Impression

"For my soul delighteth in plainness; for after this manner doth the Lord God work among the children of men. For the Lord God giveth light unto the understanding; for he speaketh unto men according to their language, unto their understanding."

Book of Mormon, 2 Nephi 31:3 

I was born with an inherent curiosity toward creation. I've always wanted to know how things were made; I'm a tinker fairy. What follows is the account of a moment that was thirty years in the making.

I think it started with Sesame Street. I'm certain everyone my age watched Sesame Street as a kid as there were no other options. My favorite segments were the snippets filmed in factories with assembly lines demonstrating how bell-shaped birdfeeders, crayons, and trumpets were made.

I dipped my first candle in summer school and subsequently took note of glass blowing, yarn spinning, butter churning, and other crafts of olde. Watching my mom pin, cut, and sew Suzette’s faux Gunne Sax gown was mesmerizing. So was the way she crimped pie crusts on Thanksgiving Eve.

When I was young, postage stamps were sold in gummed, perforated sheets. One had to rip a stamp off and lick the back to activate the glue. I took a piece of construction paper and poked a grid of holes with a push pin from my bulletin board until I had made a fake sheet of stamps. I drew a flag on each front and stuck a piece of rolled tape on each back. They ripped off and acted like real stamps. 

I unglued a cereal box to lay it completely flat and examine its pre-folded shape. I began noticing small pink, blue, yellow, and black squares on the hidden edges of printed materials. I similarly dissected envelopes to see what shape they were born with. I studied the ridges inside a piece of cardboard and turned curl ribbon into ringlets with my fingernail. I hoarded snippets of carbon paper for personal experiments and tried to make my own post-it notes with strips of clear contact paper on the back of paper squares. I took an early interest in calligraphy but could not make a quill from a blue jay feather. Hand lettering painted on storefront windows shouted at me.

When I cheated at Duck Hunt on original Nintendo (duh, gun touching the screen) I put my eye next to the glass. Every tiny dot on the TV was made up of three tinier dots: one red, one green, and one blue. It confused me that red, green, and blue could make all the colors I saw because Mrs. Epps taught the 5th graders all you need to paint anything is red, yellow, and blue. The magic of mixing paint was fireworks inside my young mind; infinite rainbows from three primary colors and black and white. Add the satisfactory swishing of a dirty brush in a Mason jar and tapping it on the rim as if to make a toast and I was in heaven. My affinity for art continuously emerged with age.

Most nights my dad read the Columbia Daily Tribune on the front steps between concrete planters spilling pink impatiens. Occasionally I'd notice the colored part of the grocery ad looked odd. I could see different layers of color, like the item had a colored shadow. It seemed like a mistake.

I soaked squares of dry cotton in my mom's Oster blender and whizzed them to a pulp before pressing the strained sludge onto screens that dried in the sun. Paper! I could make (rustic) paper! I began noticing the quality and texture of pages everywhere. Book order books had the cheapest paper.

In early morning Seminary I discovered there were strings placed methodically throughout the pages of my Bible. I peeled back the finished edge of my Bible's spine and observed the many folded sections of pages all stacked together to make a book. I couldn't figure out how the strings were laced but I could see them as clear as day.

Freshman year at BYU I took Printmaking from Royden Card. Woodcut, linocut, embossing, engraving, etching, aquatint, lithograph, intaglio. In-tall-eee-oh. What a word. It was a revolution of techniques. The deliberation and steps required to create one little illustration were unimaginable. This class was like potato stamping at Girls' Camp but through a wormhole at light speed.

I learned the anatomy of a letter and the symphony of a font in Typography with Mark Wadsworth; at last I understood why my favorite letter since I was a kid was the looptail version of lowercase g. Ampersand, em dash, ligature? Nice to formally meet you.

Junior year I scored a coveted spot in Bookbinding with Chris McAfee. It was the tiny class I sliced the tip of my middle finger off in and the class that answered my Seminary string query. After my fingertip was stitched back on I learned the folded sections of pages were called "signatures" and the string marked the middle of each one. I learned four ways to sew a book together and discovered the proper names of things I'd always noticed but never known the words for: Davey board, clamshell boxes, endpapers, round and flat spines. I mastered the coptic stitch with a curved quilting needle; a skill I have used six times on six Durkobooks. I learned that PVA washed out of jeans and therefore wiped my slimy bone folder on my leg as many times as needed when scoring and wrapping marbled Italian paper around a cover. I loved Bookbinding more than any other class I had ever taken.* Learning how books were made from scratch was a recipe I'd been searching for my whole life.

The next semester I took Letterpress from Headmaster Heidelberg. My puzzle-loving mind welcomed the challenge of upside-down and backward movable type all organized by demand in a California job case. Tweezing incredulously thin punctuation was harder than grabbing the Adam’s apple stem in Operation. I controlled leading with actual bars of lead. Gutenberg and Ben Franklin were my shoulder angels as I rolled ink. Let us be uniform. Let us avoid blobs. I held my breath as each sheet of paper was pulled up from its blackened rest. The imprint of type into paper was a beautiful fossil I created again and again. The creation never got old; every embedded outline was a miracle with meticulous focus behind it.

I took Poster Design as part of my BFA requirements. I learned how to silk screen. I mixed and applied gradients by hand and discovered clear varnish. A decade later Google taught me how to freezer paper stencil on t-shirts since I didn't have a silk screen set up in real life (but I did have an x-acto knife and surgeon hands).

I got a student design job in BYU’s Press Building and cut across the floor enough times to fall in love with the perfume of ink and hot paper. There was a small balcony above the action with a vending machine and a short couch. Many catnaps were stolen above the deafening and methodical spinning of a running press, the sound of which was a heartbeat to my being. The bindery and its guillotine chops echoed from the trimming table. At last I was able to touch all the papers with their pounds and points: vellum, pearl, felt, velvet, matte, gloss, linen. Text and cover, coated and uncoated, it was all making sense. My paper petting zoo had amassed so many more animals than the stash of astrobright and résumé samples I'd taken from Kinko's when I was eight.

Education and experience were illuminating. I could finally solve my own art problems! No longer were there blank labels on things I wanted to identify. I had terms and definitions and hands-on experiences to verbalize the visual masterpieces I'd wanted to discuss for ages. The sunset was a gradient, the newspaper dots were halftone, the alignment of layers was registration, the original size of a cereal box or an envelope was a template. I noticed RGB versus CMYK long before I owned a computer or prepared a file for press and I sensed color schemes long before I mixed my first color wheel.

I heard Elder Monte Brough speak at the Alpine Tabernacle many years ago; I took notes. He was instrumental in bringing the gospel to Mongolia, however, his love of mountain climbing is what originally brought him there. He said the Lord gave him the love of climbing to bring him to a country and a people he would love even more. He said the Lord would reach/direct/give us joy us through our hobbies and encouraged everyone in attendance to use their hobbies for good. This made perfect sense to me. The art world, from its tiniest golden paper clip to its bulkiest behemoth printing press, was my hobby and my language. It's what I heard. It's what I saw. It's how I spoke.

So what does this have to do with anything? Everything.

Five years ago we went as a wee family of three to the American northeast. We flew into Buffalo and only ate at non-chains found on Yelp for four days. I'm still dreaming about the gumbo from Kentucky Greg's Hickory Pit (yes, we bought Greg a shirt). We sailed into Niagara Falls' mist, went to the top of Toronto's CN Tower, and took in the Church History sites in Palmyra, New York. Palmyra, which reminded me of Tarrytown with its trees and steeples, is a sort of Mecca for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It is where we believe Joseph Smith saw God the Father and Jesus Christ in the Sacred Grove and where Joseph Smith retrieved the ancient records known as the gold plates from the Hill Cumorah. We believe he translated the gold plates by the power of God into the Book of Mormon. We use the Book of Mormon as a companion to the Bible and are asked by our modern-day prophet to read from its pages daily.

Palmyra was a ghost town. (Go the week before school starts if you don’t want to deal with crowds.) We got personalized tours and one-on-one attention at every site. I will admit that a small and foolish part of me hoped that something marvelous would happen in the Sacred Grove. I mean, this was holy ground for Joseph and could therefore be holy ground for me. We had the Sacred Grove to ourselves. How familiar the layers of forest were to this Missouri girl from canopy down to felled acorn. It was silent except for buzzing and birds. The absence of darkness and the aura of peace were obvious...and peace is a fruit of the Spirit...but nothing really spoke to me. 

No matter. We also toured the E.B. Grandin building, the historic publication site of the first 5,000 copies of the Book of Mormon. Mere blocks from the Erie Canal, Grandin had his heavy equipment delivered via floating for a fraction of the usual price.

Here is where the books would have been sold, said the tour guide.

Here is the bindery. Beautiful hand tools.

Here is the room the books were printed in. My antenna popped up.

This room is the only room that was preserved in the building's restoration; the floors and walls are original. Antenna higher. Searching this space for messages.

This is a printing press. Heart beating faster. Surveying the glorious work studio.

The actual press the Book of Mormon was printed on is in the Church History Museum in Salt Lake City. The Church made a mold and created an exact replica to place in this room. The original press' feet made indentations in the floor; this reproduction is sitting exactly where the original press sat. Watchdog.

It took ten men seven months to set the type for the Book of Mormon. Speed demons.

This is how the first 16 pages of the Book of Mormon would have been printed, folded, and trimmed to be sewn. Take a copy. Hello, Signature. Good to see you, old friend.

Here are reproductions of the pages drying on the rafters. This is the door where the dried papers would have been stacked, tied, and lowered to the main level. Clever use of space. Nothing wasted.

Children would have had the job of washing ink off of the metal type and they certainly splashed all over. See the ink splatters on the back wall? They are original. Original ink? Maybe this ink kissed the moveable type that built the columns of the most correct book on earth. Maybe it didn't. But it was there when Joseph lived and it stayed there to speak to me in my language. I wasn't seeking a confirmation, I was merely touring a bookstore, but the silent spots spoke. Warm explosion of static in my chest. Fingertips zinging. I knew that what I believed to be true was true. Joseph Smith's life and mission were foreordained, not folklore. His talk with God in nature dismissed so many myths about the nature of God. He translated the Book of Mormon and had it printed in the room I was standing in. 

It is a peculiar irony that the machine responsible for kick-starting mass communication was also the vehicle for my personal witness.

Heavenly Father does speak to each of us in our own language. He literally spoke to Joseph in the Sacred Grove, however, he did not speak to me in the Sacred Grove. Instead, he instilled a lifelong love and awareness of art, materials, and methods in me and slowly set the scene. Through the gift of the Holy Ghost he whispered to me through my hobby; he made his impression with ink.

Photos of the press room in the E.B. Grandin Building. Info here. And here. And here.

*except for Humanities with Lauri Haddock

My love affair with office supplies is a direct offshoot of my love for all things art. Office supplies are tools for creation. Creation is power. If I’d had access to washi tape and a personal laminator in my formative years I very well could have been the first female President of the United States. But here I sit, a mother of three with a very powerful stapleless stapler.