Questions
& Answers

¶ What is a Varying Hare?

Varying hare is the lesser-known common name of the Lepus americanus or snowshoe hare, a large-footed woodland lagomorph native to Nova Scotia. I selected this press name in part because these hares are plentiful in my woodlot. They are not burrowers, but rather use the terrain and evergreen thickets for shelter. They’re ‘varying’ because of their ability to change the colour of their coat from brown to white and back again as the seasons change.

¶ Do you host workshops or take on interns?

I am not presently offering any workshops or taking on any interns—maybe in the future. I am, however, always desirous of being helpful and encouraging to aspiring writers, designers, printers and publishers, so reach out by email if you need help or advice and I’ll see what I can do.

¶ I want Press of the Varying Hare to publish my book. Can I send you my manuscript or pitch you my project?

No! Please don’t send me your manuscript. The Press of the Varying Hare is essentially a private press and does not entertain unsolicited submissions; all such queries will be ignored. I am no longer a trade publisher; the projects that will be published by the Press will generally be initiated by invitation only. However, I will sometimes print for clients if you want to hire me to produce a book or a broadside.

¶ What is the difference between having my work ‘printed’ by the Press and having my work ‘published’ by the Press?

Depending on my availability and the compatibility of the project, the Press can be hired to provide various manufacturing services—editing, design, typesetting, printing, binding, etc. When the Press is contracted to provide such services, it is the client who is ‘the publisher’—they are the one responsible for all the production costs and for the distribution and promotion of the finished product. Projects printed for clients will not bear the Press of the Vary Hare’s imprint, only a credit line. On the other hand, when a book is published by the Press of the Varying Hare, certain rights to use the work are licensed from the author in exchange for a royalty or some other form of compensation, and the responsibility to develop, finance, manufacture and market the work is taken up by the Press itself. These are the works that bear the Press of the Varying Hare imprint.

¶ So people can hire you to design and letterpress print things?

Yes, they can, depending on my schedule and the suitability of the project to my tools and processes. Whether it’s a letterpress book, chapbook, broadside or some other sort of ephemera, I’m interested in discussing what I can do for you. I should note that I almost never design or print wedding invitations. Weddings are just not my cup of tea.

¶ Do you also offer digital typesetting services?

Yes! I am available to typeset books and other text-centred works for trade publishers, organizations or individuals. I enjoy typographic projects of all sorts, ranging from typesetting poetry books in a quiet, classical style right through to designing complex academic texts, exhibition catalogues, annual reports or riotous posters. Please contact me if you are looking for skilled help with a typographic problem.

¶ Do you offer modern offset printing or digital printing services?

No, not in-house. All of the printing presses that I operate employ the ‘relief’ or letterpress process. However, I can broker offset printing or digital printing jobs to third-party providers and manage the production process on your behalf, which particularly makes sense in instances where I have designed and typeset the project.

¶ What is letterpress printing?

Letterpress printing is a ‘relief’ printing process where ink is applied to a raised surface that is then pressed into sheets of paper in order to transfer an image. That raised printing ‘surface’ is commonly traditional wood or metal type and the ‘image’ is usually letters and words, but truthfully it can be almost anything. These days many people print letterpress from digitally-generated designs that are rendered as a photopolymer plate—an intriguing mix of old and new technologies. I use photopolymer sometimes, but I personally prefer working with old-school analogue type. For centuries, letterpress was the dominant process in commercial printing and book production, but it gradually fell out of use in the second half of the twentieth century as photo-lithographic or ‘offset’ printing techniques were perfected. Nowadays, offset printing is itself in decline as various toner- and inkjet-based digital reproduction processes now meet most of society’s demand for printed items, from pizza flyers to books.

¶ Is letterpress printing superior to more contemporary methods of printing?

That’s not really a useful way to think about it. Each method of printing has different characteristics and different applications. Each wave of technological change brings with it an assortment of advantages and disadvantages relative to the technology it intends to replace, but we rarely make objective assessments or ‘apples to apples’ comparisons. We get distracted by our preoccupation with ‘new things’ and by the boisterous sales pitches that promise progress, speed, efficiency or thrift; we often neglect to properly consider each tool’s right use—so it’s just out with the old, in with the new, over and over again. Often when a technology gets abandoned by the industrial mainstream, it gets adopted and repurposed by artists and craftspeople; this is what happened when letterpress printing fell out of commercial use. These days, the people who compose and print books using letterpress tools are committing to a process that is slower and more constrained than what is possible with digital typesetting and modern printing processes—so what’s the appeal? In essence, it’s tactility. The sculptural effect of type impressed into paper enlivens the experience of reading, something that is absent from more contemporary printing methods. In my view, letterpress printing remains the ultimate expression of typographic letterforms. A carefully letterpress-printed page can produce a crisp, sculptural expression of type that gives the page a vitality and a beauty that remains unsurpassed. Of course, the modern methods offer other virtues (speed, ease, economy, etc.) and can produce great work of a different kind when thoughtfully employed, but a letterpress book printed on good paper from analogue type remains in a class all its own.

¶ What is a ‘fine press’ book?

There is no one agreed-upon definition of this term, but in my view ‘fine press’ (once more commonly called ‘private press’) is a subset of book publishing and print culture that focuses on the production of finely-crafted books that employ higher quality materials and more handcraft-aligned production processes than a typical commercially-produced trade book. In general, fine press books are issued in small limited editions, sometimes consisting of only a handful of copies. Unlike an ‘artist book’—which often prioritizes artistic expression, visual content and experimentation—a fine press book typically focuses on the skillful communication of a text with the expectation being that those who encounter the book might actually bother to read it. The design of a fine press book can range from quiet and classical to exuberant and experimental; these lines are constantly being blurred. Although they are sometimes lavishly illustrated, often with wood engravings or other sorts of fine art prints, fine press books generally tend to keep the text, and typography, front and centre. Often the production of a fine press book involves a fair amount of handwork, or at the very least the use of antiquated printing processes like letterpress printing using wood and metal type, but of late more and more use of digital typesetting, photopolymer and inkjet printers is creeping in; it’s a dynamic field. Fine press books might be bound modestly by the printer in paper wrappers or simple casebindings, or in complex bindings and boxes made by specialist bookbinders. It is not uncommon for a fine press book to be offered for sale in various ‘states’—on different papers and in different bindings, catering to different tastes and budgets. For all of these reasons, a fine press book is usually much more expensive than your typical trade book, and of interest to both bibliophiles and collectors.

¶ Are Press of the Varying Hare’s books ‘fine press’ books?

It, well, varies. Sometimes they are, and sometimes they are not, depending on how you divide up the world. Some of the more elaborate and expensive limited-edition letterpress books that I produce would certainly meet any reasonable definition of fine press, but I also like making simple, brief books and chapbooks that, while they employ the same processes and equipment, make much more modest claims (and are sold for a much more modest price). I’m just making what pleases me and I’m not too concerned about categories or definitions.

¶ What makes a limited edition ‘limited’?

In most of the book trade editions are ‘open’, meaning that a publisher can reprint a book as many times as the market demands and their contract with the author allows. But many letterpress-printed books are issued in editions where only a specific number of copies are made and no additional copies will be added later. This practice comes out of the fine art printmaking tradition and is of particular interest to collectors (i.e., quantifiable scarcity determines, and sometimes over time even increases, a book’s value). In books from the Press of the Varying Hare, the number of each individual copy and the extent of the limitation are typically noted in pencil on the book’s colophon page using the following format: 1/80 (i.e., copy one of eighty copies). Occasionally, a few extra copies exist outside of the edition. Such copies are identified by one of two penciled notations on the colophon page. Imperfect copies or trial copies are identified as ‘MAKEREADY’ (often followed by a short description of that particular copy’s shortcomings). Sound copies not intended for sale are noted as ‘H/C’ (short for hors commerce or ‘out of the market’).

¶ Are Varying Hare books handmade?

No, I don’t think they are because all presses are machines. Handmade is a problematic term because it implies the absence of mechanization, and yet printing has from its very inception been all about the mechanized reproduction of texts. (If you want something handmade, hire a calligrapher.) The fact that a press is old or inefficient—or that we are inefficient in operating it—does not somehow make it not a machine, and every printing press, even Gutenberg’s screw press, is literally a machine. A more honest descriptor of what I do might be something like late-nineteenth-century analogue book production, since I make books using a mix of pre-digital machines and handwork. It may also be fair to distinguish between machines that use electricity, particularly motors, and ones whose operation requires the direct physical intervention of the user to feed the paper, ink the form or power the making of the impression. But it still seems a bit dubious to call things made on these more simple machines handmade. One thing I know for sure is that anyone who prints from a digitally-originated photopolymer plate and says that the thing that they have produced is a handmade thing is surely either a fibber or woefully confused. I’m not taking issue with these tools or the things they produce, I just feel like we need a more honest descriptor for the process. Letterpress tools of all sorts can make beautiful things, but this beauty does not need to be tarted up with a fib.

¶ What is printing from photopolymer plates all about?

It’s actually pretty slick. This popular letterpress method involves creating a relief expression of a (typically) digital-originated design on a plastic plate, and mounting that plate on the printing press instead of traditional analogue type. It’s efficient and effective, and it was a process I used to good effect in my work as a trade printer, but it’s about as far from bespoke as a letterpress printer can get. Photopolymer’s not really a craft process; it’s more closely related to modern offset printing than it is to traditional letterpress work, even though the process involves a raised surface that is inked and impressed into paper. Photopolymer is a quick, relatively cheap and (in skilled hands) effective way to simulate real letterpress printing, but so long as the real thing is still around we ought avoid any claims of equivalence. Photopolymer should not be passed off as being the same as traditional letterpress printing from metal or wood (Littera impressa typographia); it is a hybrid, a subspecies (Littera impressa typographia plastica).

¶ Why don’t you use a more automated ‘shopping cart’ at checkout?

I prefer to interact directly with each customer. Isn’t that the point of working at this scale?

¶ What’s the best way to contact you?

You can contact me by email at pressvhare@gmail.com, by DM on Instagram or by old-school paper mail at the postal address found at the foot of this page.