A wayzgoose (or wayz-goose, waygoose or wayzegoose) was at one time an entertainment given by a master printer to his workmen each year on or about St Bartholomew's Day (24 August). It marked the traditional end of summer and the start of the season of working by candlelight. Later, the word came to refer to an annual outing and dinner for the staff of a printing works or the printers on a newspaper.
In modern times, the tradition has been adopted by large publishing and educational sales companies in the United States.[ citation needed ]
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The derivation of the term is doubtful. It may be a misspelling for "waysgoose", from wase, Middle English for "sheaf", thus meaning "sheaf" or "harvest goose", a bird eaten at harvest-time, cf. the "stubble-goose" mentioned by Chaucer in The Cook's Prologue. [1]
The most likely origin is the word "Weg(s)huis", which was current in early Modern Dutch.[ citation needed ] This word (literally, "way house") was one of several words meaning the English "inn" and was figuratively used for "a banquet". The Low Country origin of the word "wayzgoose" has never seriously been disputed by etymologists, seeing that much early chapel terminology was borrowed from Low Country printers by their English apprentices (and later journeymen). The variety of spellings and pronunciations (including with and without the "z") indicate that it is an orally-borrowed Dutch word that fit somewhat uneasily in the mouth of English speakers.[ citation needed ]
Another plausible origin is a more general word for a merry making or feast, reputedly referring to the grand goose-feast annually held at Waes, in Brabant, at Martinmas. [1] However that is pronounced quite differently, as "Waas". It apparently means "cloud-veil" in Dutch: also there are no places called Waes or Waas in Brabant, but there are several places with "Waes" in their name in East Flanders.[ citation needed ]
Relations between England and the Low Countries were often very close, and it is plausible that such entertainments might have grown to be called colloquially a "Waes-Goose". [1] It is not clear why the term should have survived later in the printing trade. Certainly the goose has long ago parted company with the printers' wayzgoose, which was usually held in July, [2] though it had no fixed season. [1] A keepsake was often printed to commemorate the occasion. It could be printed ahead of time, or the printing could form part of the evening's activities.[ citation needed ]
Some bookbinders believe that Wayzgoose was held on St Bartholomew's Day because he was the patron saint of leather workers. It was no coincidence that on 24 August 1456 the printing of the Gutenberg Bible was completed, perhaps triggering the very first wayzgoose party at Fust–Schöffer shop in Mainz.[ citation needed ]
The holiday, a break in printing, was traditionally also the day that paper makers took a break from making paper for the printers, and used up the last of the pulp to make paper for windows, waxed paper being the traditional window material for the yeoman class before the use of glass became more widespread, and after this was done, the pulp vats would be cleaned out for the new fiber, made from rags collected in the spring, and retted (prepared by rotting) over the summer.[ citation needed ]
The paper windows were fitted on St. Martin's Day (11 November). Just as the saint had supposedly cut his cloak in half to share with a beggar during a snowstorm, so yeoman farmers would give off cuts of the windows to the poor, to help them keep warm during the coming winter.[ citation needed ]
Parchment was the original medieval material for keeping northern homes warm for those who could not afford glass for the windows. The patron saint of parchment makers was also St Bartholomew. With paper replacing parchment, the name of the traditional Martinmas party, the Wayzgoose, might have been transferred to both paper makers' and printers' parties.[ citation needed ]
Since 1979, the Grimsby, Ontario Public Art Gallery has held its annual Wayzgoose festival showing handmade books and paper arts and demonstrating their technologies. The festival occurs on the last Saturday in April. [3] [4] [5] The wayzgoose is held in the Grimsby Art Gallery. [6] The town produces a limited edition anthology showing samples of the work by private presses and celebrating print media and book arts across Canada and internationally. In addition to publishers with displays at the fair, the anthology includes the work of private presses that cannot come to Grimsby for the event. The usual edition is 115 copies. [7] To celebrate its 35th anniversary, the gallery published a two-volume anthology in an edition of 135 copies.
For almost 20 years the Letterpress Guild of New England has met in late September for their annual Wayzgoose.
In 2009, Coach House Books, an independent Canadian press, began hosting an annual Wayzgoose Party, in celebration of buying the building which they had rented since 1965.[ citation needed ]
The University of California, Irvine's student government (ASUCI) hosts a medieval fair called Wayzgoose every April for an open house event known as Celebrate UCI. [8]
Minnesota Center for Book Arts, a contemporary art center preserving traditional printing and bookmaking crafts, celebrates an annual Wayzgoose in appreciation of its donors and members.
Tacoma, Washington holds an annual Wayzgoose event dubbed a "printer's celebration". This event, which includes a large-scale relief printing project using a steamroller, is designed to get the community interested and involved in the art of printmaking. [9] The School of Visual Concepts in Seattle, Washington also celebrates an annual Wayzgoose festival which includes a "Steamroller Smackdown" competition. [10]
The Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum [11] in Two Rivers, Wisconsin holds a Wayzgoose in November. The event is a multi-day conference with presentations and workshops by letterpress printers and historians. [12]
The Museum of Printing (in Armidale, New South Wales, Australia) held its first Wimble's Wayzgoose on 28–30 April 2017. [13] It is named after the FT Wimble & Co. Collection which is housed at the museum.
The Ann Arbor District Library in Ann Arbor, MI hosted their inaugural [14] Wayzgoose & Printing Festival in 2018. It is now an annual event with lectures, exhibits, vendors, learning workshops, and a tour around town.
Wharfedale Wayzgoose is the name of a Border Morris side (team of Morris dancers) [15] from Otley, West Yorkshire, a town renowned for the development of the Wharfedale printing press. [16]
In 1928, South African poet Roy Campbell wrote a satirical poem, The Wayzgoose, about racism in South Africa.
In 1978 a children's sketch comedy TV show entitled Wayzgoose was produced and screened for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The series ran for about ten half-hour episodes.
The codex was the historical ancestor format of the modern book. Technically the vast majority of modern books use the codex format of a stack of pages bound at one edge, along the side of the text. But the term "codex" is now reserved for older manuscript books, which mostly used sheets of vellum, parchment, or papyrus, rather than paper.
Lithography is a planographic method of printing originally based on the immiscibility of oil and water. The printing is from a stone or a metal plate with a smooth surface. It was invented in 1796 by the German author and actor Alois Senefelder and was initially used mostly for musical scores and maps. Lithography can be used to print text or images onto paper or other suitable material. A lithograph is something printed by lithography, but this term is only used for fine art prints and some other, mostly older, types of printed matter, not for those made by modern commercial lithography.
Parchment is a writing material made from specially prepared untanned skins of animals—primarily sheep, calves, and goats. It has been used as a writing medium for over two millennia. Vellum is a finer quality parchment made from the skins of young animals such as lambs and young calves. The generic term animal membrane is sometimes used by libraries and museums that wish to avoid distinguishing between parchment and vellum.
Vellum is prepared animal skin or membrane, typically used as writing material. It is often distinguished from parchment, either by being made from calfskin, or simply by being of a higher quality. Vellum is prepared for writing and printing on single pages, scrolls, and codices (books).
Printmaking is the process of creating artworks by printing, normally on paper, but also on fabric, wood, metal, and other surfaces. "Traditional printmaking" normally covers only the process of creating prints using a hand processed technique, rather than a photographic reproduction of a visual artwork which would be printed using an electronic machine ; however, there is some cross-over between traditional and digital printmaking, including risograph.
Daisy wheel printing is an impact printing technology invented in 1970 by Andrew Gabor at Diablo Data Systems. It uses interchangeable pre-formed type elements, each with typically 96 glyphs, to generate high-quality output comparable to premium typewriters such as the IBM Selectric, but two to three times faster. Daisy wheel printing was used in electronic typewriters, word processors and computers from 1972. The daisy wheel is so named because of its resemblance to the daisy flower.
Papermaking is the manufacture of paper and cardboard, which are used widely for printing, writing, and packaging, among many other purposes. Today almost all paper is made using industrial machinery, while handmade paper survives as a specialized craft and a medium for artistic expression.
Otley is a market town and civil parish at a bridging point on the River Wharfe, in the City of Leeds metropolitan borough in West Yorkshire, England. Historically a part of the West Riding of Yorkshire, the population was 13,668 at the 2011 census. It is in two parts: south of the river is the historic town of Otley and to the north is Newall, which was formerly a separate township. The town is in lower Wharfedale on the A660 road which connects it to Leeds.
Dots per inch is a measure of spatial printing, video or image scanner dot density, in particular the number of individual dots that can be placed in a line within the span of 1 inch (2.54 cm). Similarly, dots per centimetre refers to the number of individual dots that can be placed within a line of 1 centimetre (0.394 in).
Giclée describes digital prints intended as fine art and produced by inkjet printers. The term is a neologism, ultimately derived from the French word gicleur, coined in 1991 by printmaker Jack Duganne. The name was originally applied to fine art prints created on a modified Iris printer in a process invented in the late 1980s. It has since been used widely to mean any fine-art printing, usually archival, printed by inkjet. It is often used by artists, galleries, and print shops for their high quality printing, but is also used generically for art printing of any quality.
Digital printing is a method of printing from a digital-based image directly to a variety of media. It usually refers to professional printing where small-run jobs from desktop publishing and other digital sources are printed using large-format and/or high-volume laser or inkjet printers.
Office supplies are consumables and equipment regularly used in offices by businesses and other organizations, by individuals engaged in written communications, recordkeeping or bookkeeping, janitorial and cleaning, and for storage of supplies or data. The range of items classified as office supplies varies, and typically includes small, expendable, daily use items, consumable products, small machines, higher cost equipment such as computers, as well as office furniture and art.
Letterpress printing is a technique of relief printing for producing many copies by repeated direct impression of an inked, raised surface against individual sheets of paper or a continuous roll of paper. A worker composes and locks movable type into the "bed" or "chase" of a press, inks it, and presses paper against it to transfer the ink from the type, which creates an impression on the paper.
A wedding invitation is a letter asking the recipient to attend a wedding. It is typically written in the formal, third-person language and mailed five to eight weeks before the wedding date.
The history of books became an acknowledged academic discipline in the 1980s. Contributions to the field have come from textual scholarship, codicology, bibliography, philology, palaeography, art history, social history and cultural history. It aims to demonstrate that the book as an object, not just the text contained within it, is a conduit of interaction between readers and words. Analysis of each component part of the book can reveal its purpose, where and how it was kept, who read it, ideological and religious beliefs of the period, and whether readers interacted with the text within. Even a lack of such evidence can leave valuable clues about the nature of a particular book.
Saint Martin's Day or Martinmas, and historically called Old Halloween or Old Hallowmas Eve, is the feast day of Saint Martin of Tours and is celebrated in the liturgical year on 11 November. In the Middle Ages and early modern period, it was an important festival in many parts of Europe, particularly Germanic-speaking regions. In these regions, it marked the end of the harvest season and beginning of winter and the "winter revelling season". Traditions include feasting on 'Martinmas goose' or 'Martinmas beef', drinking the first wine of the season, and mumming. In some German and Dutch-speaking towns, there are processions of children with lanterns (Laternelaufen), sometimes led by a horseman representing St Martin. The saint was also said to bestow gifts on children. In the Rhineland, it is also marked by lighting bonfires.
Robert Smail's Printing Works is a fully functional Victorian era letterpress printing works in the small Scottish Borders town of Innerleithen, now preserved by The National Trust for Scotland as an Industrial Heritage museum showing visitors the operation of a local printer around 1900 while still carrying out orders for printing and stationery.
Margaret Lindsay Holton is a Canadian artist primarily known for her 'naive-surreal-folk-abstracts' oil and acrylic paintings, pinhole photography, short documentary film productions, poetry and literary novel works.
Wayzgoose Press is an independent private press founded in 1986 by Michael Hudson (1939–2021) and Jadwiga Jarvis (1947–2021).