Gary's retirement party was this afternoon! Gary Frost is the head conservator (well, former-head conservator now) at the university library and one of the leading thinkers on bookbinding and conservation in the field so it was pretty cool and sort of weird that I got to be at his retirement party. The party was at City Park and there were food and gifts—including a hand-made time capsule filled with memories from projects Gary's worked on (and our poster!)—and a good time was had by all. Gary said some pretty funny things, like when he went off about Harlequin endbands (when half the endband is one color and the second half is a different color) or when he read a line from the letter that the head librarian sent with her retierment gift to him that said he always sent her very detailed and thoughtful feedback. He just laughed and said, "And here I thought I was being a nuisance!"
But for me the best part was that Gary genuinely liked our poster! He made sure to tell us once in front of everyone when we got there and again while we were all milling around chatting that he was very impressed with our letterpressing. It felt so great to have him compliment us on our hard work. He could tell that we had based our design off of a vintage broadside and was impressed with how it turned out. We had about a million copies since the thing that takes the longest with letterpress is setting it up—the difference between printing 1 and 50 is about 5 minutes—so we handed them out to the party attendees and everyone seemed excited to get them. It was very self-affirming.
So, despite my stuffy head and runny noes (allergies?) today has been a good day.
But for me the best part was that Gary genuinely liked our poster! He made sure to tell us once in front of everyone when we got there and again while we were all milling around chatting that he was very impressed with our letterpressing. It felt so great to have him compliment us on our hard work. He could tell that we had based our design off of a vintage broadside and was impressed with how it turned out. We had about a million copies since the thing that takes the longest with letterpress is setting it up—the difference between printing 1 and 50 is about 5 minutes—so we handed them out to the party attendees and everyone seemed excited to get them. It was very self-affirming.
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| Gary with our poster! (Click to enlarge.) |
1 comment:
Hehe, that's a very nice poster! It seems like a nice way to mark his retirement party, you know? It's great that you guys got to celebrate this milestone in senior life!
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