The Books of Anger

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Last Monday morning I went over the print shop with some creative energy. I’d been mulling around an idea for an alphabet book, one I might return to. But an alphabet book didn’t seem, well, meaty. Or vulnerable.

There have been a lot of heightened emotions in our circles—in me—this winter, and anger pops up more often than I’d like. It’s only (embarrassingly) recently that I’ve even begun to admit that I feel anger at all. Emotion that feels like anger I’ve been quick to stomp on, to rationalize away, to pretend it doesn’t exist.

And so it came to me: what about a set of notebooks, The Books of Anger, that would let me spend some time, some intimate hands-on time, with the flavours of anger. It’s hard not to introspect about, say, “irritation” while pulling big heavy metal type—I R R I T A T I O N—out of the type drawer, locking it into place, and printing it on card stock with bright orange ink.

“Oh, I’m feeling resentful about…”

“I’m exasperated that we keep looping back again to this…”

I could connect with every one. Except fury. Fury eludes me so far. I know it’s in there, though.

So, The Books of Anger.

A set of five notebooks: Resentment, Irritation, Exasperation, Frustration, Fury.

The look and feel of them sprang into my mind in one fell swoop. Setting type, printing, cutting, scoring, punching holes, binding, trimming, and rounding the corners took another week and a bit.

I printed 12 sets, and they’re available for sale on our Queen Square Press shop, on a kind of “pay what you can” scale of $25, $50, or $75, with 4 sets available at each price (the 12 sets are identical; all that’s different is the price you pay). If you’re looking for help calibrating the price you pay, each set required about 2 hours of my labour from start to finish.

I printed the covers on the Golding Jobber No. 8 letterpress. I set the titles in 120 point Akzidenz Grotesk, all-caps, and printed them using Victory Ink rubber-based Pantone Orange 165 on white 74 pound card stock.

The back cover is printed in black ink on the back of every book, in 11 point (who ever heard of 11 point type?) Futura Bold. This was tricky, because I don’t have any 11 point spaces, so I used 10 point and hoped for the best. 

The inside pages are 24 lb. coloured paper; each flavour of anger has its own colour:

• Resentment — Red
• Irritation — Blue
• Exasperation — Green
• Frustration — Yellow
• Fury — Orange

I choose the colours for each flavour based on my gut feeling. “What colour is irritation?” and so on.

I hand-bound the covers inside pages are together with colour-matched cord, using a link stitch, a technique I learned from Ido Agassi in this video. It’s a fiddlier stitch than a simple pamphlet stitch, but the result is more appealing along the bound edge.

Enjoy. Get angry.

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