Steven T Mason, Boy Governor and Founder of the University of Michigan

A PDF of the article

Your average letterpress-printing[1] enthusiast probably shares this earth with more than sixty thousand like-minded souls. For instance, Briar Press, a popular letterpress community on the web, has nearly sixty thousand registered users. In other words, you could populate a reasonably sized small city with letterpress enthusiasts.

Heidelberg Windmill 10X15 Blackball

Heidelberg Feeding Apparatus

The Heidelberg Needs a little cleaning.

This is one of two chases that goes with the press.

Challenge Model 20 Hydraulic Paper Cutter

Here is the Model 20 powered on. The automatic clamp works, the blade cuts, its in good working order. The only problem is that the backgauge no longer has a digital display (the whole display unit is missing). The backgauge works fine, but you have to do the measurements by hand. A replacement display may be found.

This issue features a microinterview with S. T. Joshi, conducted by Fritz Swanson. Joshi began his career as an H. P. Lovecraft scholar at the age of seventeen, in 1975. The compilation of criticism, H. P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism, that Joshi began as a young man led to a comprehensive bibliography of Lovecraft’s work released by Kent State University Press. He now acts as the unofficial curator of Lovecraft’s life and work, editing the definitive editions of Lovecraft’s fiction for Penguin Books, and working to release all of Lovecraft’s extensive correspondence. Joshi is also a scholar of H. L. Mencken and Ambrose Bierce, and has pursued his scholarship independently, without a PhD or the support of any academic institution.

The article is called "A Piece of History", and it starts on page 60 of the Fall 2010 issue of LSA MAGAZINE. (pdf)

Jason Polan and I did this a few years ago, but they are still awesome.

Here are PDFs of my work:
A Sidebar on Great Monsters, which is at the end of this article.

An article about BiblioBouts which is an educational game I developed with a team in the School of Information that teaches academic library research.

And finally

Another article about Neil Greenberg this time focusing on his UMICH bus system AIRBUS.

"He’s working on a project that might be called All The Water Towers in America."

Fritz Swanson profiles his artist friend Jason Polan

My wife Sara held black olives out to our son, Oscar (age one). He took another olive tentatively. He had just gagged on an olive that came right off the pizza we had bought, and it had been too hot for him. “You feel better now?” Sara asked Oscar as he examined the olive. “Gah!” he said in the affirmative.

Jason Polan, whose illustrations have appeared in The New Yorker, on test-design bags for Jack Spade, in marketing material for The Criterion Collection, and most recently in the museum store of the Museum of Modern Art (in a book honestly titled The Every Piece of Art in the Museum of Modern Art Book), nodded a floppy-headed nod to encourage Oscar. He then got up and pulled another slice of pizza from his box. “I think it was a good idea, each of us getting our own pizza,” Jason said. “That way we each get more.”

Jason had come out to Manchester, the village where I live with Sara and Oscar, so that we could talk about profiling him in a New York magazine. We had even met the week before at an Ann Arbor burger joint in an abortive attempt to do a straightforward interview. Now he was out in my little country village and we were going to try again. But before we did that, he wanted to walk down to see our water tower and take a picture of it. He’s working on a project that might be called All The Water Towers in America.

We got Oscar into a red spring jacket and loaded him into a jogger stroller with big knobby mountain bike tires. First we pushed Oscar north to the old town cemetery. The big wheels of the jogger allowed us to pilot the stroller over the March slush past raspberry canes and rose briars to the top of the hill where only one fragment of a grave marker remained. The River Raisin curled around the hill where the cemetery once stood and we listened as the ice broke. We admired the view.

“What should the profile be about?” “It should say, ‘Jason is from Michigan.’”
We walked back down the hill, past Dr. Eccles office in the old green Methodist church, and up along Main Street. Beyond the gas station, the bakery, the antique store and the pizza place we stood on the bridge over the river and Jason took a picture of the water tower. Oscar kicked his legs in the breeze, and Jason took a picture of that too. “Where’s your grocery store?” Jason asked.“Do you need something?” “I just want to see it.” So, we walked back west on Main Street, past our house, toward the setting sun.

Oscar kicked his legs and huffed, rubbing the sun out of his eyes with his fist. We tried to arrange a blanket over the stroller, but Oscar refused to be shrouded. “I can walk backwards,” Jason offered. And he did, casting a shadow over Oscar’s eyes. Oscar beamed up at him and we marched slowly to the Spartan Store. We walked up and down the rows of the store. Jason pointed out a pile of Entenmann’s Pastries. “These are good,” he said.

As we left, I said to Jason, “Earlier today there were Girl Scouts right here at the entrance. We could have gotten Girl Scout Cookies.” “Damn,” Jason said. “I guess we could talk about all of your projects,” I offered as we sat in the living room chowing on pizza.

But to be honest, I didn’t know exactly what to say. Jason does a lot of honestly named projects. He drew a book of thumbnail sketches of every piece of art in the MOMA once. And he drew every item in a bag of microwave popcorn, including grit and burnt kernels. He makes books of illustrations in limited runs with titles like Animals Hugging and Every Person in the Phone Book that basically do what the titles suggest.

“Why do I do those ridiculously massive things?” Jason said, shrugging.
“Because I want to accomplish it.”

Once, Jason mailed me a drawing of two men hugging. They were both stocky little men, the outlines stout and hard to distinguish. But then, after staring at the piece for ten minutes, I noticed a few lines on each of their outfits that seemed familiar. It was a drawing of two X-Men. Cyclops and Wolverine. Hugging.

“I want people to be excited,” Jason said to me as we ate burgers at an Ann Arbor burger and hot dog joint called Red Hot Lovers. “What should the profile say?” I asked Jason.

“Jason loves pizza and snacks. Jason loves snacks.”
Oscar chewed on a rubbery black olive while Sara tried to devour a slice of pizza. Jason asked: “Do you guys want to have a contest, to see who can eat the most? Because I’m gonna win.”

Jason Polan is an artist from Michigan. He’s an accomplished illustrator at the very beginning of his career who has already amassed an impressive list of publications. He draws pictures of superheroes hugging. He likes snacks and he can eat a lot of cheese pizza. He draws large quantities of things because to do so is impressive. He wants to produce a lot of good stuff. He wants to accomplish a lot for the sake of the accomplishment. He wants to make people happy. That’s what he wants more than anything. He wants you to be happy. He will walk backward down the street for a quarter mile so a little boy can be in the shade.

"While most in-class student doodles are toe-dips into the stream of consciousness, Neil Greenberg obsessively draws maps. Though these “eight-and-a-half-by-elevens” come straight from his imagination, they often include street names, transit systems—even elaborately conceived bus schedules. Greenberg now works as a transportation planner in the Detroit area. Fritz Swanson, his former English professor, talks to him about what maps do for him, why he makes them, and the deliberate shortcomings of Fake Omaha, one of Greenberg’s imaginary cities"

"I have never been to the Floating City. In my youth we traveled some. My mother’s career took us quickly, and in a short span of time between when I was five and when I was eight, to four different continents, twenty-seven different countries, and four hundred different hotels."

She was tender. Soft as a sand dune after a windstorm.

Back in the before days, she would wake up and stretch those arms out across the sky, her left hand arched over the Baffin Islands, her right curled up under her jaw, her elbow casting a swaying shadow over the Jack Pine Forests of Saskatchewan. She was a tangle of stretching and yawning, and I would let slip a quiet sigh from where I lay, snuggled down along the south shore of Lake Erie, my head pillowed up on the Adirondacks.

But she wasn't all cherries and milk, either. Once, in a fit after we had fought she tripped me and I came down hard on my left hand and dug out a huge print in the mud. And one time she kissed me like a river so hard I didn't come around again until the glaciers had retreated and little men were all abroad in the land stalking the bigger cats (that is, the ones big enough that I could scare her with one by hiding it in the toe of her boot). And the land looked transformed after a while, and then I realized that she was gone.

But I think now that everything in the before days was a fuzzy cloud of mists and rains and sweet fruit. It was like moss and green sprouts and black loamy earth. But that cloud of tender is also a shroud of regret, free floating, for I cannot remember where our fight started, or over what, and worse I have the sense that my own... my sense of that time was of laying about and consuming.

Her absence is a great mystery to me now, in this smaller time where the bears roam and I feel that I have become so much less. I wonder about her rage, and I find myself constantly wandering the woodsaround that great hand print of mine which, I suppose, has grown so much larger than me. The mud-print pushed up a pile of dirt, which became a hill, then a mountain, then a great land amongst lakes.

Finally, I found myself raging in the woods as the trees rose up around me. The trees loomed and the shadow of my life filled the air, amongst a closing cave of teeth and obscurity. And I knew quickly that as things were going, soon, I wouldn't be able to even see the next county, let alone all the way to the sea, and how are you supposed to find a woman in this damn world if you can't see both seas at once? If she isn't on one coast, she could be on the other and you would have to walk all that way just to check. Her space is huge and hidden and covered in so many layers of shadow... I feel that it was just a little thing that we fought over. Something small. But she made me feel so large, and in amongst all that, the little things seem fuzzy and I cannot see... I felt... and she...

That was when I started cutting. Hacking. Sawing. Beating. Tearing down. And now I find that the little men have grown a bit and they need cutters and I *need* to cut, to clear, to make open and plain the whole of the land so that I can see, god let me see far.