Date: June, 2004

Ludlow type: Tempo and unknown ornaments. Mulberry hand made paper.

Text: "HOMEWORK. Collate This: You are holding one leaf that consists entirely of one page. [Conceived and printed after attending Introduction to Descriptive Bibliography at the Rare Book School, March 2004. We send our enthusiastic thanks to Terry Belanger, Richard Noble, and everybody else at RBS. 150 Copies]

Notes:

The inspiration for this was our Descriptive Bibliography course at the Rare Book School in March, 2004. For those of you who haven’t (yet) taken DesBib, a fundamental axiom of book structure is that a leaf – the piece of paper that winds up in a book – holds two pages; in other words, you’ll never see a leaf with one page because there is always another page on the other side.

It occurred to us to make this little paradox: one leaf with one page. It is printed on a Möbius strip: a geometrical oddity discovered by August Ferdinand Möbius, the nineteenth century pioneer in topology.

The type was cast on a Ludlow line caster, using Tempo typefaces and a Ludlow ornament. We printed it two-up on our Chandler & Price platen press using the work and turn technique. It took four passes through the press to print it – although it would have been possible to print it in two passes (two colors) if we used a rolling device (it has, after all, only one side). It’s a limited edition – there are 150 numbered copies. The leaf in the picture is a cancel (in order to correct a typo); you can see where it has been tipped in.