Content
A picture book about chickens and their behaviour, observed rather than invented — the drawings come from watching the farm next door over a long period. The title supplies the joke and the narrative delivers on it.
Form
A small centre stitched booklet made from a single sheet of 200gsm Heritage Bookwhite, with a wrap-around sleeve.
This is the cheaper and smaller of two versions. The other is a pochoir picture book, a stencil printing method closely related to screen printing and considerably more labour intensive per copy. Issuing the same work in both forms is a deliberate decision about access: the pochoir edition is the object, the booklet is the book people can actually own.
Twenty-five copies painted through stencils, and a booklet anyone could carry home.
Specifications
- folded size 15 × 21 cm
- 16 pages
- printed throughout on 200gsm Heritage Bookwhite
- centre stitched with a wrap-around sleeve
- made in 2018
- ISBN 978-0-9932990-8-7
On the Single-Sheet Construction
Sixteen pages from one sheet means the imposition does the binding. The sheet is printed on both sides, folded down and stitched through the centre, so there is no gathering of signatures and no glue. For a hand printed edition that matters: every fold is one more chance for the registration to show an error, and a single sheet gives the fewest opportunities.
The 200gsm stock is heavy for a 16 page booklet and light for a screen print, which is the compromise the format requires — thick enough to hold flat colour cleanly, thin enough that sixteen pages will still close.
The Pochoir Edition
The other version of this book is a large hardbound volume, and it is not screen printed inside at all. The interior pages are stencil painted in watercolour on 310gsm Somerset tub sized satin, the hard cover is stencil painted as well, and only the wrap-around sleeve is screen printed, on 160gsm Heritage Antique.
Pochoir is stencil painting by hand: colour is brushed or dabbed through a cut stencil, one area at a time, one copy at a time. There is no squeegee and no press, and nothing about it is repeatable in the way a screen is. Two copies from the same stencil differ in the way two watercolours differ.
Specifications for that edition:
- folded size 27 × 38 cm
- 14 pages
- stencil painted in watercolour on 310gsm Somerset tub sized satin
- stencil painted hard cover, screen printed wrap-around sleeve on 160gsm Heritage Antique
- made in 2018
- signed edition of 25
Two Editions of One Book
Twenty-five copies of the pochoir version exist against a booklet that could be printed in quantity from a single sheet. The gap is labour: hand painting fourteen pages through stencils takes a day per copy in a way that pulling sixteen booklet pages from one sheet does not.
Both were made in 2018 and both tell the same story. Issuing them together was a decision about who the book is for. The painted edition is the object a collection acquires; the booklet is the version that could be carried away from a book fair, which is where most of these books met their readers.
The Subject
Chickens are an unusual subject for a screen printed book and a good one for the medium. A bird of one dominant colour with a comb and a wattle in a second reduces to flat shapes without losing what makes it recognisable, which is exactly the test a subject has to pass before it can be separated into two or three screens.
Where It Was Made
Both versions were printed at the workshop at Marshfield, near Bath, which is also the building the chicken walked into. The subject and the press were about thirty metres apart, and the book is the closest thing in the catalogue to work made directly from what was outside the door.