The last morning in the old studio

On the last weekend of October we hit the road one last time to collect what was left in the old place. We were lucky in that this very weekend treated us to three lovely late autumn days. This particular year the typical Golden October days were rare, making these days even more special than they already were for us: I had come to the place where I had been working in during the past twelve years, and I had come here for one sole purpose: leave it for good.

All cleared.

It was a gorgeous autumn morning with mist clinging to the mountain Hohenstaufen’s base. Even though we had been clearing out bookbinding and printing gear on three previous occasions already there were still enough odds and ends left to keep us busy well into the afternoon. But, finally the space was cleared, nothing left. We handed over the keys, and off we were.

Hitting the road one last time.

Monastry in Lorch

Leaving Waeschenbeuren behind we headed for the B29 road that would take us straight away to the motorway A7. We were surrounded by the mountainous countryside with trees and bushes at their autumnal best. Our route took us past the monastry in Lorch and right through Unicorn tunnel underneath the town of Schwaebisch Gmuend.

Einhorn Tunnel in Schwäbisch Gmünd

Crossing stream Rems

East of the town we crossed the stream Rems and on we went towards the city of Aalen. We were travelling on Monday but the following Tuesday would be a bank holiday in a number of German counties, so there was not as much traffic as on a normal weekday. We went on the northward bound stretch of the motorway A7, having a break at some point. The route took us through some of the low mountain regions one of them by the name of Rhoen. The highst elavation within the Rhoen region is the mountain Wasserkuppe just under 1000 metres. We did not have to brave that one, but the views of the many mountains either side of the motorway was stunning. The riges and slopes are forested and the trees had put on their colourful autumn foliage. In some spots large patches of European Larch were showing off their very special colouring.

Heading north

Having a break

Further north we had to battle what is called Kassel mountains. Here the motorway climbs a number of slopes and driving a van loaded to the brim can be challenging.Only a few kilometres shy of Kassel we left the A7 for the A44 and later the A33. Now the countryside becomes slightly less mountainous. Crossing the stream Twiste shows a meandering creek whose banks are decorated neatly with birch trees. The land gradually flatens out, the streets are lined by rows of trees and wind power stations are more abundant than in the south.

Crossing stream Twiste

Flat country

Around Herford we left the motorway for road B239 taking us through Luebbecke right on the foot of what is called Wiehen Hills. These are part of the most northerly low mountain region in Germany and the last mountain proper we had to conquer. Their highest elavation is the mountain Heidbrink with just under 320 metres. Further north streches the North German Plain towards the coastal regions of North and East Sea respectively. Luebbecke is famous for its privat brewery Barre whose buildings greeted us while we were going downhill. Leaving Luebbecke behind we came passed its port which is on the banks of Midland Canal. Building this waterway started in 1906, it runs almost straight west-east. It links river Elbe with river Weser and – via Dortmund-Ems Canal – with river Ems and the Ruhr region. The Midland Canal actually crosses both river Weser and river Elbe.

The town of Lübbecke

Crossing Midland Canal means we are almost there. Dusk was closing in, the clocks had changed back to winter time only the day before. We got home just after 5pm. The last we had loaded on to the van was my studio’s 1950s fridge. This was the piece we definitely wanted to unload straight away. There was no way I could have defrosted it prior to loading. We had pampered it with a huge pile of old towels squeezed inside to sponge up the water from the thawing ice. This had worked perfectly fine. We left the rest of the load on the truck for Tuesday. We had to hand the van back just after noon.

The barn in January

This is the barn as it looked in January. In the meantime we have cleared out the straw and where the straw was now sit all the type cabinets. And this is the printroom-to-be as it looked in April. It is still a long way until the presses can move in there and I shall be able to start printing again. We are getting there step by step.

Printroom-to-be

As I write this the wind is blowing strongly and there are powerful gusts outside. It is chilly and there are like fits of rain or drizzle. The sunflowers must feel pretty shaken by now. All of a sudden this morning the sky filled with large birds and their cries. It looked like a huge flock of cranes gathering to hit their road heading south for the winter. They were awesome to watch.

Sky filled with birds

Diary

During my ongoing process of relocating I found things I had long forgotten about. One of them was a little red notebook. Its cover is made from red plastic sheets and it has a white wire binding. I used it as my travel diary during a family summer holiday in France and we must have bought it locally at some stationary shop. There is no note about the year but it must have been in the early or mid 1970s. I had pasted in picture postcards of the location and vouchers of a pancake (crêpes) vendor called „The Golden Anchor“ plus a table of the opening times of a marine zoo.

Diary

Diary with printed poems

Until today I keep my diaries like this. I even constructed a special type of book which is designed to keep safe bits and pieces pasted on to the pages. My journals have always been companions for me. They are all worn and brim over with all sorts of snippets and odds and ends. I very vividly remember a trip to Scotland in 2006 during which my journal got soaked inside the rucksack. It was one of the first I had designed and made entirely myself. I dried it over night under some more or less heavy things I had with me, and it was fine. It still is.

Historical binding

Folding sections

In September we set out with a rented truck a second time to get the remaining components of the bindery. The intended side effect was to clear the front part of the old place in order to be able to move out the presses and type cabinets from the back. I left our old farm in the north on Thursday 22 September.

Prior to sewing

There was still paper left to pack and load. There were two old wardrobes that wanted to be dissembled, one of which we had turned into a storage place for prints years ago. There were four sideboards and work benches one fitted with a thick and weighty worktop made of black schist. Ad to that there were a fair number of type cases that would have to go on this tour because they don’t fit in any of the cabinets.

Type cases in waiting

Artist’s book on Human Rights

However, this tour still was abut moving my bindery, making it complete in the new place. I enjoy making books differently. I still want them to bring a message or come with blank pages to hold a message somebody puts in. I still want them to be proper books and be handled as books. I believe the nature of a book is that of a vessel, transporting something inside, that will be revealed or set free by opening it and turning the pages.

Cover made from towel linen

Cover made from brocade

As a child I adored those wee little Chinese boxes all covered in cloth. Mostly the fabric used was shiny brocade and inside the box was something delicate. A precious brush for calligraphy. Or meticulously carved chopsticks. Once I started bookbinding I wanted to have a go at using fabric for book covers. Over the years I tried a lot of different qualities of fabric. The most sturdy must have been some hessian from a coffee sack, the most delicate a silk cutwork fabric, handmade in Asia.

Artist’s book

Loading type cases

We kept loading the truck for three full days. The last to go in were, again, potted plants. Some young shrubs and bushes, some ferns plus the two hydrangeas and the begonia still in bloom. For a brief anxious moment it looked as if it was impossible to fit all in. But then, quite miraculously, it worked out and we made the lifting ramp go shut. In my van, once more unjustly dwarfed by its bulgy cousin, some items were nestled together that were telling of the more challenging part of the relocation process that is still to come. Two small platen presses, one of which our Adana 8×5, were carefully padded for the journey. The larger platen was strapped safely in the truck. The printing gear was till sitting in the old place untouched.

Trucks loaded

This time the journey back went pretty uninterrupted. Wednesday was a sunny day with temperatures in the mid 20s feeling like late summer. Back at the farm the sandy soils had gone dry like dust. Thursday was the day to unload. We had one whole day, but we only just so managed to have the truck empty before it went too dark for the job.

Still loaded

There it goes

There was an early start on Friday to hand back the rented truck. Here it goes, dawn just breaking. Only minutes later the really big vehicles came to the farm. But this is a different story altogether, to be told in in one of the posts to follow. First of all we will have to prepare for moving the presses and type cabinets in mid October. The date is set. Stay tuned.

More to come

As I write this the sunflowers keep nodding their golden and bronze heads in the wind. We have had chilly nights, unseasonably chilly to be honest. The crows and jackdaws and magpies had their family gathering on our meadow today playing a game around the walnuts on our neighbour’s tree. And the far reaching view to the west is restored after the field of maize has been harvested these past days.

Evening early October

Bespoke books

Binding books

Bespoke books are wonderful things, both while making them and when using them. For making them you need imagination, a feel for the materials you work with, experience. You need a number of tools, most of which are handheld. You need proper devices for cutting paper and boards. And you want a workplace you feel at home with. Having to move a bindery leaves you with a few boxes of tools and a number of items which are either heavy-weights or gaggers or both.

Bespoke books

Board shear

In mid-August we set out to get the bindery. After all, this had been scheduled for July to begin with. The most tricky to move were the board shear, the block cutter and the huge metal storage racks. The rest wass packed in boxes, some heavier than others. And there were the packs of paper, of course, sitting in piles or still stored in the racks.

Board shear: weight

We rented a lorry, drove 560 kilometres south and slightly east to where the studio still sits waiting. The board shear was built around 1912 or 1913. Its frame is cast iron, the table is wood. We decided against taking it apart. We took off the weight which when working is the balance to the cutting blade. Its shape resembles the drawn bombs in 1970s comic stories of bank robberies. It has an estimated weight of 40 or 50 kilograms and as it is rounded it is virtually ungrippable. It comes as a surprise to basically anybody who tries to lift it up. It almost always fools people new to the job. The block cutter is not even half as much fun. It comes in one piece. Fullstop. It is bulky and heavy and the lever is fixed and protrudes and will poke you unless you keep in mind that it’s there.

Board shear

Loading …

We started loading with a fair number of boxes and the board shear. We decided to have the block cutter in my delivery van, which was unjustily dwarfed by the truck we had rented. The four book binding presses were perfect company for the block cutter. The metal storage racks could not be loaded upright, as their height exceded that of the shipping space. We laid them, which gave us the opportunity to pile the packs of paper on top of them.

Packed paper

Marbled paper handmade by Victoria Hall

Transporting packs of paper always makes me feel uneasy. You need to wrap and pack them neatly. I have a good stock of very different qualities of paper. The range is from deckle edge papers and designer papers to glassine, Japanese and handmade decorated papers. Some of the qualities in my stock are old papers you would not be able to go and purchase nowadays. You would need to be lucky, as I was, to come across them at some old bindery or printing office closing for good.

Sewing sections

Even if the books you set out to make are of a fairly reasonable, say ordinary size, you will need a quite large table to work on. You will have to handle full size sheets of paper while folding to produce sections you can then sew together. So the table needs to be big. My worktable is built from four type cabinets set in a square with a large chip board on top. We started loading this table with disassembling it. We filled the cavities in the shipping space with rolls of bookcloth. We stuffed the canvas booth I use when at arts&crafts fairs on top of one of the lying storage racks. It comes with large rolls of canvas (kind of like sails) and a number of battens making up the wooden frame of the booth.

Book covers made from fabric

Basically, books are made of two materials: paper and cloth or fabric for that matter. I love to use fabric for my books‘ covers. Cotton or linen, even towel linen, hessian or silk, corduroy or Chinese brocade, Italian jacquard and African batik, English linen with classic flower patterns or even handwoven material. I love the touch of the fabric on the book. The variety of patterns is fascinating. All my stock of fabric made up for a number of large movers‘ boxes plus a couple of bolts of cloth.

… loading …

At this point we must have been loading for almost three days. A heartfelt thankyou goes to Denny, a dear friend who came round on Saturday to help us almost all day lifting and dragging and piling. She was patient enough to find spaces for small odds and ends. Where would we be without her help? Still loading, I presume. And a big thankyou to Klaus, my landlord, who helped lifting the block cutter into my van and gave us a hand with the board shear.

Upcycled book

On the field beyond my studio’s windows a small circus was camping, the tent packed away. All shows were over. One large pole had been painted blue and was drying in the sun. They were preparing for moving on some time next week. A long tent was put up as a shelter for the animals. There were two camels, a small herd of goats and four ponies. On Sunday just before noon the camels had pushed over the fence and that was when the four ponies went for it. They cantered away across the road having car drivers slaming on their brakes. We all left what we were doing running to help catching the ponies. We stood guard at the road and everybody else was grabbing collars and ropes to get the ponies. The four obviously were enjoying themselves cantering across the field, meandering around the old apple trees there having their people chase after them. It was a field I know fairly well as I used to walk our dog there. Finally the ponies were all caught safely and put back in their pen, together with the camels who had a look on their faces saying „It was not us.“

… loading.

Last but not least we loaded: potted plants. They all had been given asylum in my mother’s garden. We had left the plants in her expert care in spring 2015. We could not load them all. We decided on the young bushes like yew, rowan and guelder rose. Plus all the pots with tulips, daffodils and herbs. Plus the bryony. That was when we closed the door of the lorry. The trip back was in a way an adventure as we got stuck in a massiv traffic jam following a road accident of an HGV which had spilled its load on to the motorway. This event nailed my dear husband driving the lorry to the spot. He had set off early in the morning and when he got home it was 8pm. He had spent most of the day on the road, almost 15 hours altogether. We got the plants out of the truck and that was that.

Back home.

Lorry empty

The aftermath of this hampered journey left us with only one morning to unload the truck, as the deadline for handing back the lorry was 2pm. A whole bunch of heartfelt thankyous goes out to our neighbours. Three of them came to give us six hands for a couple of hours after they were through with the morning chores on their farm and with their cattle. We were five to unload the truck. We managed to be at the car rental company by 1.58pm. Slightly tight, but still in time.

Unloading complete

Most of the bindery has moved by now. So far everything seems to have arrived unscathed. The plants are striving, the bryony is showing a new set of flowers. The weight of the board shear is in place again the working table re-assembled. The bindery is not yet back to full working order, but we are not far from it. We have booked the lorry for another trip in late September.

Bindery tools

As I write this the sunflowers open their huge flowers one by one. They are of various shades of bronze, from dark brown to almost yellow. The swallows and martins are still chasing flies on our patio. They have not left yet for their autumn migration. I’ve seen a flock of starlings recently, so these are staying on, too. They were gathring in numbers in an old oak tree, of which we have so many around here. In a blink they had vanished from the sky and hid within the foliage of the tree. Summer is clinging on longer than usual. But this morning, quite early, I watched a formation of geese in the sky travelling. It looked as if their intention was to be gone.

Sunflower

Our former garden

This is a photo of the garden we had in the past. It is an allotment not far from Stuttgart. The rhododendrons have grown taller than two metres in over 10 years in their specially built sheltered raised beds with acidic soil. There is an extra bed of ferns, there are apple trees, a pond with irises and a huge walnut tree amongst far more. We have moved away from there, some 600 kilometres north. Instead of loamy the soil here is sandy. Instead of mountainous the area here is lowland and flat. When I chose the rhododendrons for our former garden in Swabia, I watched carefully to pick those that could deal with temperatures below minus 20 degrees centigrade. We need not expect winters getting that cold here in the north of Westphalia with the coastline of the North Sea just over 100 kilometers away. Instead we’ll have to keep in mind that winds can be rather rough. We are no beginners as to gardening, but here conditions are so different to what we are used to we can consider ourselves starting all over again.

Garden-to-be in late April with snow flurry

This would not be an old farm if it did not come with some land. There is a front garden with bushes and yews and hawthorn and a small white lilac tree. But in the back there is all meadow. Over the past so many years it was cut to feed cattle. When we moved in earlier this year the grass was dense and looked juicy.

Yellow meadow

When the wind went over it, it moved in powerful waves like if it was an ocean of green. We started mowing it with our sit-on mower at some point in May. It grew so quickly we had to cut it almost every 10 days because otherwise it would grow too tall for our mower to handle. Come August the meadow has changed from the uniform green of grass to a mixture of yellow and a great many shades of greens. It was time to take out some very old, very much used books again.

Very used old books

Muckheap in February

The old farm comes with two stables. The larger one was used for cattle, the smaller one for pigs. Both are built parallel to each other separated by the pit for the muckheap. The basis of the pit is made of neatly laid bricks. The times in which animals were kept here are long gone. The muckheap must have been disused for quite some time, 15 years at least. What was left in there had a lot of time to rot away thouroughly. Which is exactly what it had done.

Muckheap in June

Composters

The material resting there was moist and dark and densely inhabited with all sorts of creatures of decomposition: worms of all kinds and larvae and little shiny blue-black beetles. I carefully scraped all of it from the bricks and mixed it into the various composters when setting them up. With all the little helpers already in there the process of decomposition could start straight away.

Muckheap in early August

Muckheap in mid August

During the process of clearing the old straw and hey from the attic and the barn I put one compost heap where the muckheap was. It is a good place. The pit only opens to the north, it is sheltered from all other sides by walls of buildings. It gets some sun but only for a few hours each day. This heap is keeping its moisture nicely. It grows little mushrooms each night. The pumpkin seeds I put in there in July are going strong.

Garden-to-be in early April

Garden-to-be in late May

One wall of the pig stable faces east where the place of the muckheap is. The opposite wall faces west and overlooks much of the meadow. We learned that at the foot of this wall there was a rumble stretch. Apparently a certain amount of debris had been dumped here over the years or rather decades. I took up the challenge of clearing this away. It took me a couple of weeks to dig through it.

Garden-to-be in early June

Old tiles

Some very nice old floor tiles emerged. However, most of what came up was broken bricks of all sorts. There was a rusted key, some shards with floral designs and some broken glass from old fashioned bottles. Now that this strip is cleared I can start building a bed for my kitchen herbs just in front of the old stable.

Garden-to-be in mid July

As I write this dusk is closing in. The sun sets much earlier now. We had a pretty hot and rather windy day, the last in a row with temperatures around 30 degrees centigrade. During the past couple of days countless white butterflies kept dancing in the heat of the day above our yellow meadow – in pairs or in threes. If the night sky is clear it takes a dark shade of blue and we have the most beautiful view of the stars twinkling. Just recently we saw a very bright falling star.

Four legged neighbours

Anybody longing to learn more about the garden we had to leave behind? Go for it.