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.

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.

Eric Gill poster

A new poster. This quote from Eric Gill’s ‘An Essay on Typography’ has long appealed to us. It was a natural to use our Gill Sans wood letter for it. We printed it on Somerset Book Soft White 105 gsm paper, an acid-free mould-made. Soft is a description of the white but it might also refer to its silky feel. We have kept its two deckle edges and torn a third one.

It’s available now from our shop for £50 plus p&p.

Made to make your mouth water

We’ve had a lot of fun printing this poster, and we’re rather proud of it.

We started off by setting the wood type and proofing it in black to get position. We then decided on the colours, using our trusty Pantone book as a guide, and set about separating the type for each printing. We checked each colour against the black proof, lining it up on our light box.

Called Tutti Frutti, it’s available from our ebay shop. There are also some more pictures on our Flickr site.

We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

Getting ready for Bankside

Nick has spent the morning folding our posters for the show at Bankside. We thought they looked pretty good like this.

Gift vouchers

We delivered these gift vouchers to Ben Pentreath Ltd today, and we think they look rather good. Ben gave us a rough layout, and the final form was determined by the type we had available. It can be a very productive way to work.

Mike did most of the setting, Rosa printed them on the Heidelberg platen and Phil did the cutting.

Josh Roberts and another book

Josh is with us at the moment on work experience. He studied graphic design at Bath, where he had some experience of letterpress.

He’s standing next to the book we’ve been printing, now packed up and ready to go for binding. It’s a signed transcript of Doris Lessing’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, which is being published by Oak Tree Fine Press. Unusually, the author signed on blank paper before the printing, so we had to take extra care. 

That page was printed on our proofing press, but the rest went on the Heidelberg cylinder. The restoration work we described here paid off once again, because having the press in good condition greatly reduced setting up times.

More Shakespeare

We have had deliveries of type and paper for Sonnets and Poems, the next volume we’re printing for the Letterpress Shakespeare. It’s going to use more than three times the amount of paper in the picture, and will keep our Heidelberg SB busy almost till Christmas.

Lots of labels

Many people these days think letterpress is only good for short runs. When our Heidelbergs were built in the early 1960s they were the hi-tech machines of the age, capable of printing dead register work at high speeds. Today’s  presses are much faster, or course, put we still can and do long runs. We have just printed 240,000 of these wine labels for our friends and neighbours at Vesuvius International. The black labels were printed in silver first and the yellow was then overprinted. As we had 40 of them up on a sheet sized 640 x 480 mm getting them in register wasn’t easy, but we got there.