The gales of November came early (a slight exaggeration)
¶ Those of you who have found the Varying Hare website at this point get points for curiosity. I’ve not actually promoted this new site yet, so there were no flashing neon signs for you to follow. I suppose you would call the present availability of this website a ‘soft launch’. I wanted to get things up and running but didn’t tell anyone much about it since I’m too busy moving gear and setting up the new shop to manage much interaction at the moment. I won’t be ready to sell or ship books or to take on design or printing work until 2026, so no sense blowing the trumpet quite yet.
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There’s still a little work left to do on the new shop building, but it’s got power, heat, light and high speed internet. I’ve been using the bindery/office space for several weeks now to design and typeset a trade book about the Fine Arts department of Mount Allison University in New Brunswick. It’s a substantial book (300+ pages and over 350 images) that poses many interesting design dilemmas. The book is a joint publication of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery and Thaddeus Holownia’s Anchorage Press. It will likely be available from Anchorage Press by late winter.
Meanwhile, it feels like I’m within reach of completing the move. Today I got three of my presses moved up to the new shop the mountain from the valley floor by using a tilt deck tow truck. The move went well, despite the fact that November is already throwing lots of snow flurries and damp, dark weather at us — I was hoping for a warmer, dryer longer autumn, though lord knows we need this precipitation after the summer’s devastating drought and wildfires.
These presses (a Vandercook 219, a Vandercook Universal 1 AB and a 10×15 Chandler & Price platen) join all my cabinets of metal and wood type, type matrices, and paper, as well as the shop library. There’s a fourth press (a Heidelberg windmill) and two Linotypes yet to move, as well as a Ludlow caster, Nolan metal remelt pot, a paper beater, standing press … okay, so maybe there’s still a lot of stuff to move, but it does still feel like I’ve made some major progress.
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I’ll start promoting the existence of this website in about a month’s time, so enjoy your brief remaining moment in the sun as an early adopter. And thanks again for your interest in my work.
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Postscript: In case you are unfamiliar, the title of this post (Gales, November, Early) is a nod to a line from a famous modern folk song by Gordon Lightfoot, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which describes the circumstances of a major modern shipwreck that took place 50 years ago this month on Lake Superior. It topped the charts in Canada in 1976.