A night of printmaking at the kitchen table, in honour of the Londoners who drew the news before anyone could photograph it
I Carved a Headline Into a Piece of Lino and Most of My Thumb
I am typing this with nine fingers. The tenth is wrapped in a plaster, a second plaster and a strip of kitchen roll held on with masking tape, because at about half past nine this evening I pushed a V-shaped gouge through a sheet of lino, off the far edge and into the base of my left thumb. Every printmaker does it once. The rule is to keep the hand that is not cutting behind the blade. I know the rule. I have told the rule to other people.
It was worth it. Drying on the clothes airer over the bath, pegged up between my socks, are fourteen prints of a newspaper headline, in black ink, slightly wonky, made entirely by me. I feel like a small Victorian factory.
Who I Am and Why I Was Holding a Gouge
For the benefit of this diary: I am twenty-two, I came to London from Carmarthenshire to read history and never went home, and I make things. Every day. I always have. Knitting, embroidery, printing, mending, the odd disastrous pot. My flat is ninety per cent wool by volume. My flatmate has learned to check a chair before she sits on it.
To pay for the wool, I write for The London Prat, a comic newspaper that has been printing straight-faced untruths since 1961. I do three days a week on the desk. And lately the two halves of my life have started leaking into each other, which is how I came to be carving one of our headlines into a floor covering.
A Very Short History of Drawing the News
It began with a seminar I half remembered. Long before there were photographs, or newspapers anyone could afford, Londoners got their politics from prints. Single sheets, engraved on copper, run off by the hundred and sold in shops.
The father of it was William Hogarth. He was born near Smithfield in 1697, apprenticed to a silver engraver, and worked out that if he drew stories about modern London life and sold the engravings cheaply, he could reach people who would never buy a painting. His most famous pair came out in 1751. One shows a street of fat, cheerful people drinking beer. The other, set in the slums near where Centre Point is now, shows a street destroyed by cheap gin: a drunken mother letting her baby fall from her arms, a pawnbroker doing brisk trade, a man gnawing a bone with a dog. It was propaganda for a new law to control gin, and it worked. The law passed that year.
He was so widely pirated that he got Parliament to pass a copyright act for engravers, which people still call by his name. You can visit his country house in Chiswick, Hogarth’s House, wedged beside a roundabout that bears his name, which he would have drawn with relish.
The Shop Window
Then, a generation on, James Gillray, who was crueller, funnier and probably a little mad. He lived above a print shop in St James’s kept by a woman called Hannah Humphrey, and each time he finished a new plate it went in her window. Crowds blocked the pavement. He drew the King as a miserly farmer, the Prince of Wales as a bloated glutton picking his teeth with a fork, the Prime Minister as a beanpole. The politicians he drew sent their servants round to buy copies.
That shop window was the front page of its day. The V&A and the British Museum hold thousands of these prints, and I have spent whole afternoons in front of them. What gets me is how they were made. Every line cut backwards, by hand, into metal. If you wanted to be rude about the government in 1790, you needed a steady wrist and a week.
Lino, Which Is Flooring
I cannot afford copper. What I can afford is lino, which is the poor relation and has a nice history of its own. Linoleum was patented in the 1860s by an Englishman as a hard-wearing floor covering, made of linseed oil and cork dust pressed onto canvas. For decades it was just what you had in the kitchen.
Then artists noticed that it was cheap, soft and had no grain, so you could cut it in any direction. In the 1920s and thirties a school in Pimlico taught a whole generation to make bold colour prints with it: Tube escalators, speedway riders, rowers, all swirl and speed. They wanted art that ordinary people could own for a few shillings. I have a postcard of one above my desk.
So the method is this. You draw your design on the block. You cut away everything you want to stay white. What is left standing takes the ink. You roll ink on, lay paper over it, rub the back with a wooden spoon and peel. And it comes out in reverse, so any lettering has to be drawn back to front.
Guess What I Forgot
I chose a headline of ours from last week, eight words about the rent, set in big capitals with a little drawing of a house underneath. I traced it. I cut for two hours, tongue between my teeth, lino crumbs all over the table. I inked it up, feeling terribly pleased, laid the paper, rubbed with the spoon and peeled.
It was a mirror image. Every letter backwards. I had drawn it the right way round on the block like a child.
My flatmate came in at that moment, looked at the print, looked at me and said, is it in Welsh? I said a word in Welsh.
So I did the whole thing again on the other side of the block, properly reversed this time, by holding my tracing up to the window. That was when I was tired, and that was when the gouge slipped. I finished it with my thumb in my mouth.
What I Learned From Doing It Slowly
Here is the thing I did not expect. Cutting a headline letter by letter, backwards, makes you weigh every word. On a screen I can type eight words in four seconds and never think about them again. In lino, each letter costs ten minutes and a certain amount of blood. By the third word I was asking myself whether it deserved to be there.
It turned out two of the eight did not. The headline was better at six. I cut six.
My editor says a headline should have nothing in it that the joke can do without. The paper’s essay on what satirical commentary is, and what it is not puts it more grandly, but it comes to the same thing: say the true thing plainly and get out. Hogarth did not have room for a subordinate clause. Neither does a lino block.
I also understood, in my shoulders, why those old prints hit so hard. If it takes you a week to make one image, you choose your target with care. Nobody spent seven days engraving a joke about someone who did not matter. The page on the British Onion tradition traces the line from those print shops to papers like ours, and I had read it and nodded. Tonight I felt it in my wrist.
The Run
Fourteen good pulls and five duds, where the ink was patchy or the paper slipped. Each one is a bit different. On one the house has come out with a faint thumbprint in the corner, in red, which is not ink.
I am taking them into the office tomorrow. The editor does not know. I am going to pin one above the kettle and see how long it takes anyone to notice that the paper has, for the first time in its history, been printed by hand in a bath. If she likes it, I have an idea: one headline a month, cut and printed properly, in an edition of fifty, sold to readers. A shop window, in other words. I shall look at the guide on how to run a satirical website to see what it says about merchandise, and then ignore it.
The headline itself is already on the London satirical news page, the right way round, for anyone who prefers their reading without a mirror.
My thumb is throbbing in time with my pulse. The bath is out of use until Thursday. This diary lives at Comedywriter.vip, and the things I make out of words are over here.