Crawhall Broadsides

Assignment for February 17: Historical Broadsides

For next week’s class, write, design, and construct a broadside along the lines of those collected in Charles Hindley’s Curiosities of Street Literature. Spend some time browsing through Hindley’s selection. Your broadside will have essentially three units from top down: 1) Title/Image, 2) Text, 3) Colophon. To unify the design of the broadsides, only use images from the publications of Joseph Crawhall in the title/image or header portion of your broadside. Three Crawhall titles have been added to the online reading list on the blog. You can base your own drawings on Crawhall’s designs (curiously, he called them sculptures), or you can appropriate them directly via screen-grabs (essentially clip-art). Yes, you can cut, splice, mash-up, whatever you want to call it. The text will be the most fun and probably the most difficult to write. You can also cut, splice, mash-up texts from the broadsides we’ve been studying, but you can also write your own text of your own choosing (and it doesn’t have to be fake-antique).We will cut and paste these much in the same manner we made our chapbooks last class period, and we’ll print them on light card-stock (11x17) in an edition of 20 on the Xerox machine. Anyone wishing to make a historical broadside in a different manner, screen or letterpress for example, is free to do so, but remember that you’ll need to make an edition of 20.

Questions: csmith@corcoran.org