in. In future I would like more of my own 'voice' to be present in any outputted work. We'll see how this goes...it may even be something I end up abandonning.