Closing the workshop

The building was sold in January 2024. The new owner intends to convert the upstairs loft, where the workshop sat for ten years, into apartments. The downstairs is becoming a coffee shop. I was given until the end of April to remove the workshop. The presses, the cabinet, the inventory of paper, the ink, the rollers, the proofing trays, the cleaning rags, the metal type, the chase library, the entire physical accumulation of ten years had to be elsewhere by the first of May. It was. I have, since then, been at slight loose ends.

The week before

The Heidelberg and the Vandercook were collected by the Antwerp printer on the Monday and Tuesday of the last week. He came with a crane operator (the same one, by the great gift of professional networks, who lifted the Heidelberg into the loft in 2014) and a flatbed truck. The Heidelberg went out the window the same way it had come in. The Vandercook is smaller and could be wheeled down a ramp that the printer brought with him. By Tuesday evening the loft was, for the first time in a decade, empty of large objects.

The type cabinet went on the Wednesday. Two men, a piano dolly, and a careful trip down the staircase that took two hours. The cabinet survived. The smaller things, chase library, ink, paper, rags, went on the Thursday in my car, in three trips, to a friend's barn outside Boxtel where they are now stored awaiting either a new workshop or, more probably, distribution among other printers.

The last evening

On the Friday I cleaned the floor. There were ten years of ink stains, ground into the floorboards in roughly the area between the Heidelberg and the inking bench, that no amount of cleaning could remove. The new owner had told me he did not care about the floor; the apartment will have new floors anyway. I cleaned it anyway. It seemed wrong to leave ten years of ink and not at least attempt to acknowledge it with a mop.

The light in the loft on the Friday evening was, as it had been for ten years, sideways and gold and coming in through the small north window that overlooked the Heuvelstraat. I sat on the floor where the Heidelberg had been, drank a beer, and locked the door at about eleven.

It seemed wrong to leave ten years of ink and not at least attempt to acknowledge it with a mop.

What comes next

I do not know. I am not currently looking for a new workshop. The Antwerp printer has, with what I can only call exceptional generosity, offered me access to the Heidelberg and the cabinet for one week per quarter, indefinitely, with no expectation of return. I will take him up on this. The first visit is scheduled for July. I am taking three days off work, two boxes of Hahnemuehle, and a new ink recipe I have been working on.

This site is, for the moment, the archive. The broadsides are scanned, the essays are here, the recipe for the black is on the site for anyone who wants to mix it themselves. The originals are in flat files at a friend's house in Boxtel and will, eventually, find permanent homes in collections that have not yet been identified.

The workshop is closed. The work is not finished.