THE COLOUR OF PARADISE
“It all sounds good to me,” says Hugh. I have just laid out what I think we can accomplish today: choose the ink, okay the images, set up a timeline. “However, I am a little worried about riding with a woman who is picking up a chainsaw.”
It is early March, and we are on our way to our first formal meeting of Team Paradise Project. I picked up Hugh just before noon. We are due at Erik’s farmhouse in the rolling hills of Central Ontario just after lunch. It’s not a farm, really, although that’s what city people call a hived-off acreage like his, with an old farmhouse, a barn, and a scattering of outbuildings, testimony to the actual farmer’s attempts to make a living from cows, then pigs, then chickens, and, finally, small-engine repair. We live on a similarly much-reduced former farm further east. It’s spring, time to cut wood: I need our chainsaw back.
I’m feeling querulous. I’m not looking forward to spending three hours in the car with someone I barely know, even after a year. And I’m concerned, just a little, about bringing my son into the project. I mentioned in passing that Erik was a painter and bam! Hugh anointed him Team Artist.
This book project is running ahead of me, and I’m struggling to catch up. I’m used to an editor, a copy editor, the predictable unfolding of production. Decisions about typefaces and paper stock and illustrations and how many books to print and where to sell them: that’s always been someone else’s business. I don’t mind being involved. In fact, I usually insist on voicing an opinion, and I am looking forward to knowing more about the innards of publishing through this project. But no editor? I feel as though my father has just taken his hand off the seat of my bicycle, shouting, “Keep pedalling, you’ll be fine.”
Like almost every writer I know, I have little faith in my own words, and when I look at my son’s block prints, no faith whatsoever in my ability to assess whether they are brilliant or complete bunk.
Erik is feeling tentative, too. “I know you want me to have the freedom to express myself, but I would love to hear what you think of the images,” he says gently, opening the folio of sketches. “Not that I will change them,” he adds with a smile. The old one-two.
We are sitting at a table in the red-brick farmhouse he gutted last year, stripping it down to its essentials. The place isn’t quite dressed again. Shreds of green-checked wallpaper wave from the kitchen walls and the plugs hang precariously from a post, but we don’t pay them any attention. We’re here to work. Hugh fans colour swatches over the Salad paper he has spread on the red-checked tablecloth. We narrow the colour fan to show only strips of green, every hue from pale pea to deepest jade.
My eyes go directly to a soft spring green. Erik is fingering a muddy olive. My heart sinks. Hugh nods enthusiastically.
“Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh,” he says, bobbing his head up and down. “That’s good. That’ll work.”
I say nothing. I trust my son. The two of us have worked together before. When he was thirteen, we visited ruins in the Yucatán jungle. I wrote a travel piece about the trip and the magazine illustrated my story with his watercolours of Mayan glyphs. When he was twenty, he painted the cover for my first book of stories, The Lion in the Room Next Door. He has his father’s surname, so the publisher who hired him didn’t realize he was my son. When he called me with the news, he asked if I was cool with the idea. “Sure,” I said, “but we’re both professionals. If I don’t like it, I’ll say so.”
Now he is telling me that this muddy chartreuse is perfect for the images that will lie beneath my words.
“Like ghost images,” Hugh says.
“Exactly!” says Erik.
They are speaking the same language, a lexicon of colour and design that is foreign to me, although I can appreciate the sound of it, its cadences.
I push back my chair.
“It’s up to you,” I say, throwing up my hands, just a little.
They both stare. They aren’t used to me having no opinion.
“Really,” I insist. “You decide. This is your bailiwick. I have nothing to contribute.”
I’ve been wrong so often, I know enough to keep my mouth shut, although I haven’t yet learned to do it graciously. My son leafs through the folio, showing us sketches for the block prints he will carve. I struggle to disguise my shock. I had imagined delicate plants twining through the pages, a vision that was dispelled weeks ago by the first sketch he emailed to Hugh: scissor blades slicing through a stalk.
“Secateurs,” I wrote back. “A plant cutting is made with secateurs, not scissors.”
“Hey! I’m the artist!”
“Right. I just thought you’d want to know. For accuracy.”
“It’s not an illustration.”
“Of course not. The scissors are great.”
He changed them to secateurs, now in a big brawny hand that reaches up from the bottom rim of the page. The drawing is muscular, vaguely threatening.
But it’s a paradise project, I want to tell them. All the people in these stories are making a paradise, their own Eden. However misguided we may think they are, it’s an honest impulse, deeply human. A positive thing.
“I took the theme of tools,” Erik is saying. “The things people use to make their paradise.”
I make encouraging noises, but in my heart, I’m not convinced that these images won’t overpower my words, shift their meaning. I’m not used to competing for a reader’s attention. Won’t it be confusing?
A story, to me, has always been a pure object. A thing that exists apart from me. Pre-exists, in fact. As a writer, my job is to find it, give it shape, walk the reader through it in a way that will show it off in its best light. Not the prettiest light, but the most authentic, the most effective, which sometimes means taking the most dramatic path and sometimes the softest, subtlest one. I’ve written sixteen books. So far, nothing has shaken that conception. Design, printing: it’s all in service of the story, isn’t it? By which I mean the words. My words.
Now the story is no longer mine to tell. Erik is telling it through his images. Hugh is telling it through his choice of ink and type and paper, and the way his turtles are set into the page. I thought I understood collaboration, but the truth is I thought of this project as my stories, with embellishments by others. It’s only now beginning to dawn on me: we’re all in this together.
A few days later, I get an email from Hugh. “I just returned from dinner at Swiss Chalet, where my mind was focused on Erik’s work, which I find totally outstanding. One of my personal tests for artwork is being able to recall the work to my mind’s eye long after seeing it. I can do this with every piece Erik sent in his email.
“I think you will agree,” he goes on, “that our interviewing and reviewing the work of the other twenty candidates was time well spent and that we have made the proper selection in Erik. (<;)- Oh! and all the paper has arrived, hoping for ink tomorrow.”
IT ISN’T EASY BEING GREEN
Type gives shape to words, pressing letters into paper, crushing the fibres to make an impression. But it is ink, flowing between the banks of those curves and lines, that makes type—letters, words, sentences—visible.
For Hugh, the transformation is a miracle, one he takes very seriously.
In choosing the ink colour for a text, he rarely resorts to default black, which is the colour of the words in all the books on my shelves. Indeed, in all the books I’ve read throughout my life, a fact that only now hits me.
I get it: the first inks were made with the cheapest and handiest colouring agents, which just happened to be black—lampblack, graphite, charred bones—but why hang onto the darkness when modern chemistry can paint us rainbows?
Hugh agrees, but when he is about to print a new project, he doesn’t impulsively grab the tin of colour that reflects his mood of the day, which is my guiding principle when I change the colour preferences on my laptop screen
. He chooses his colours to reflect the text. When Jack Layton, the leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada, died, Hugh printed an excerpt from Jack’s final letter to his supporters. “My friends,” it begins in deep NDP orange. “Love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear.” When Hugh printed “The Bridge,” a poem by Shaun McLaughlin, a twelve-year-old Irish boy killed by an IRA bomb, he chose purple for bravery.
Hugh loves colour. He especially loves red. You wouldn’t know this from looking at him: he wears sombre working-man clothes, mostly blues and browns, although I suspect this is not so much an aesthetic preference as a practical one, given that he is a widower who spends most of his time around ink.
“It was Verla who pointed out that I didn’t use enough colour,” Hugh tells me. He doesn’t talk much about his wife, not because he has forgotten her, but because, even after a dozen years, he still feels her loss so sharply that his eyes well up at the mention of her name.
Verla was married before she met Hugh. She contracted polio as a young woman, which left her paraplegic. She lived with her first husband in his old family house behind the Kingston Vinegar Works. One day, the factory caught fire and she was trapped inside the house. She wasn’t harmed, but the fire department insisted her husband build her a wheelchair ramp. There wasn’t much money, so a neighbour built it for them. After that, to supplement the family coffers, Verla knitted sweaters and socks to sell. That first marriage dissolved long before she met Hugh, but she loved knitting so much that she carried on throughout her life. Eventually, Hugh bought her a loom and she took up weaving. When he set up his private orthotic practice, she finger-wove privacy screens, scenes of birds and landscapes. “Beautiful things!” Hugh exclaims, tears in his eyes. He still wears the sweaters she knit for him, unravelling now at the wrists, and on special occasions the sashes she wove on her small lap loom.
“When I began to print books, she complained that I was afraid to use colour, which was probably true. She spurred me on to experiment.”
Not all his early experiments were successful, however.
“When I printed The First Paradise, Odetta, back in 1985, I used a lighter brown ink because I thought it made the text a little softer. I was a neophyte printer and the pale brown text drew a lot of scoffing from my letterpress printer friends at Wayzgoose. They said it was too hard to read.”
After that, Hugh embraced bolder colours. He is especially fond of rubification, the official word for making things red, from ruber, the Latin word for the colour. Rubrica was red ochre. In the thirteenth century, “rubric” was coined to refer to the directions in a religious service, which were written in red, as were important days on the calendar—red-letter days. Red was used so often in medieval manuscripts for headings, running titles, and initials, that people assumed their books would be black and red, like the Bible I read as a girl, the words of Jesus as red as freshly spilled blood.
One might say that Hugh is rubicund, inclined to redness. He uses the colour to excellent effect on his “Saffron Fireflies” ligature poster, the bright red fft and ffi bursting out from the shadows of black words.
Colour printing came of age in the nineteenth century, when printers started using multiple colours in illustrations, especially in children’s books. At first, each ink was individually mixed, but eventually systems were introduced that could produce every conceivable colour simply by overprinting the three basic colours—cyan, magenta, and yellow—with a bit of black to add richness to the hues.
Much research has been done on the readability of different colours of ink as they appear against various backgrounds—red on green, blue on yellow—but little attention has been devoted to the readability of one colour of ink as compared to another. If purple, black, and orange is each printed on white paper, which is more legible?
This hasn’t been an issue since printing was mechanized and black was adopted as the universal colour for text ink, but in Gutenberg’s day, when inks were ground for each project, colour may well have been a topic of conversation. And today, when readers can choose any colour for the words on their computer screens, why aren’t we talking about the relative merits of grey, black, and mauve?
As the colour theorists like to point out, the real issue with reading coloured text is contrast, not the actual colour itself. Paper is never absolutely white, and even black ink is never absolutely black. How a person sees white, black, or any other colour will depend on the light shining down on the paper.
Nature doesn’t deal in absolutes, but technology does. Pure black on pure white may not be possible with ink and paper, but it is possible on a digital screen. Even so, pure black and white are almost never used because backlighting makes the contrast so hard on the eyes. On ereaders, the background “paper” is almost always off-white, and the “ink” is off-black or dark grey. This is easier on everyone, but especially on dyslexic readers, who can be particularly sensitive to brightness, which for them causes words to swirl and blur together.
People who grew up with digital readers are used to a lot more colour in their text. I expected to discover that the colour choices were intentional, the result of years of readability research, but no. Why is Facebook blue? Because its co-developer, Mark Zuckerberg, is red-green colour blind. Blue is the colour he sees best. And why are hyperlinks typically blue? Because Tim Berners-Lee, one of the primary inventors of the web, was working with Mosaic, a very early browser that displayed web pages with black text on a dismal grey background. The most intense colour available at the time that would stand in contrast to the black text was blue. Hyperlinks have been blue ever since.
Hugh, of course, doesn’t play the practicality game. He doesn’t care which ink is cheapest or easiest to procure or quickest to clean up or even the easiest to read. He doesn’t play the personal-preference game, either. If he did, all his books would be printed in red. But no, he chooses the ink for The Paradise Project the same way he approaches every other element of the printing process: by selecting a colour that is organic to the text.
Paradise is gardens, so of course the images must be green. The stories are rooted in the soil, so the ink for the text—no question—has to be an earthy brown. Precisely which green and which brown has yet to be determined.
How can I not love this guy? For him, as for me, it all starts with the words.
BOXCAR COLOUR
Hugh buys his inks from Boxcar Press in Syracuse, New York. Boxcar can premix ink to any number on the Pantone scale, a colour-matching system developed in the late 1950s by a young university graduate, Lawrence Herbert, who was hired part-time at a print shop. Passionate about chemistry, he took it upon himself to systematize and simplify the company’s stock of pigments and the production of their coloured inks. Within a few years, he had bought the company for a song, renamed it Pantone—“all colours”—and developed the familiar Pantone Guides: cardboard strips printed with related samples of colour and bound into the fan deck still used by most graphic designers and printers.
Boxcar can make ink in any Pantone colour or a printer can mix it himself. Sixteen hundred distinct hues can be produced from just fourteen colours of ink. Even the six basic colours—warm red, reflex blue, yellow, and transparent white for mixing, plus printing black and opaque white—will produce a few hundred colours.
“I don’t have the full complement of fourteen, but I have more than the starter kit,” Hugh boasts, but when he checks his stock, the old inks are skinned over like cold cocoa.
That wouldn’t happen if he used the rubber-based inks Boxcar recommends for general letterpress printing.
“It’s true the rubber-based inks don’t dry out. They let a printer leave the press open longer. The ink can stay on the press overnight and still be good to print in the morning, no problem. The bad part is that when a page is printed it can take days or even weeks to dry, so you can’t stack the printed pages. And I sure don’t have enough room to pr
int hundreds of copies and lay them out! I tried that once and ended up using a heat gun to blow them dry.”
He picks up an old poster he printed with rubber-based ink and another printed with oil-based colour. He has that gleam in his eye that tells me we are getting to the crux of his love affair with ink.
“See that? The rubber-based inks are matte. Dull.” He holds up the other sample. “Here, lift this up to the light. Not like that. Flat to the light,” he says, whipping it out of my hand and giving it back, tipped at the proper angle. “See how it shines? That’s oil-based ink.”
He goes for the glitter every time. I wear rhinestones on my T-shirt: I’m a glitter fan, too.
“Sure,” he answers before I ask. “I have inadvertently mixed oil-based and rubber-based inks and it is like mixing oil and water,” he says. “I just swear a bit at Stupid Hugh, throw it out and clean the press and start over.”
Oil-based colours are brighter and set up quickly, which means Hugh can stack pages as they come off the press. But if he leaves the ink on the press overnight, he’ll have a royal battle on his hands to clean the rollers. And they skin in the can. Every time he starts a new project, chances are he’ll have to buy fresh stock, which he does now for The Paradise Project: a fresh starter kit of six basic colours plus a few empty cans to hold the particular colours he’ll mix.
I expect Hugh to be the sort of seat-of-the-pants printer who mixes his coloured ink by eye. And it’s true: if he’s printing what he calls an ephemeral—a small-edition broadside or one of his famous Christmas keepsakes—he admits he sometimes mixes a colour right on the press. Most often, though, he uses the formula that Pantone supplies.
“I have a metric weigh scale in which I can measure to the one-hundredth of a gram. If the formula calls for six parts green and twelve parts white, I estimate how much ink I’ll need for a print run and then scoop out with a knife a weight of thirty grams of green and then add sixty grams of white, making a total of ninety grams. I mix them together with a slightly bent 1/8-inch rod spinning in a 1/4-inch drill.”
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