Reynolds Stone

Millions of Britons know at least one piece of work by Reynolds Stone. The coat of arms on the front of the United Kingdom passport is his work. He died thirty years ago, so the design is extremely durable.

This year is his centenary, and we’ve just printed an edition of ten of his wood engravings. We’re very excited.

The prints will be part of an exhibition at Sophie Schneideman Rare Books, 331 Portobello Road, London W10 5SA. It will be open Tuesdays to Fridays 11-4, Saturdays 10.30-6 from the 6th to the 21st November. Other times by appointment (07909 963836) or chance.

Insectissimo

Insectissimo is the third in our Paw Prints series. Once again it is written by Holly Skeet. The pictures by Chris Brown have been printed direct from his lino blocks.

We’ve put it in our ebay shop listed as a children’s book. It wasn’t easy to decide on a category, as we think it will be loved by people of all ages. A friend lent her copy of Circus Minimus, its predecessor, to her grown up daughter, who didn’t want to give it back.

Mark Twain poster

Mark Twain is a bit of a hero around here. He’s best known as a writer, of course, and a great one. We really like his description of his time as a cub pilot on a Mississippi steamboat.

Less well known is that one of his first jobs was as a compositor. He found it such drudgery that he later invested a lot of money in a type setting machine. Sadly for him his investment wasn’t a good one.

He was also a wit, of course, and when we found this quote we couldn’t resist it.

As usual, you can find this in our ebay shop.

The return of Tutti Frutti

Tutti Frutti is back! We were thrilled with the response to the original print and both pleased and sorry that it sold out. Sorry because it was a limited edition, so nobody else could get it. We obviously couldn’t do a straight reprint, but we could do a new version, and that’s what we’ve done. The layout is changed, and Rosa chose a stunning new set of vibrant colours. What’s more, we haven’t signed or numbered them, so we’ve brought the price down.

Tutti Frutti is in our ebay store and at Ben Pentreath now, and Keep Calm will have it next week.

God is in the details

We’ve always preferred the idea of god being in the details to the alternate version, where it’s the devil. We try to pay attention to the details in our work, which is why we chose to make this poster.

Once we had decided to use metallic inks on black paper we knew we had to under-print them to bring out their brilliance. There is opaque white under the silver and yellow under the gold. We used Fabriano Ingres 160 gsm paper, trimmed on two edges to 700 x 500 mm.

Like most of our other posters, you can find it in our shop.

What we did at Whittington

Like last year, we were put in charge of Whittington Press’s FAG proofer on Saturday. It’s the same model as our own one, so we prepared this poster beforehand, a touch of the Blue Peters.We don’t get to use our 18 line Gill Sans wood letter very often, so this was a good opportunity. We were told afterwards that it was quite a site to see lots of people walking round clutching the copies that they had themselves printed.

The kiss

This may be churlish, but there is one aspect of the current revival of interest in letterpress that bothers us. Impression. Or rather, excessive impression.

Often now our customers want their printing heavily pressed into the page. We can understand it: they’re usually paying a premium to use us, and they can reasonably expect to get something extra. Such is the demand that Crane’s have produced their Lettra range of uncalendered papers. Soft and textured, they take impression very nicely and are, as the lager ads used to say, reassuringly expensive.

A couple of months ago we printed business cards for someone who said they weren’t ‘letterpressed properly’ because we hadn’t produced a braille-like surface. There seems to be such an expectation now of unsubtle printing that we’re often unsure how a new customer is going to receive our work.

We always do our best to oblige when asked to thump the paper. It involves us balancing the customer’s instruction with producing a sharp, clean image. Pushing extra hard on the plate (we never do this to our type) can produce distortion, especially at corners.

We explained to our dissatisfied client that printing you can feel as well as see is a recent fashion. We have read that the history of letterpress in the industrial age can be seen as the story of the elimination of impression. If a machine minder of, say, the 1960s saw work like that in our photograph you could expect the air to turn blue.

What, you might ask, is the point of letterpress without impression? As another customer said recently, we deliver blacker blacks and denser colours than litho. When we work with metal and wood rather than plates you get the qualities, good and bad, of the design of the type and the physical limitations of putting it together.

If you ask us to print something that shows through on the other side we’ll do it the best we can. We like the traditions of our trade, though. We talk about cases and galleys, not drawers and trays. When we’re left to our own devices we like our type to kiss the paper just the way our machines were made to do it.

New shop sign

We never got round to putting a proper sign in our window when we moved here to Pinchin Street. We had a print of our logo in 72 pt which we stuck to the door with Sellotape. That was ok, but recently we noticed that the red had faded to a pale orange.

Now we’ve had it changed, as you can see. We rather like it.

Whittington Summer Show

We will once again be at the Whittington Summer Show this year. It takes place on 5 September, and you can see the gorgeous poster here. The illustrations were hand stenciled by Miriam Macgregor, and we think it’s worth going just for the chance of picking one up.

As last year, we’ll be on the proofing press. We are currently putting together some type for a poster which we’ll be taking with us so that those who want to can print their own copy. We’ll have other posters too, as well as books and cards.

36 pt Gill Cameo Ruled

We bought this fount of 36 pt Gill Cameo Ruled on ebay this week. It’s not the sort of thing we usually go for, but this was irresistible. We don’t have a use for it in mind, but we’re confident that it’ll be just the right thing for a job one day.

Eric Gill, whose name it bears, was a purist – ‘Letters are things, not pictures of things’, ‘A is A and B is B’. We’re curious to know what he made of the many variants of his type face that Monotype released. It’s easy to imagine him condemning them, and just as easy to imagine him justifying them as the inevitable consequence of machine made things.

Gill Cameo Ruled was one of a great number of types sold by Mouldtype Foundry when they were still going. If a fount wasn’t needed they’d sell display sizes (18 pt and above) as individual sorts. We still have a line of 36 pt Pepita bought that way. We only bought type when it was needed for a job in those days, but looking back it’s a shame we didn’t get any Festival Titling. It’s hard to imagine using it very much, but what lovely letters.