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The sea thine enemy by edwinm

The subject of the booklet is death. Death, loss and absence. Each page describing the death of someone in the town where I grew up (a small Welsh town, hence the title). Some of the people I knew, some of the people I was close to but others I was only made aware of as they became characters in playground stories; ‘Hear about H? Topped himself with a shotgun’. This would be followed by the miming of placing a gun barrel in your mouth.

The booklet proved a hit with my old school friends, every now and then I would be told about another more recent death or someone I had missed out of the original text.

For years I have wanted to remake the work. I wanted to hone some of the language and include some images. In my head it became a book, hard-back, printed on heavy art paper with beautiful typography and accompanied by photographs of the various spots that these people died but somehow the thought of printing a book (which inevitably incurs cost and thus the necessity to recoup that cost by selling it) just seemed wrong.

So I have decided on a series of framed prints. Each print a page of the work, including a photograph which I went back to Wales to take. The print includes various printer marks which somehow seem to me to leave the work in some sort of ambiguous state, documents of a text ready to be published but instead hanging on a wall behind glass.

Recreating the work led me down a an unexpected path, that of the arcane world of Josef Müller-Brockmann’s typographical grid system. I have always been attracted to minimalism in art but have been blissfully unaware that the process of minimal graphic design has its own set of ‘rules’ created (or defined) by Müller-Brockmann. When typesetting the original green green grass booklet I did everything by eye, moving a letter a few pixels to the left etc until everything just felt ‘right’. Little did I know that a process exists that I could have followed to achieve the perfection that I was looking for.

I then discovered the calculations of Marcus Gärde who handily put on the internet fairly easy to follow guidelines about how to create a guideline grid in Adobe’s inDesign that matches your chosen paper and font size. I spent a few evenings following the instructions, laying out the various elements on to the underlying grid but I just couldn’t help myself shifting things about a fraction at a time. I guess I still have the habits of someone taught by that generation of the 60s and 70s where instinct is preferred to any sort of system of rules.