printing presses....

So I just finished up looking through the websites for tomorrow's class and I was really surprised by the variety of the presses. I really liked the documentary about the old fashioned printing press. It made the actual act of printing and publishing seem so much more important than what is just done on computers. The printing process is so involved and intricate that it almost reflects the exact process of writing, which I found to be really interesting. A poet spends so much time becoming attached to their work and enraptured with finding the exact word to sound and fit precisely into their piece, but then it is coldly copied and printed quickly. There is no intimate connection between writing and printing with modern technology, but with the old fashioned methods, the process is slow, involved, and collaborative. There becomes something poetic in the act of printing, not merely just of writing and I found this to be really intriguing. I also really liked the flying fish press. I thought it was amazing how they created an art out of publishing books, something that is usually not considered to be the artistic piece of the publishing process. Their books almost didn't require words or writing, because they were so intricate and beautiful themselves. I find there to be something fascinating and exciting about publishing books through processes that are just as beautiful as the words that were chosen to go inside them.