Eight haiku. Twenty four total lines. A unique drink coaster printing project.  What’s the big deal?

Hundred-year old presses. Tiny pieces of metal type. Questions like, errr, do we have a ligatured ff instead of a regular ff? Did a piece of roman type slip into the italic type drawer? Did we just really run out of lowercase e’s?? And so on.

First poem in the haiku sequence. The ink is a rich dark green.

Here’s Emily’s design for the haiku side of the coaster, with a proof on regular paper placed on top of a coaster so you can see the approximate registration.

I like that the haiku has its own space, and that all the other information, including the title and sequence of the poems, is on the back. It gives the reader the experience of the poem alone.

And here’s a proof of the last poem in the sequence:

An old Marvel Comics-inspired No-Prize to anyone who spots the Boy I’m Glad We Proofed This detail. Oh, wait. I’m out of No-Prizes. So just read the copy to the left.

I was so enamored with seeing my own work printed in beautiful Garamond that it took me over a dozen views before I noticed the “s” in the first line is a roman “s” and not an italic “s”. Now there’s a whole philosophical movement going back a couple-three generations among some printers that states you should leave some flaws in your work, because after all to err is human, and in some cases perfectly so. But in this case I decided that I’d just stick with fixing it and not get all philosophical.

That will be the reader’s job, upon the second or third drink…

Photos courtesy of St Brigid Press