A Month of Days

Peter Rukavina

This is A Month of Days, a project I’ve been working on for the last month:

A small notebook, with background image of a stylized yellow half-sun, with the title, in all caps. A MONTH OF DAYS on the front, in black, along with a simple sun, in black, above.

It’s the simplest of all date books: a page per day, numbered in the corner in big bold red Akzidenz Grotesk:

A two-page spread of a date book, with page numbers 12 and 13 on opposite pages, in big bold red numbers.

The books are simple; the printing, assembly, and binding were simple steps too, there were just a lot of them.

I first had to figure out how to print the numbers on the pages in a way that I could cut and fold larger pages down into signatures that would be paged in the right order. 

I made a couple of mock-ups before I got everything sorted, and then set out to set the type for each spread of pages:

A letterpress chase with evenly-spaced out day numbers in the four corners of a large space filled with wooden furniture.

From there it was a lot of printing, setting new numbers for a new spread, and cutting down pages into signatures, a process that resulted in this collection:

A grid of 8 sets of pages, each with different numbers, laid out 2 x 4.

With the pages printed, I set out to design and print a cover. We’ve recently come into the loan of an etching press, and I was keen to try it out, so I carved a lino block of an abstract sun:

I chose a rich Akua Diarylide Yellow ink for the printing, and ran the block through the press on notebook-sized pieces of card stock, to produce:

A grid of paper with yellow abstract sun image, set out to dry.

When the suns had dried, I used the letterpress to print the “fronts” and “backs” of each cover:

A stack of covers, with the yellow abstract sun image overprinted with the title, in all caps, A MONTH OF DAYS, with a black simple sun ornament above; on the left side is the credit Queen Square Press, 2025.

The “A Month of Days” in all caps is from a font of a tiny perfect sans-serif typeface that I acquired somewhere along the way. Above it is an ornament is by Johannes Troyer, circa 1953, cast from the original matrices by Skyline Type Foundry.

On the back is the credit “Queen Square Press, 2025” set in very tiny and fiddly 6 point Spartan, from a font I inherited from Prince County Hospital many years ago.

With the pages and covers printed and dried, all that was left was the assembly: the cover, and each page, got scored and folded, collated into a “book,” and then punch, with an awl, in three places along the spine. I then bound the books together with a simple pamphlet stitch, using bakers twine, and put them overnight in the nipping press to settle.

The final step was to trim the edges, and round the corners:

Five finished notebooks set standing on a brown table beside each other.

I’ve made a limited edition of 50 notebooks, and they’re available for sale on our online shop now.

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About This Blog

Photo of Peter RukavinaI am . I am a writer, letterpress printer, and a curious person.

To learn more about me, read my /nowlook at my bio, listen to audio I’ve posted, read presentations and speeches I’ve written, or get in touch (peter@rukavina.net is the quickest way). 

I have been writing here since May 1999: you can explore the 25+ years of blog posts in the archive.

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