Description
About this piece:
This one-of-a-kind artist book started out as my fourth 100 Day Project on Instagram. For 100 days in the spring of 2025, I posted ampersands that I had printed in the Baylor Book Arts & Letterpress Lab. Each was printed on an 1870 Washington style handpress on a scrap paper circle measuring 2.5 inches in diameter. These beautiful characters grew more and more captivating as the pile of printed circles increased, and it was a daily creative practice through which I became more familiar with our ever-growing collection of type. I then built the flag book structure, onto which I attached each of the circles — the circles are not adhered to each other, allowing the reader to investigate the reverse sides where I have handwritten the sizes and typefaces of each of the ampersands.
Materials:
ink, paper
About the artist:
Jeanne Dittmann currently lives and works in Central Texas. She has loved letters all of her life. Self-taught from a young age, she began studying calligraphy seriously once her formal education was complete. A couple of years ago, she found herself working in an academic library where her colleague Sha Towers had, years earlier, started building the Baylor Book Arts Collection. In 2024, Sha was inspired and empowered to build the Baylor Book Arts & Letterpress Lab, a creative instructional space in the library where the book arts could be taught and studied and handled and explored and written and printed. Jeanne was asked to serve as the coordinator of the lab, where she is learning the art of letterpress printing while also teaching it. The daily hands-on creative instruction in a space full of beautiful letters and historic presses is a dream come true, and the response from the campus community has been overwhelming.
