Fred Burwell

Lithomarge: [see also, lithobutter] a print produced by lithomargraphy, a process in which one renders an image or word via rendered margarine on non-absorbent pastry which repels the ink, allowing it to rappel onto an appropriate surface or external locus, ostensibly providing a subcutaneous veneer, although a few (jealous – or zealous? I can’t read my own handwriting) scientists in Monaco doubt its plausibility.

You’ve heard of butter sculpture? This is similar. Read on:

Long, long ago an itinerant Italian artist and printer named Graphias Litho sat down at the breakfast table with a hefty chunk of Tuscan flatbread and a pot of well-congealed butter. He was an absent minded fellow, given to flights of fancy and flights of forgetfulness. That day, knife in hand, he was about to slice into the flat, smooth crust, when without thinking a thought, he carved a word in his native language, “buffone” or “buffoon” as we call it today. He then pressed the bread against the creamy butter, while simultaneously spilling a quantity of ink which he’d mistaken for wine. When he lifted the bread, he cried, “Voila!” Or, rather, “Ecco!” There was “buffone” spelled out in lovely burgundy-colored letters. Sadly, the newly invented “lithobutter” had a very short life span once the Tuscan sun – and Graphias’s wife Petra – heated up. Petra was quite upset to find ink mixed into her butter and threatened to use Graphias’s printing press as kindling. But the germ of an idea grasped Graphias and spun him around. Once he stopped spinning, he began the art of lithography in earnest.

Flash forward two centuries and an Armenian avant-garde scholar/artiste named Plebiscite Philagorean spent two hundred days in the Litho room of the Benedetto Archives of Siena, Italy, pouring over Graphias Litho’s papers, which included original lithographs, baffling treatises on befuddled subjects (unless it was the other way around), and mysterious ink-stained notes, as well as assorted crumbs from long ago meals. One day he stumbled upon a still slightly greasy jotting about Litho’s initial discovery of the lithobutter process. A light bulb lit above Philagorean’s head, although that was not unusual. Lights were always flickering on and off at the Benedetto Archives, which along with its fabulous collections, featured faulty electrical wiring.

Plebiscite Philagorean raced back to his hotel room on the Rue de la Champagne (for some reason he was commuting daily from Lac Dumas aux Flambeau, France, 750 miles away), not forgetting to pick up the flattest, hardest, three-day old bread he could find. He rummaged in the refrigerator for a plastic tub of margarine and then set to work. To honor the Italian Graphias Litho, Philagorean carved the word “vermicelli,” a type of pasta also known as “little worms.” He pressed the bread word into the margarine and stared in disbelief at the faint, spectacularly unspectacular imprint. He’d forgotten the ink! Hurriedly he pulled apart a BIC pen and squirted it all over himself. Fortunately, enough ink dripped onto the bread that he was able to try again and this time the word stood out a vibrant blue. The art of the lithomarge, created by way of lithomargraphy, was born and the world was never the same, although the world didn’t know it.

Actual definition: smooth, compact kaolin, a type of clay used to manufacture porcelain.