Rain Vol III_No 3

Symbols, Signs and Signets, Ernst Lehner, Dover Pictorial Archives, $3.50 Drawings of Rembrandt, Vol. 1, Dover Art Series, $6.00 More than 1300 graphics-mostly onecolumn size. Japanese crests, watermarks, monsters and imaginary figures, church symbols, astrology, gods and deities. Community Press Features Excellent, of course-300 portraits, landscapes, figure studies of all sizes. Generally on grey background, but many should reproduce well. Cartoonists Guild 156 W. 72nd Street New York, NY 10023 National Cartoonists Society 9 Ebony Court Brooklyn, NY 11229 THE PICTORIAL ARCHIVES SERIES of books put out by Dover Publications, 180 Varick St., New York, NY 10014, is probably our favorite standby graphic source. This unique series of more than 90 books has been specifically designed for the artists, designers and other persons who use pictorial material in their work. When you buy a book in the series, you buy full reproduction rights to material in the book as long as you don't reprint the whole volume. Most of the series are collections of old things which aren't copyrighted anyway, but they have several books of new sketches and photographs which are interesting. Their catalog suggests that much of the material in their artbook series is also suitable for reproduction! It's sometimes hard to tell from the titles whether you'll like what's in the books-it's best to look through some in a bookstore. BEGGED, BORROWED OR STOLEN GRAPHICS from books, magazines or newspapers is the next step up. If you're doing this for your own use, it's probably okay, but if you're printing something publicly and especially if for profit, you're likely to run into problems with copyrights on the materials. This is particularly a problem with cartoons and photographs, .as that's how those people earn their livings and they generally don't like unauthorized use of their material. It's worth a try, though, to ask for permission to use something if you really like it- if you're non-profit the charge is often $10 to $25 for permission to use once. OLD NON-COPYRIGHTED BOOKS are another good source of photographs, etchings, woodcuts and other graphics. Check in the front of the book to see if it is copyrighted. Old books, and many academic reports and journals, are not copyrighted. Interesting photographs can often be found in photographic· archives in libraries, historical societies, museums and maybe your grandmother's attic. You can also take a gamble on books you're pretty sure are "bluffing" their copyright. Obviously the drawings in a book of Rembrant sketches aren't copyrighted-the copyright is often only on the introduction/text and to prevent reproduction of the book as a whole. GETTING GRAPHICS READY FOR PRINTING may involve several different processes. If you clip the graphic out and it's the right size, just attach it to your layout sheets. If it's in a book, we've found that normal xeroxing usually isn't good enough quality for reprinting, but copies made on a Royal copier (and probably other brands designed for reproduction of photographs) are usually okay. Line drawings can be shrunk on the Xerox 7000 and 9200 machines, though the 9200 won't take books. Reduction of other graphics costs more-about $3.00 to have a reduced or enlarged print (PMT) made the size you need, already screened (if necessary) for printing. Some Xerox centers have acetate sheets covered with fine white dots or lines that you can place over a drawing or photo to Xerox-gives a coarse but sometimes interesting ready-to-print copy. It is sad, but perhaps not, that too often we feel dependent upon sources like these rather than being able to let flow our own expressiveness, our own unique sense of what is right here and now that can't be touched by the greatest art of any other time or place-that burning and unquenchable consciousness of now that must pour forth to meld all our changes into a new sense of being. We all need to learn to let that flowboth in ourselves and as a society. Yet it's not really ready today, and for some it will flow better as words than as pictures; as sounds or as movement; as bread, or as smiles or bricks. And always there are so many things we want to do that certain ones have to wait their turns-replaced for now by ways that allow us to put our energy other places, where it's more needed. -Tom Bender

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