Making Seedlings Spring

We retell the ins and out of the process creating our first handmade book -- from collecting submissions of writing and art, to letterpress printing, creative decisions and making books!

Making Seedlings

By Will J. Wood and Sally Eden

I'm Will J. Wood, editor-in-chief of Seedlings and I printed the poems in the book myself at London Centre for Book Arts. My own poetry and short stories have been printed in a few magazines and my short films have won awards at indie festivals. Growing up in the Suffolk countryside, I've always been close to the Old Ways. Heralded by William Morris, Virginia Woolf and Robert Graves I practised letterpress with the Cambridge University Bibliophiles, before joining LCBA in London to professionalise my type printing. Seedlings is a dream for me, allowing me to honour writers' work by forging their words in the tactile, timeless form of letterpress prints in a handmade book.

Personally, what I want you to take from Seedlings Spring '24 – and the whole new project we're nurturing – is the organic flow of the pieces inside. Reading the literary submissions, I would know my response to the poetry sometimes intellectually, but more often deep in my body. One day, after reading, and re-reading dozens of excellent pieces which had tended to be quite literary and formal, I encountered 'February' by Claire Silverman (p. 2) and was overcome so much, I stopped working at once but not after putting it in the shortlist. There is place in Seedlings for literary, form-wrenching work, but also careful, heart-worn words in a gentle pulse of phrases. 

Otherwise, I don't have highlights, try to read them all!

I'm Sally Eden, Creative Director. Seedlings and my own practice as an artist are intertwined. Much like the book I’m a contemporary artist that works with the seasons with a heavy focus on nature, currently exploring the extensive biodiversity of the Ligurian mountain ranges. My practice steps away from the hustle of the London art scene after graduating in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art last year. Looking through Sebs Art List for a private view on a Thursday evening was a regular theme throughout my time in London, bright white galleries displaying work like price meat ready to be cut and sold to the highest bidder. Instead my work is becoming a way of life, a slow process I can connect to that doesn't focus on money or fame, but more a project to bring to light the importance of a slow life and a practice that supports mental health. Stepping away from this mentality and designing our opening event to be in Victoria Park on 4 May 2024 in a wide open space surrounded by the dandelions and clovers creeping up from the soil felt like a better way to introduce Seedlings to the world, something new and slow in a city of capitalist chaos. 

Will J. Wood - Seedlings is a project bringing together so many people that we thought the best way to introduce it was a conversation. We are currently in my flat digitally printing the final photographs on the pages of the book. The green paper for the front cover arrived today, and tomorrow I'll be taking it to the studio and printing the cover on it. You, the reader, know what's on the cover more than I do right now. I hope you like it.

Sally Eden - Will brought me a dandelion on the walk back from the studio this morning, we talked about the different ways you can eat and use dandelions as medicine. It's a nice reminder of how everything is waking up, and even here in industrial London there are so many signs of spring – the dandelions and the cherry blossom in the street outside the window. 

Will - Because this is such a long process …

Sally - nearly three months, we've really felt the change of the seasons. But it's not all been romantic, we've both shed tears and I've had weird dream hallucinations of the unfinished pages of the book pricking and smothering me in bed as I slept – it's all worth it.

Will - hopefully.

Submissions

Sally - Submissions were a profound experience. We had work from so many amazing people which we're so grateful to see. And even despite the learning curve about organising so many emails and pieces of work (all the Alexes and Annas with no last names…) we were honoured to see it all. So many artists' practices were so deeply tied to our ethos, it was like they were waiting for us and us for them.

Will - Submissions were part of my original fantasy of Seedlings, sitting at my desk and reading different poems all day. It's become my chance to sit and listen to all the voices that have sent their words to us. There really is no way to have such a diverse range of writing styles and characters in front of you, comparing them, arranging them, listening out for the echoes and rhymes between writers – how many poems had a line about 'the dirt under my fingernails'? That could be a subtitle for our book. How did you create a story through all the art submissions?

Sally - When selecting the artwork I spent time reflecting on pieces while doing daily routines, cooking, short walks, in the mornings with a cup of tea with the farm dog Ciccio. The work had to move me in some way and when placing it with the poems they were chosen together to enhance each other, to create a story line that passes through the book as the changing of the seasons. 

I am currently sitting in Will's living room with floods of paper surrounding me, but my editing process was based in the Ligurian mountains where I now call home. My partner Stefano would read me the stories and poetry from the sun lounge outside his parents' olive farm. He gets a special mention for not only being the kindest soul bringing me cats and snacks while I work but also supporting me though the literature where my dyslexia puts me at slight literary disadvantage, so thank you Stef. 

I sat by the waterfall after helping plant this seasons field of red and yellow potatoes, washing the dirt off my hands in the fresh mountain water, surrounded by hundreds of small blue and old world swallowtail butterflies and I remember all the artwork falling interlace in my mind, In that moment I reflected on the importance of being away from social media, leaving my phone at home and taking my time to let my mind work slowly though its creative process. 

Design

Will - The whole time throughout the process we've had the final book in mind. Seedlings as a concept needed a small book and I'd imagined it the size of a seed packet. I've also spoken to many artists who hate printing in A sizes (A4, A5, etc). It was you, Sally, who decided to make it a square. It's 148mm squared, small enough, but still with space that say A6 or postcard size won't give you. The poetry I wanted to be letterpressed, and made well. Otherwise I didn't have extremely ambitious plans for it. We aren't very used to the look of letterpress anymore – real printing, rather than digital – so I hoped we could put ink on lead type on a recycled page, and let it speak for itself.

Sally - One of my favourite works was by Josie Hargresves placed on page ‘Foal and his mother’ a sketch from Hackney city farms of a newborn foal, etched onto the back of used oat milk carton. The work like many others marries with the echos of seedlings, slow, sustainable with an observation of overall appreciation for the natural world. we received hundreds of artworks, seeing peoples desire to create and in turn how seedlings had prompted people of all ages to start creating again felt like a beginning of a community and the start of a never-ending story.

We are creating a book inspired by each season. Spring, Summer, Autrum, Winter. Our colour theme also follows this, fresh clovers for spring and a chalk blanket of snow set against a deep blue sky for winter, from the materials our artists use to the elements of the book everything is carefully thought out and cared for.

Print

Will - For me, letterpress now tastes like mint tea. I drank so much over the three weeks it took me to print the poetry in this book. When you're putting lines together in a composing stick like this:

–firstword-secondword,-thirdword-more-words-finalword.––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

(but upside down).

the piece takes on a substance in your hands that's so new (old!) for us digi-kids. The closest friends of these lines in lead would be a longhand journal, a typewritten manuscript or a postcard from a friend. It takes time. More so the adding the spacing (the whitespace) to fit the line out perfectly, once you get fast at picking out the right letters of type from their holes in the case. Over the days, I started listening to music, the longer the better, as three minutes starts to feel very short indeed. I rediscovered audiobooks (words in my hands, words in my ears). By the final week I was six chapters into the Complete Shakespeare performed by an acting company in what felt a very odd sequence– A Midsummer Night's Dream, All's Well, A Lover's Complaint, Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It. It took me over ten hours to realise it was in alphabetical order. 

Towards the end of the print I came back to some pages that for some reason I hadn't finished typesetting. I was listening to Shostakovich's 5th and doing a run of 129 poems, when I realised, only as the last movement began, that this would be my final page. It was in the final brass-breaths of the long cadenza of the very last bars – what ridiculously ostentatious music – that I slid the top corner of the final page into the grip of the Vandercook feed and led it around the cylinder, across the bed. The page was printed. Let it dry, what's next.

Sally - For the art, here we are now printing the photos digitally. It's a long process with lots of little checks of whether the pigment is coming out just right or if it needs some fine tuning.

Will - One final word on printing. Your life takes on the form of a printer. Everything – time, furniture, cooking, conversations, travel plans – seem to fall into these perfectly oriented, reproducible, ritualistic blocks. Streets look different. You compare in your mind the width of cars and the width of lanes (much like A1 to B1 in paper sizes). It's an engineer's view of the world, no space for wobbles that will ruin the inking. Your brain finds ligatures everywhere (letters stuck together to fit, look at that word, fit, the fi is fused). In the evenings after fixing all the wobbles, you decompress. You want to wobble a lot.

Sally - I want people to go into Seedlings with a mentality of slowness... leave your phone at home before you open the rest of the book and find an old oak tree to nestle under for a few hours, take a sketchbook and Seedlings spring with you, along with some snacks and let your mind rest for a moment. Sit with the birds and bees, create, reflect and rethink the fast paced flow of a stressful life, where do us humans belong? Then send us your work and let's create a movement of creativity that feeds the masses in a slow and sustainable way.

Seedlings Spring is a limited edition book, that’s almost sold out on our shop here.