#Vale Press

[uwmspeccoll]

Typography Tuesday

This week we present some type and wood-engraved initials from an edition of Alfred Lord Tennyson's Lyric Poems by the Vale Press, printed in London at the Ballantyne Press in an edition of 320 copies in 1900. British artist, illustrator, printer, and book and type designer Charles Ricketts (1866-1931) founded the Vale Press in 1896 and designed three typefaces for the press. The most commonly used typeface was Vale Type, which is used here. Ricketts also used over 100 ornamental initials which he designed and engraved, several of which are shown here. To make the initials, Ricketts would draw the designs in ink, and then would paste a number of designs onto a single sheet. These were then photographed onto a woodblock, engraved by Ricketts, and finally separated when they were electrotyped.

The Art Nouveau-style border design in the first image was designed by Ricketts and engraved in wood by Charles Edward Keats, who began working for Ricketts in 1899. As Ricketts did not own the requisite printing equipment for his enterprise, he established a relationship with the venerable Edinburgh-founded Ballantyne Press, and this edition was printed by Charles John Holmes, who worked for Ballantyne and became the manager for Vale.

This copy of Lyric Poems is another gift from our friend Jerry Buff.

View more posts with work by Charles Ricketts and the Vale Press.

View more Typography Tuesday posts.

[mispelled]

Would you guys hate me if I told you I drew most of this before the poll was over

[ray935sworld]

"That's the room in which your father and I got divorced :)" might be the most rosquez sentence I ever heard in a family court

[moonshynecybin]

why would they do this to bez he looks like he’s narrowly escaped the shire

[bikefuckersoftheworldunite]

Sete Gibernau and Valentino Rossi during a pre event press conference in Catalunya, 2005

+ closeups

[xoxogeorgiegirl]

nothing but myths now | rosquez | rated T | 3.6k

"You need to end it," Uccio says, apropos of nothing, voice crackly over the phone. "He is a distraction, and he will lose you the championship if something does not change.

'What, not even a hello?' he thinks about replying. Vale looks at Marc across in the kitchenette, brushing his teeth and watching out the window, tapping a hand lazily against the countertop as though listening to a song. He says nothing.

[strawbunni-shortcake]

Come get your toxic Uccio/Vale situationship!!

[nerdy-nails]

Welcome to Nightvale set!

Way longer than I normally do, but they turned out cute!

[topnotchquark]

Dirtbag who can fuck X Most dickmatized person in the history of humanity

Thanks @fourelles for finding the picture

[le-chevalier-au-lion]

trying my hand at vale x casey but struggling to come up with scenarios where they don't bite each other's dicks off and then continue with press shenenigans

[carmyprosecco]

saw this insane video of jacob elordi and barry keoghan and my brain went ok but make it ✨rosquez✨

so this happened

[moonshynecybin]

Hi, new to motogp and i’m a sucker for friends to enemies to lovers and relationships drama and pain so obviously i love marc/vale, i am also think marc is fascinating, but I haven’t found much info detailed info vale’s smear campaign against him/his media savvyness/his entire personality, like i think i grasp the bare bones but, are there any tumblr essay that are required reading to you? Also any good posts about this arm injury (aside for the documentary that i will be watching this weekend)

i love arm. ummmm his documentary is pretty much the story. like the central conceit/plot of the whole damn thing is to chart this latest operation on the injury he sustained in jerez 2020 its GONNA give you most of the information on that. now, that being said. marc is a liar sometimes, so i'm gonna try and gather some resources that might give a better idea on where his arm is NOW, because its something he kind of contradicts himself about !

simon patterson interview with The Race podcast: shockingly candid tbh. i think lil homie was having a bit of a crisis. standing on the edge of a cliff facing down possibly the end of his career. what if the move to gresini sucks ass kinda moment. couching his chances this year pretty aggressively. he ALSO says some stuff about how fucked up his arm still is that hes since tried to mildly walk back cuz hes funny. anyways because im insane i transcribed it:

SP: Did you have to switch teams this season? Did you have to change to something that gave you more of a chance to win after the last few years after how difficult everything has been? MM: Yeah, of course if I change teams its because it was something that I need. And yeah, of course it was a risky movement, but at the same time it was a movement thinking on my career, not on results in a short time. Its like thinking if I have the motivation, if I’m competitive again. You know, I had— three years ago, four years ago I had a very big injury, a hard injury in the arm. And yeah, now its working well, but still is not— I mean its the arm that you open four times. If you ask to a doctor, of course its performing in a good way, but its not the same arm. But I have many question marks inside my head. So, the best way to answer to myself is— do what I want. And yeah, its a risky movement. Why? Because the comfortable movement is to stay where I was, with my people, with my friends, with a big salary, the project. But I decided to jump to a new project and at the moment we will see if I can answer the many questions that I have. SP: It sounds like the reason you did it, the questions you have to answer are all for yourself. It's not about– MM: No, no no no– it's just for me. Because for me— I say many times in my interviews— if I don't feel competitive– and competitive doesn't mean win or win, it means be in that top five top six, and yeah five four podiums, five four victories. Win a championship is super difficult. And especially it becomes more and more difficult when the years are passing and the younger [people] are coming. So the life is the life and every athlete has his moment, and then step by step it goes down. But yeah I need to feel again competitive to continue with my career.  Especially these last four years, has been, I mean– has been a nightmare, but is like it has passed super quick. The other years I was competing. I mean in the last four years I’ve completed half the championship, because I had many injuries, so now I need to find this stability, this pace. To start to create again a good base to fight for some races to the top positions— this is my intention. But to fight for the championship? This is something that still I’m not ready for. SP: You said that you learned a lot, during all of this. Is there things that have made you better? Are there things that youre gonna come back now with like new skills because of the experience? MM: No. I will not be better than before. Because– Yeah, maybe I have more experience, but before I was 100% in physical condition, and I was fresh. People say ‘No, he will come back stronger.’ When you have an injury, of course it's— injury is an injury. When you have an injury like two, three years, you lose the rhythm, you lose the feeling sometimes. And then it's super difficult to repeat all those things. But especially because your body— I mean they say the body is super smart, it can adapt. The body is super smart to adapt to new things, but it also is smart to remember what’s going on there. So yeah. I will be different, maybe— but not better.

theres also this similar quote from jan 2023:

theres also this recent statement from mat oxley talking about his arm and his sort of. show no weakness when it can be used against you philosophy

SO. following with that observation. he's started also kinda. being more noncommittal and vague in interviews/presscons now that he senses blood in the water. show no weakness expose no underbelly type stuff. so theres this in preseason which is actually around the same time as the patterson interview where he's still couching it a bit but hes also very adamant that his arm is working:

and then the BIG change comes around mugello this year, when he was fishing HARD for that ducati 2025 seat and changed his tune uh. QUITE a bit:

finally just some posts psychoanalyzing his ass about arm/injury, MOST of which are fairly recent. here, here, here, here, here, and here. ive also aggregated some recs for content good for learning about him in general here! go with god

[batsplat]

seeing the jorge celebrations you posted is so interesting, but besides the gladiator, i didn't even know any of them. dorna and the motorcycle media have been talking valentino's celebrations for years, with stuff like "top 10 valentino rossi celebrations," but they're so indifferent to everyone else's. it's so unfair. thanks for showing me

wait a minute I think melandri said something like this in 2010

obviously jorge himself was a bit of a critic lol

anyway, yeah, of course there is a bit of a disparity, which is in part because dorna knows what will get clicks but is also a bit of a self-perpetuating cycle. I mean, you may have noticed but much of that post was like... me scrounging together screenshots from the actual race footage rather than finding actual nice photos. if you don't show people this stuff, of course they're not gonna decide for themselves whether they're into it or not. it's a shame, because it's kinda also interesting specifically in relation to valentino? like, everyone who was doing celebrations after he '''started'''' it was kinda inevitably in conversation with his approach, and it's an interesting element of his impact on the sport

with jorge specifically, I do think part of it is that it did kinda tail off. you have this 2007 stuff... then you have a few other fun ones like that time he almost killed himself jumping into the water jerez 2010 or the chair in le mans 2010 melandri thought was like, sophisticated subliminal mind games via the colour of the chair. what an incredible sentence to type out. and of course various championship celebrations but... it did change, he still did the lorenzo's land stuff and the jumping on the podium, but it also changed a bit tonally? a little more defiant, not always wanting to give a gift to the fans as much it was rubbing it in their faces. valentino is unique in that he has these kinda staged celebrations over the span of so many years, so you do also have a little bit of an arc there. the way he's changed his approach over those years, when he kinda went back to that over the years and what that meant to him (cf 2003-04) - but then the memorable celebrations post-2006 are really the spontaneous ones (kissing the corkscrew, pointing to the 99, celebrating to the empty jerez grandstands). it's a well he keeps coming back to in one way or the other, but it's hardly a uniform approach. jorge's celebrations tail off way sooner in his career way more sharply - and beyond his actual popularity or lack thereof with the general fanbase at that time, that's probably part of why they haven't stuck in people's minds in the same way

that being said!! yes!! motogp content mills are SO uncreative like!! come on, there's more shit out there!! mine those mills!! or something! let the new fans see jorge jumping over an imaginary rope! also, can I just say, there's two jorge/dovi title fights out there and I bet dorna still has some juicy stuff in their archives the rest of us don't have access to. come on, please, the people are starving

[bikefuckersoftheworldunite]

Qatar MotoGP ends amid controversy

[article published right after Qatar 2004; autotranslated from italian]

There's a blue motorbike leaning against the guard rail, over there, at the penultimate corner. It's a Yamaha, it's full of dust and it's not where it should be, while the desert sun is already setting and Sete Gibernau is flying happily across the finish line of the first Qatar GP. There's a blond boy in the mobile clinic. He's the rider of that grazed motorbike and he's also where he shouldn't be. His left little finger hurts like hell, but it's not that much, even if "when I saw the glove full of blood I was scared". No, the problem is the soul, which is also on fire but much more difficult to cure. It stings because anyone could have won but not Sete Gibernau, and not like this, 25-0 with a built-in mockery and the consequent reopening of a World Championship that seemed already sealed.

Valentino Rossi is there and he is out, very out. From the race and also a little from himself. "They stole it from me, Gibernau's is not a victory" he says in front of TV, notebooks and Arab fans with cameras and 20-kilo Rolexes. Furious and disappointed, the Doctor doesn't speak, he growls: "They can't win in a normal way, so they're holding on to something: Gibernau is the instigator of the operation with his chief mechanic Juan Martinez, someone who became famous thanks to me (he was his suspension technician, editor's note). They snitched like children. I was hoping to have an excuse to not talk to Gibernau anymore. Now I have one".

Later he will say it's a joke, in the meantime he said it. And, while waiting to see if Sete and Vale will really no longer dance together in the discos of Ibiza, we wonder what has taken away the joy of the laughing champion to the point of making him resemble a football president who senses conspiracies and hisses furiously: «This is a dirty trick».

The point, of course, is not the fall that occurred on the 6th lap after a comeback that was a demonstration of pure class: «I was already fourth but I relaxed for a moment, I hit the kerb and I fell». Ugly to see: the Phenomenon crawls to get off the track, then walks in the gravel with his head in his hands. «I made a mistake, yes, but it wouldn't have happened if I had started in front». And here we come to the point, the painful one.

Yes, because Rossi didn't start 8th, as per official tests, but 23rd. Blame it on a penalty following a complaint signed by Hrc, his former team, which reported his maneuver the night before, strictly according to the rules (article 3.3.1.2, "unsporting action"), terrible: his mechanics cleaned and rubberized the dirty and slippery asphalt of his starting position with a scooter. The move did not escape Gibernau or the other teams, who in the morning decided on the legal move, signed by Carlo Fiorani, Honda team manager and old friend of Vale, and supported by the Honda Gresini team (of Gibernau) and Ducati. Among the witnesses, also Martinez, the one who broke through thanks to the Doctor.

Result: 6 seconds more than Rossi on the qualifying time, enough to relegate him to last place. But for the punished "the penalty is a farce", and not only because "the rules are so clear that they could have put me up against a pole and whipped me..."

The issue, according to Rossi, is that basically «everyone usually goes to clean the box when the circuit is dirty. It also happened in Rio and on Friday when I saw Biaggi's mechanics cleaning his I thought: great idea». Yamaha, in truth, responded with a complaint against Biaggi, who was also penalised and forced to start behind Vale. In any case, the Doctor has another explanation: «I didn't know anything about it and when I saw the box I thought someone had put paint on it to boycott us. Instead my mechanics explained to me that they had marked the box so that I could go through it during the warm up and clean it. A carelessness, but it's an old trick they did with Doohan...». This time it didn't work and the complainants, who were just waiting for it, were relentless in punishing a naivety that a high-level team shouldn't commit.

So, the bitter moral of one of the worst “Rossian” weekends ever is that motorcycling, like the seasons, “is no longer what it used to be and there are no longer riders with balls. Now I will try to take back what they stole from me.” The boy says it with an anger that doesn’t seem like him. But on certain days, when night falls and only your own and other people’s mistakes remain, and then revenge and regrets, there is nothing to laugh about. Not even if you are Valentino Rossi.

[victorluvsalice]

Oh hey, remember when I wrote that story about Alice becoming the Malkavian Fledgling in Vampire: the Masquerade -- Bloodlines and doing all the Santa Monica missions in her snarky, snarky way?

Here's the first chapter of the sequel. :p Enjoy!

[strawbunni-shortcake]

i love how much nick harris loves to wax poetically about seeing valentino for the first time and thinking he was a young girl