The Print Museum

by Heidi Williamson

Overview

In her second collection, printer's daughter Heidi Williamson mines the rich language and history of printing to consider themes of belonging, parenthood, love, and how we communicate, and fail to communicate, with each other. Individual, familial, and cultural inheritance is explored - through subjects ranging from Gutenberg to Gill, Kindles, Twitter, ultrasounds, the death of Diana, 3D printing, climate change, childlessness, genes, and what is downloadable. By turns sensual, playful, and stark, The Print Museum collects exhibits and fragments from this fading industrial art and displays them alongside pieces driven by the same forces of longing, loss, transformation and delight. Winner of the Poetry Category and Book by the Cover award, East Anglian Book Awards, 2016.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781780372921
Publisher:	Bloodaxe Books
Publication date:	03/24/2016
Pages:	72
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Born in Norfolk in 1971, Heidi Williamson has lived in central Scotland, Brussels and Salisbury. She now lives in Wymondham, Norfolk. She is an Advisory Fellow for the Royal Literary Fund, and was Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of East Anglia from 2018 to 2020. From 2011 to 2014, she was writer-in-residence at the John Jarrold Printing Museum in Norwich and in 2008-09 was poet-in-residence at the London Science Museum’s Dana Centre. In 2008 she received an Arts Council award to complete her first collection, Electric Shadow (Bloodaxe Books, 2011), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, which was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize. The Print Museum (Bloodaxe Books, 2016) won the Poetry Category and the Book by the Cover award in the 2016 East Anglian Book Awards. Her third collection, Return by Minor Road, is published by Bloodaxe Books in June 2020. A poem from this collection,‘With a rootless lily held in front of him’, won the 2019 Plough International Poetry Prize. Her work has been used to inspire poetry and science discussions in schools and adult creative writing groups, and has featured in NHS waiting rooms, cafés, and at festivals. Poems have been translated into Polish, Turkish, Romanian and German. She works with poets worldwide by Skype as a poetry surgeon for The Poetry Society, teaches for The Poetry School, and mentors poets through The Writing Coach, National Centre for Writing and The Poetry School.

Table of Contents

Preface 9

Out of print 11

Span 12

Work and turn 14

The dark manner 15

Furniture 16

At the Print Museum 17

Uncoated 20

Letterpress 21

Gutenberg 23

Em dash 24

Majuscule 25

Offcuts 26

Crossover 27

Bewick 28

The print mausoleum 29

The Case 30

Machine Minder 34

Newton's Rings 36

Separations 37

Repeatability 38

Shingling 39

Coffin 40

Hard ground 41

Landscape 42

Portrait 43

Dimensional stability 44

Figure 46

Bleed 47

Non-printing blue 48

Hellbox 49

Proof 50

Lineage 51

Dot gain 52

States 54

Adhesion 55

Cursive 56

Graphic 57

Ascender 58

Descender 59

Minuscule 60

Permanent 61

Manifold 62

Glossary of Printing Terms 65