Book du jour - letterpress progress

The plan was to have the text appearing, like a spreading stain or a puddle - but from where, the middle or the top or...? On re-reading the text I found the word "seeped" right near the end so that solved the problem. 

Working it out roughly on the computer, totally disregarding the line breaks in the typeset version -

Getting to grips with it on galley -

I printed onto tracing paper, so that when the pages were turned the back of the page would look like the way the type had been set - the letter on the bottom with the "top" as a shadow on the previous page -

 At the last session I discovered the lack of As and Es -- and indeed no more in Times 18pt could be found, even in the repository of undistributed type, left by students as far back as 2009. It was "an education" to try to find "my" letters among the many trays of abandonned projects. I needed 10 Es and 5 As, and to get round this shortfall am using italic, which means entire words, higher up in the text, have been made italic. I think it will look horrible and it's not what I wanted with the text, but hey, this is the learning phase! I shall persevere and see what comes of it, and what emerges in terms of doing it better next time.

What, though, happened when I set the second line ... what rogue word slipped in (or got left out of the text I worked with on screen, copied from the electronic file of Mary Ruefle's text)? Next letterpress session is Thursday, but I might have to drop in earlier and have a look.

Another technical problem - I managed to get the lines packed out so they stay (quite) tight - it really shows with the flat surfaces of the "words" - but the bottom lines are looking very uneven. When you start learning something, there's SO much to pay attention to!

The text is about erasure, but for the transparent pages to work, the opposite process is happening - instead of disappearing, the words are appearing. Could this be called "de-erasure" ... hmm, derasure (d-erasure? d'erasure?) - interestingly, deradere is the Latin for to smooth, to rub off, wipe - we are going in circles...