Ampersand Duck too

A few years ago I went to the launch of Michael Richards’ ‘biblio-biography’ of Alec Bolton at the National Library of Australia (NLA). I love the idea of a ‘biblio-biography’, which is just what it sounds like: a history of someone via the books they made. It could also apply to the books someone owned, if they were just a collector, but Alec was a book maker. He was a professional book designer and a letterpress printer. He was the first Publications Manager of the NLA and before that he worked for publishers Angus & Robertson and Ure Smith. He established a private press, the Brindabella Press, and last but absolutely not least, he was the husband of poet Rosemary Dobson, whom he met at Angus & Robertson and married in 1951. I mentioned in the last post that I worked for Rosemary Dobson Bolton. Here’s where it intersects: I met Alec when I worked as the Publications Officer for the Australian Academy of the Humanities, which launched a major bibliographic project called the ...

Moving into my 'forever home' has involved a lot of unpacking of boxes, many of which have been packed for a very long time. I'm nowhere near finished, nor have I organised everything that I've unpacked, which has resulted in a modicum of chaos (if there can be such a thing). Over the last year I've worked on a  project to make a material, handwritten archive of my (meaningful) Facebook posts, something I call my 'Facebook Yearbook', and that crazy task is almost finished. Today I came across a post I wrote in February 2025 and realised that it should be part of the 'small collects' post series that I started here during the first Covid lockdown and will now continue as I wrangle the hoard of treasures collected, bequeathed and discovered through what I now think of as my amazing bibliographic life, now that I'm entering the third trimester of it (cross fingers I am lucky enough to get a good run of it). So what follows is an extended version of ...

It's that time of year when One Must Print a Card, if you have the means to do so. When my studio was in storage, I'd make cards using Letraset, like this one (how good is that vintage card stock!): I don't make Xmas cards because I loathe Xmas. I think I've covered the reason why in my 'Enough' post.  I make 'not-Xmas' cards, and this year I had fun using an italic wood type font inherited from the Wayzgoose press, silver ink, and three different paper stocks: thick white European paper, mustard-yellow textured cardstock, and thin handmade Bemboka Paper Mill stock in a salmon colour. Here's the variants: A lovely thick paper that I only had in a few sheets -- an end-of-pack from a Wayzgoose Press (WP) book production, I think, because it was folded into landscape pages Same silver ink on the Bemboka Mill handmade paper. Is shinier than it seems here.  Single-printed on this great WP textured card stock, again, with only a few sheets left.  Double p...

Back in the good old innocent days of  blogging , I would document a wonderful perk of living in Canberra: hot air balloons (or, as my Western Australian father calls them, “baahllooowens”). They would appear in Autumn, when the air was cool and crisp and the sky usually clear. Either we’d get up early in the morning for the Balloon Festival by the lake, or I’d just see a balloon while I was out and about, and it never failed to lift my spirits, and if I was already feeling happy, I’d just get dreamy happy. The hero image here is a shard of a screenprint I made at a  Megalo  workshop. Balloon days are actually the reason I became Ampersand Duck — Below is a snippet of a letterpress print that I made as a student in the mid-1990s, and the combination of a comma and ampersand was perfect: literate yet completely silly, my favourite way of living life. So, I chose this small town not only because I have roots here and it’s affordable, but also because it’s 20mins from the be...

I’m a member of a few bookbinding guilds, not because I’m a keen binder, but because I do enough bookbinding to be eligible and it’s generally a small community down this end of the world so why not support it. I'm also a book designer, mostly for academics, nothing too sexy.  I was recommended this excellent  Substack article  called ‘Books Going Wrong’ by one of the various newsletters and it made me want to jump into the comments with what I’m about to show you, but you can’t actually – as far as I can tell – include images in Substack comments. For that reason I’ll throw them in here before I go any further. Can you see why I want to share? Bastardising the immortal words of Sesame Street,   NONE OF THESE THINGS IS JUST LIKE THE OTHER. Where do I start? These are meant to be the hardback first editions of the diaries of a serious and well-respected Australian writer. They are trying to hit all the markers of quality: hardback, dustjacket, nice paper, reason...

Living in a reasonably small town is still fascinating to me. I’m terrible with faces and names, but I know that they will stick in my head eventually, so I smile at everyone just in case. I like making my own fun, and don’t get lonely easily, so I’m actually terrible at wanting to find fun, but when there’s easy fun to be had (criteria: walking distance from home), I’ll be there. I bought my house to (a) support and encourage my parents to move off their 20-acre prickle farm and into town, and (b) live in the house myself when they moved out. I couldn’t afford to buy in my city. When my parents lived in my house and I visited, or eventually lived with them until they moved to their new supported-living villa, I would sit on the front porch with my mother and watch the world go by. She’s got dementia, but she loves looking at things, even if she doesn’t know the words for them anymore. She would look upwards and say, ‘look at that…’ and move her hand in a soft swirly motion. I’d say, ‘...