Manhattan Fine Press Book Fair

A great pitch by my friend Russell Maret:

Podcast: David Esslemont on the history of the Gregynog and Solmentes Presses

Gregynog Hall

Nigel Beale aka The Literary Tourist, came to visit and recorded our conversation in which he asked me about the history of the Gregynog Press, my time there as the Controller (artistic and managing director, and printer) of Gwasg Gregynog from 1985–97, and the evolution of Solmentes Press. Listen to the podcast at The Biblio File (link below).

Waxing lyrical about the the press's setting amidst the rolling hills of Montgomeryshire, I talk about its founders, the wealthy Davies sisters, some of the key players such as Blair Hughes-Stanton (coincidentally one of my tutors at the Central School of Art), and some of the outstanding books produced there up to 1945, when the press closed.

Encouraged by John Ryder and Ian Mortimer, among others, I joined the press from Newcastle upon Tyne where I had been printing and publishing since 1978. It was a significant move, I learnt to speak Welsh, and delighted in the literary and artistic traditions of Wales. Over the course of 12 years I was able to re-open the bindery, re-install hot metal typesetting and Heidelberg cylinder presses, and grow the operation substantially. I enjoyed the opportunity of working with some of Wales' leading literary figures and commissioned many wood engravers to illustrate a wide range of subjects. My favorite book of those I designed and printed was Wrenching Times: Poems from Drum-Taps by Walt Whitman. It was illustrated by Gaylord Schanilec an engraver I met on my first visit to New York in 1990.

Leaving Gregynog was a painful affair. For example, at one point I was ridiculed (by a political scientist nonetheless) for embracing a vision for the future of the press – an account of my time there has yet to be published. Nevertheless, I began to make books again and achieved a noticeable success with The Wood Engravings of David Gentleman. This led to Inside the Book and the birth of the Solmentes Press; the seminal Ink on the Elbow (another collaboration with Schanilec), and my move to the United States. The conversation concludes with some enthusiastic talk about food – I had just published Chili: a recipe – and was wondering what to publish next, would it be curry or pizza? [Recorded in December 2013]

Many thanks to Nigel Beale for hosting this conversation on his Biblio File podcast.

Englishman makes pizza from scratch and sells recipe for $$$$

It all began with a dream of establishing a self-sufficient “Pizza Farm” business. 

Decorah, IA – Artist David Esslemont dreamt of establishing a “Pizza Farm”. He grew wheat and tomatoes and built a clay oven – but it just wasn’t feasible. However, he had another idea: a limited edition hand-printed book.

Pizza from Scratch, a visual narrative in woodcuts and linocuts, tells the story of how he literally grew a pizza on his farm in Iowa. With orders from distinguished institutions such as the Library of Congress and the British Library the book promises to be quite a success, and with copies selling for up to $4,800, it will help pay the heating bills this winter.

Weeds, fire, cultivating, seeds, seedlings, broadcasting, harrowing, harvesting, threshing and construction details are all depicted together with a diagram proving Pythagoras's theorem (used to make a right angle when laying out the foundation for the walls).

Esslemont grows the oven from scratch. Cement block walls support a reinforced concrete plinth and a layer of firebricks. He then makes adobe bricks with clay dug from his farm, and forms the oven around a mound of sand. After adding a layer of insulation, more clay bricks, a chimney, and a roof, it's ready to fire up.

As the oven takes shape, the artist appears in a number of self-portraits that reveal his growing obsession with the project. The book concludes with instructions for making the dough, cheese, and tomato sauce and cooking the pizza.

Finally, there is an extraordinary multi-color print of a pepperoni pizza.

Pizza from Scratch is published by Solmentes Press in a limited edition of 40 copies, 10.5 x 15 inches, landscape, 68pp. Thirty-six images together with a separate plan, printed from the original blocks. Five deluxe copies bound in white alum-tawed goatskin – $4,800, and thirty-five copies in cloth-covered boards – $2,400.

Full details and images on solmentes.com
Read the story behind the book here

Bio
David Esslemont is an artist, designer, printmaker and bookbinder who makes books from scratch, most recently about food, and published under his Solmentes Press imprint. He was Artistic Director of the University of Wales Gregynog Press from 1985–97 and has won many book design awards including the Felice Feliciano International Award in 1991. Esslemont’s work can be found in both private and public collections worldwide. (His archive to 2005 is held at the University of Iowa.)

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Contact David Esslemont 563 419 8882 david (at) solmentes.com
Solmentes Press, 1990 Fox Hollow Road, Decorah, IA 52101

Pizza from Scratch – The story of a visual narrative

I have an interest in food – okay it’s a passion – actually it’s an obsession: I am obsessed with food and cooking, today it's pizza cooked from scratch in a wood-fired oven. Some of my earliest memories of cooking date back to when I was a Boy Scout: delicious, smoky, crispy outside, soft inside “benders and twisters” – simple wheat flour dough balls stretched around a stick, cooked over a campfire.

Later, travels in Italy and the revelation that the Holy Trinity was in fact garlic, tomatoes and olive oil, and the best pizzas where cooked in wood-fired ovens, helped fuel this passion for cooking that become an obsession.

I want to know where my food has come from. If the food is processed, what are the ingredients and where did they come from? How were they grown/raised? I want to taste natural flavors, not chemicals; naturally ripened tomatoes, not bland, anemic imposters – I don’t want to worry about pesticide or herbicide residues. So, I grow fruit and vegetables following organic methods, and preserve as much as possible.

In the first year after moving to Iowa we raised over a hundred tomato plants from seed, all heirloom varieties from Seedsavers Exchange (conveniently located just a couple of miles away). Before long we were supplying Seedsavers with seed. We grew peppers and cucurbits and learned what it felt like to be a peasant – my mother’s comment was, “well it’s in your blood you know!” But I am not a farmer, I’m an artist who makes books.

The garlic and basil thrived and I learned the rituals of canning – processing hundreds of pounds of tomatoes and other produce and preserving them in glass jars. This gave me the idea that I could grow all the toppings for pizzas and make and sell them, say, once a week.

Pizza farms are not uncommon in the Midwest and my main inspiration was Robbie Bannen and Ted Fisher’s AtoZ Bakery in Wisconsin that hosts a now famous "Tuesday Night Pizza" on their farm. I considered the feasibility of a pizza operation at our farm.

Learning the art of the Pizzaiolo

In July 2011 I built a wood-fired oven and began making pizzas, little knowing how the project would evolve. I dug clay from a corner of a field and mixed it with sand to form Adobe bricks; then built a dome-shaped oven on a plinth constructed from heavy oak beams left over from our barn resizing. The hearth was made with reclaimed firebricks from a demolished school. Just days later we hosted a pizza party and cooked over a dozen pizzas – learning “on the job” the art of the pizzaiolo –forming the dough, preparing and applying judicious amounts of toppings and cooking at high temperatures in a wood-fired oven.

There is something magical about the wood-fired oven: the rolling flames, searing heat and tantalizing aromas are quixotic. If you’ve grown the ingredients, and harvested the tomatoes and basil that afternoon – the flavors will be out of this world.

Disaster strikes

On Saturday, May 12, 2012, the firebrick hearth was unusually hot and I noticed the 8 x 8-inch oak beam at the mouth of the oven was smoldering, again. The pizzas were unremarkable and the base of the crust, burnt.

The next morning, our son Tom ran into the kitchen: “the pizza oven has collapsed, it’s burning!” He was right . . . my pride and joy was reduced to a heap of white-hot burning oak beams among which lay the hearth of recycled firebricks, topped by sherds of the shattered hard-baked adobe clay dome from which jutted the chimney flanked by the tin roof. Thank goodness I didn’t build it near the house. I was devastated.

Breaking ground for a new oven

In May 2014 I burned a field of weeds to clear it ready for planting spring wheat, and dug the foundations for another pizza oven. Cement block walls would support a reinforced concrete plinth, an insulated bed of new firebricks and the clay oven. As I documented its construction and the emerging wheat and tomato seedlings I conceived the idea for a new book.

Pizza from Scratch: the story of how I literally grew a pizza on the farm in rural Iowa. Wholly embracing the farm-to-table movement, I grow hard red wheat and Amish Paste heirloom tomatoes; design and build an adobe clay wood-fired oven (scale plans included); give instructions on how to make the dough, tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese; fire up the oven, assemble the pizza and cook it, in less than three minutes.

Following the success of my book Chili: a recipe this new book would also be a visual narrative in woodcuts and linocuts. My first image was a series of woodcuts, that together formed a panel six feet long, the subject: weeds. In due course this was reduced to just one page, fifteen inches wide and I settled on a landscape format chiefly to accommodate the subsequent twenty-four inch wide print of burning weeds as a double-page spread.

I made thumbnail sketches for a storyboard, and began detailed studies and drawings from life and from photographs documenting the construction of the oven and the progress of the wheat and tomatoes. Then I began cutting blocks. [see blog post Pizza from Scratch – Part 2]

As a bookbinder, I approach book design with the book’s final structure in mind and the best construction is a sewn gathering of folded sheets with the grain direction of the paper running parallel with the spine. I wanted most of the images to “bleed off” the trimmed page. Consequently the sheet size had to allow for a substantial margin around the prints (to hold the paper in place while printing) and was thirty-four inches long by fifteen inches high. This required a cunning set-up on the Ostrander Seymour “Extra Heavy” iron hand press as its platen is only twenty by seventeen inches and demanded extra care when handling such a large sheet.

Printing began in April 2017 and continued into June. While some images are just black and white, others are complex multi colour prints from three blocks that were cut and printed several times (reduction cutting). Printing fifty copies yielded an edition of forty books. All told I pulled 5,600 prints, not counting proofing and set up. The larger prints required double pulls and the more solid images were “hard pulls” that required an extension tube on the bar!

Binding

With the sorting, folding, gathering and collating I was able to clear some bench space in the workshop as the books were consolidated into three small piles. The book is offered in two variant bindings a “regular “ case binding and a “deluxe” full leather binding. Both bindings involve sewing by hand and each is presented in cloth-covered drop back box with the title printed on the spine and lid. Inserted into an envelope on the inside of the lid is a large folded print of the scale drawings for the oven.

I am pleased to report that “regular” Pizzas have been shipped to collectors in the US and the UK and I am particularly proud that both the British Library and the Library of Congress now have their copies. The deluxe bindings are almost finished.

Where to see Pizza from Scratch

A travelling exhibition is planned together with presentations and demonstrations and the book will be shown at book fairs in 2018 including the Manhattan Fine Press fair and the Oxford Fine Press Fair in March, and at the Oak Knoll Fest in Newcastle, Delaware in October. Full details of the book and all the images can be seen at solmentes.com

There is something magical about cooking in a wood-fired oven: the rolling flames, searing heat and tantalizing aromas are quixotic. If you’ve grown the ingredients, and harvested the tomatoes and basil that afternoon – the flavors will be out of this world.”

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