Letterpress and the Economy of Words

First off, yesterday I went to "letterpress training." We set the second half of a short poem and printed 50 or so broadsides. It took 4.5 hours with 6-8 people working on it. That's craziness! and so beautiful at the same time. The care with which you have to handle every single letter, apostrophe, dash and space is incredible. When steeped in these deeply material concerns, I started thinking things like "is that word really necessary"? As some may know, I had a phase a while back, which still continues more or less, where I was obsessed with the relationship between words and money: writers and stenographers who get paid by the word, Aram Saroyan getting a $500 NEA grant for his poem "lighght" (that's $70.50 a letter!), and the idea that perhaps books should be priced according to the number of letters or words included. But letterpress training yesterday made me look at this world of economy in a new light, and one that not only sheds light on early modern practices but also contemporary ones.

Look at a piece like Kenny Goldsmith's DAY which "consists of the New York Times for Friday, September 1, 2000, retyped-page by page, column by column, line by line-reducing multiple font sizes to 9-point Bookman Old Style and ignoring instructions to turn where stories continue." (cf amazon.com) Now, in some sense, yesterday I "retyped" a poem using different materials. Rather than the New York Times being a newspaper, Kenny turned it into a book (showing us the ridiculous aspects of a claim that one reads the New York Times daily). Rather than a printed word document, we turned the poem into a broadside, a collectible "artwork." The list price for DAY is $23.00; the Kelly Writers House broadsides have become collectible items. The notion that things are valuable because of the labor put into them strikes me as something worth talking about and puts a very interesting spin on contemporary value systems.