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 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 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.

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.

We’re amazed and gratified at the success of our internships.We thought they were a good idea – that’s why we started them – but we had no idea that they would be so popular. When we were taking bookings six months in advance we considered cutting each intern’s stay from two weeks to one, but the second week is usually considered really valuable.

Now we’re booked  up until the end of 2010. This is terrific, but it’s a little out of hand, so we’re not taking any more applications for the time being.

When Leo Griffin was with as an intern in July he made a film of our Heidelberg cylinder press. This included locking his camera in a forme and running it in the press. Has this ever been done before, we wonder?

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.

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.

We’ve finally got round to updating the type list on our web site. It was a bit fiddly but quite simple once we found out how to do it. Next time we buy new type there’ll be no excuse not to put it on the list right away.

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.