Prior to the WSJ Hedcut, Inceptive View

Long before I went to work for The Wall Street Journal, I was a student at Tyler School of Art, in Philadelphia. Prior to the WSJ Hedcut, Inceptive View was the name of a project I created for Typography class. It was Junior year for me, and my close friend, Mick Tuccillo, agreed to write some verses...Here, I present the original collection of poems and illustrations, as typeset, designed and printed by me on the school's letterpress printing press...Mick was ahead of me a bit in literacy -- I had not run into the word 'inceptive' before! It means beginning or initial. I had to set all type by hand, meaning the arrangement of tiny pieces of metal with letters chiselled on their faces. Hours of fun! This cover was printed on grey paper that was carefully folded to create a portfolio to hold the printed pages within.Contents/Title page. The left and bottom edges were folded together to hold the pages. The right side enabled the reader to remove and view the collection.Page one was a dedication to author C.S. Lewis, who bore a heavy burden on us back in those days! Note the deckled edge of the page. I had to plan for that!A self-portrait. You can see that I was drawing with the stippling technique pretty early on, later to open my way into WSJ repute! The printing plate used to produce this page is a bit tarnished today...I will return next week with the rest of this collection of art and poetry... stay tuned!