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Monthly Archives: May 2021

From DA 88: The David B. Milne Playing Card Project

Posted on May 31, 2021 by Devil's Artisan

One of the fascinating articles in the latest issue of the Devil’s Artisan dives into a rather non-traditional project taken on by Canadian painter David B. Milne in the early 1940s. Milne became fascinated by the history of playing cards and created a series of watercolours featuring the characters we normally see on face cards–kings, queens and knaves/jacks. These watercolours were later used to create actual decks of playing cards in 1973 by Stan Bevington and David Silcox. Continue reading →

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The Devil's Artisan is remarkable in Canadian publishing in that most of the physical production of our journal is completed in-house at the shop on the Main Street of Erin Village. We print on a twenty-five inch Heidelberg KORD, typically onto acid-free Zephyr Antique laid. The sheets are then folded, and sewn into signatures on a 1907 model Smyth National Book Sewing machine.

To take a virtual tour of the pressroom, visit us at YouTube for a discussion of offset printing in general, and the operation of a Heidelberg KORD in particular. Other videos include Four Colour Printing, Smyth Sewing and Wood Engraving. Photographs of production machinery used on these pages were taken by Sandra Traversy on site at the printing office of the Porcupine's Quill, December 2008.

The Devil's Artisan would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Magazine Fund (CMF) through the Support for Arts and Literary Magazines (SALM) component toward our editorial and production costs. Thanks, as well, for the generosity of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Sleeman Brewing Company.