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<\/a>Hugh is over 80. When he was born in the 1930s, he would have been called a craftsman. In the 1940s and 50s, a how-to kind of guy. In the 1960s and 70s, a do-it-yourselfer. Now he is a classic Maker.<\/p>\nAt 10, Hugh\u00a0built\u00a0 <\/span>himself a workshop in his parents\u2019 basement. At twelve, he designed and built his own sailboat. By seventeen, he was tearing apart cars and putting them back together. At twenty-three, he invented a lightweight leg brace for a friend, which propelled him into orthotics, where he invented half a dozen orthotic devices including the dynamic-tilt wheelchair<\/a>. When ink seeped into his blood, he bought an antique letterpress, pulled it apart and put it back together again, learning to operate it the same way he learned how to build it: by doing.<\/p>\n The first book to roll off Thee Hellbox Press<\/a> was A Letter to Teresa<\/i>, <\/span>a thank-you to the Walpole Island First Nation for including his adopted Cree daughters in their powwow. He published dozens more, and in 2012, invited me to work with him to produce\u00a0The Paradise Project<\/i>, a process I track\u00a0in Gutenberg\u2019s Fingerprint: Paper, Pixels, and the Lasting Impression of Books.<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n Source<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n With The Paradise Project<\/i>, I became one\u00a0of a long line of writers who have fallen in love with giving their words physical form. One of the most articulate is Ana\u00efs Nin, who set up her own small press in 1942 in New York City. She taught herself typesetting and did almost all the manual work of <\/span>self-publishing a letterpress edition of her third book, Winter of Artifice<\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In The Diary of Ana\u00efs Nin, Volume 3, 1939-1944,<\/i> she writes about the particular joys of making:<\/span><\/p>\n \u201c<\/span>You live with your hands, in acts of physical deftness . . .You pit your faculties against concrete problems. The victories are concrete, definable, touchable. You can touch the page you wrote. . .. At the end of the day you can see your work, weigh it. It is done. It exists.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n I laugh, reading about how she uses soap boxes as shelves to hold her tools\u00a0and inks, how she arrives at her printing loft, \u201cloaded with old rags for the press, old towels for the hands.\u201d Hugh\u2019s print shop is a chaos of \u2018making,\u2019 too: an old cookie tin for a \u201chellbox\u201d where he tosses damaged type; bits of projects from the past three decades scattered across every surface and taped to the walls.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Most of today\u2019s Millennials had two working parents. By the time they got to high school, home economics and shop had been retired along with art and music. No one showed them how to sew a seam or cut up a chicken or change the oil in their car. No wonder they are flocking to DIY\u2014oops, Maker\u2014sites to teach them what\u00a0they yearn to know. <\/span><\/p>\n A whiff of the counter-culture utopianism that drove 1960s\u00a0DIY is driving Maker Culture today. <\/span>Making is the flip side of consuming. It<\/span> is active, not passive; doing instead of acquiring; local instead of global; not disposable, but sustainable.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The opposite of corporatism and siloed individualism, making implies learning through informal, collective networks where people share and pool knowledge. The motivation is not just the object that is produced; makers are looking for\u00a0self-fulfilment and dare I say it, fun.<\/p>\n \u201cPress on!\u201d Hugh exclaims as I struggle to find the right letters and get them upside down and backwards into the chase. He punches his fist in the air. \u201cJoy is the objective!\u201d<\/p>\n Titillium<\/a> is a typeface born in 2012 at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Urbino, Italy. It began as an art-school assignment to collectively create a family of open-source fonts to be shared freely through a web platform. Each year, a fresh crop of students works on the project; graphic designers are encouraged to develop their own versions and add images of how they use the typeface to a database of case histories.<\/p>\n Not exactly typeface designed by committee, and not individual innovation, either.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s the way of the future,\u201d my son says.<\/p>\n \u201cThe relationship to handcraft is a beautiful one,” Ana\u00efs Nin wrote. “You are related bodily to a solid block of metal letters, to the weight of the trays, to the adroitness of spacing, to the tempo and temper of the machine. You acquire some of the weight and solidity of the metal, the strength and power of the machine. Each triumph is a conquest by the body, fingers, muscles.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Gutenberg is often credited with inventing the printing press, but a press consists of many moving parts. His fundamental innovation was the creation of movable type, <\/span>a modular technique for bringing together the 26 letters of the alphabet into an endless variety of words and sentences and fixing them so that page after identical page could be printed, then the letters released to be reused to create new pages.<\/p>\n That may seem like a purely technical enterprise, but as Nin points out, the physical action of making has an added benefit: it reverberates from the hand back up into the brain, into the intellect and the imagination. <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThe writing is often improved by the fact that I live so many hours with a page that I am able to scrutinize it, to question the essential words. In writing, my only discipline has been to cut out the unessential. Typesetting is like film cutting. The discipline of typesetting and printing is good for the writer.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n And it is<\/span> a movement. DIY is one of the most popular categories on Pinterest<\/a>. Etsy<\/span><\/a> hosts more than a million makers selling their\u00a0artisanal products. Craft nights are replacing book clubs. Libraries and museums are being turned into \u201cMakerspaces.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Brilliant new concepts rarely appear out of the blue. More often, the key elements have been bumping up against each other for a while, waiting for someone with the insight, the foresight, and the audacity to try something new. Waiting for a maker.<\/p>\n \u201cMore Aha!<\/em> than Abacadabra!<\/em>,\u201d I say to Hugh.<\/p>\n \u201cGood girl. You\u2019ve got it!\u201d he says.<\/p>\n G<\/span>ive makers the tools and they become creators; t<\/span>hey can\u00a0change the world.<\/p>\n [\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_separator][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1477364431886{padding-top: 10px !important;padding-right: 10px !important;padding-bottom: 10px !important;padding-left: 10px !important;background-color: #ededed !important;background-position: center !important;background-repeat: no-repeat !important;background-size: cover !important;border-radius: 2px !important;}”]<\/p>\n [\/vc_column_text][vc_separator][\/vc_column][\/vc_row]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]\u201cIf I don\u2019t have it, I make it,\u201d Hugh Barclay says, sawing a groove into the body of a letter A so he can insert a short sliver of lead to create an accented vowel. \u201cWhat else is a person to do?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":453,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,18],"tags":[71,78,77,73,75,70,74,72,76],"class_list":["post-438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-history","category-book-making","tag-anais-nin","tag-arts-crafts-movement","tag-gutenberg","tag-gutenbergs-fingerprint","tag-handmade-books","tag-maker-culture","tag-the-paradise-project","tag-thee-hellbox-press","tag-titilium","invicta_simple_style_entry"],"yoast_head":"\nWinter of Artifice<\/b><\/h3>\n
<\/a>Maker Millennials<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n
<\/a>In high school, I took home economics and learned how to make blanc mange and an A-line skirt. My mother showed me how to make a cherry pie and embroider a\u00a0Christmas stocking. My dad taught me how to change a tire. My great aunt instructed me in the art of hoeing a straight furrow, planting seeds.<\/span><\/p>\nA Horse Designed by a Committee \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n
<\/a>At the same time I was hand-typesetting The Paradise Project<\/i>, I was working on a digital edition with my book-designer son. Hugh was busy adapting his wood-and-metal type when he needed a diphthong or some tight kerning. Meanwhile, my son pointed me to <\/span>Titillium.<\/p>\nThe Gutenberg Effect<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n
<\/a>Technology\u2014the art of making, the application of knowledge for practical purposes\u2014connects the body to the mind.<\/span><\/p>\nMake America Make Again<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/span> Three years ago, Barack Obama announced a <\/span>National Week of Making<\/a> (June 17-23), to\u00a0encourage making, mentoring, maker organisations, and to recognise\u00a0<\/span>individuals who contribute significantly to Making and to the Maker Movement.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nWhat did you make today?<\/h3>\n