Ampersand Duck too

It's been years now since I had a sessional job teaching artist books and letterpress printing at an art school – a relationship that COVID-19 killed, really – and while part of me misses it, I am enjoying a much less structured life. It's not quite retirement, it's more like 'dedicated freelancing'.  Image above: Ampersand Duck & Byrd: Altered Library, 2013 I inherited that artist book submajor course around 2007, when my art school was starting to restructure itself in various ways. I'd been a student in the original unit, and it was taught along the lines of the original workshop, the Graphic Investigation Workshop (GIW), even though GIW had been closed to become the Printmedia & Drawing Workshop (PMD). The original semester unit would produce one publication only: an editioned collaborative book/folio/boxed work, where each student would produce a page (often a double spread) using various print techniques and letterpress, all responding to a common...

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...