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Created Apr 03 21
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Black Thumb Press

Created Mar 22 21
Updated Mar 22 21

Steve Izma

Here is the beginning of a collection of items I printed on Dumont’s Multi 1850 offset press.

A collage built from a spread in a department store catalogue. I reused this image in Dis*ease (more about that later) and it has been reproduced a few times in faraway places. I wrote this long before “the undead” became a gothic cliché.

I think I set the type for this using our Phototypositor, an amazing machine (completely unelectronic) that was essentially an enlarger combined with a developing tray. We had several fonts for it, each one being a long roll of film, and I think I even figured out at one point how to make fonts from Letraset that would work in this device. It allowed for almost infinitely precise letterspacing and various kinds of distortions. It was probably the most fun to operate of all the machines in the shop.

This was written by my anarchist friend Nicola Santoro. I think he used it for one side of his birthday invitations.

That’s Michael Kelley and Ken Epps. I’m not sure how long the brand lasted.

Around 1974, it became clear to some of us how much of a tyrant Mao Ze Dong was. It became clearer to more of us once we began to be pestered by the CPC-ML in 1975. Hardly any of them had anything resembling a sense of humour, and political debates with them were a waste of time. This postcard and the following ones depicting Mao were a change of tactics for myself and friends.

This is based on a famous hagiographic postcard issued by the Chinese Communist Party. It’s not satire, it’s the truth. Mao was Stalin’s biggest fan.

You get a prize if you can reveal the hidden political ideology in this construction. I thought I was just playing around with test strips that came out of the Compugraphic headliner when we tried to coax it out of having a bad day. But it’s also possible that its mysterious machine noises and rhythms hypnotized me into spelling out some deeply held theory, probably late at night after an excruciatingly long shift.

I slightly altered the lyrics of the Monty Python song to accompany my self-portrait here.

The image is borrowed from the Detroit-based Eat the Rich Gang, a group of anarchist friends involved with the Black and Red Printing Co-op and the Fifth Estate newspaper.

The logo I used mostly in anarchist pamphlets I printed. Yes, that’s my thumbprint.

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Jan 01 70

Food for Thought, and then some...

Aug 31 21

Gary Robins

Sometimes, with a little discussion and collaborative inspiration, a good idea can take root and blossom into a concept or a plan, and then grow into a tangible and valuable project. The Food Paper was just such an endeavour.

It was initiated as a collaboration between a couple Dumont staff members and several folks involved in setting up the Waterloo Food Co-op. We saw it as a kind of popular education tool not unlike the Ireland Paper which Dumont staff had produced two years earlier, designed to present a broad overview of the food industry, the changes in production, distribution, food quality and food security, and how independent local food co-ops could help consumers regain a greater level of control in obtaining better quality and less expensive meals for our tables.

That’s where we started, but of course it became a whole lot more than that. The volunteer group who researched, wrote and produced The Food Paper back in 1974 wanted to find the reasons why food had recently become a major public issue.

“When we first began plans for the paper, we also hoped to demonstrate the necessity for groups like the Waterloo Food Co-op as alternatives to present food industry structures. Although we still see such a necessity, we have come to realize that the difficulties would not end with a large-scale co-operative movement and proposing that everyone join a food co-op is too simplistic a solution to provide total answers. We can only hope that by reading the paper people will at least gain a clearer picture of the issues involved.”

Okay, so that part worked, The Food Paper was a huge success. We had to do a second press run. The National Farmers Union (NFU) distributed it to its members at their annual convention that fall. Oxfam Canada sent it out to their entire membership. It was initially distributed as a supplement to a number of university and alternate newspapers, and many nonprofit community groups and other food co-ops wrote to request copies for their own distribution.

But were we really all that successful? Forty-seven years later, all of the significant economic, environmental, corporate and social concerns we raised appear to have taken place. The family farm is essentially gone, agricultural soil quality is on life support, corporate consolidation and control has continued, international food sourcing threatens the sustainability of the planet. Yikes! It’s grim, but it’s not all bad. Local food security has become an important political issue. Some fights continue on…  We did a good job with this project, and much of what we wrote is still valuable and important all these years later.

As we wrote in our introductory statement back in 1974: “Food is a basic necessity for sustaining life. The quality of life is very much dependent on the availability of such basics as good food. For people to be in a position where they cannot afford to buy food grown in a country as rich in agricultural' land as Canada is perverse. Farming is one of the few remaining occupations that maintains a balance with nature. To find farmers leaving the land because they can no longer make a living and to see urban sprawl eating away the countryside left behind is equally perverse. If we are not to be confronted with, large, mechanized farms, using all the latest industrial and chemical techniques, providing low quality food to huge metropolitan centres at high prices, then something will have to be done about present food industry trends very soon.”


3 more photos in this story.
A document is attached to this story:
1974-The Food Paper.pdf