Letterpress Roundup

With the completion of the Be Aware segment, I haven’t had a place to post some of my letterpress snippets. I have a few little letterpress things to share, including another free alphabet, some downloads and letterpress for your derriere.

I also wanted to gather all of my Be Aware letterpress mini-posts into one unified place. Hopefully the letterpress curious will find this page a nice resource. So after the three new mini-posts, I have “republished” my 12 contributions to the Be Aware posts. I have also finally added the answer to my “Letterpress Word Scrample” from Be Aware 9. Scroll away.

Letterpress by the Roll

While visiting my brother in Mexico City I noticed this little bit of letterpress printing. With the soft paper, the impression was very evident. The only drawback to this wonderful piece of design was that it is actually toilet paper. Well, maybe there is more wrong with this piece, but it reminded me of one thing. Although letterpress or silkscreen might enhance work, it doesn’t automatically make something great. Good design is good design and bad is bad. Maybe someone will set me straight and let me know that this isn’t exactly letterpress printing, but if it isn’t, it is a very close cousin. It is fairly obvious that this is printed from a raised surface and as far as I understand, that is one of the only requirement to be considered letterpress.

Blackletterpress Alphabet

If you haven’t had enough of the Blackletter trend, here is a high-res scan of a test print from one of my blackletter letterpress fonts (sorry about the missing lowercase b). The printing isn’t perfect, but that might be just what you are looking for. If you want to be truly authentic, the font’s original size is 36 pt. Like I have mentioned when I have offered downloads in the past, please let me know if you use this in one of your designs. I would love to see how you use it. You also are not allowed to use this on products or sell it as a font or digital file.

Letterpress Wallpaper

While I am not a huge fan of desktop wallpapers, I have caved and I now offer one from my own website (see the very top graphic to this post). After I took this photo of a self-promo poster I printed, I thought it would make a nice backdrop for type and letterpress fans. So, if you are a fan of colorful desktops, download away. Just visit the downloads section of my website.

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While visiting my brother who is living in Mexico City, my wife and I wanted to do something aside from the normal touristy stuff. After a quick google search (here and here), I apparently found Mexico’s National Printing Museum. I figured the largest city in the world would have an amazing collection of letterpress equipment. At least that was the thought.

One day I convinced my wife and brother to let me visit this National Printing Museum. We called up my brother’s new trusted taxi driver and we were on our way. Our experienced cab driver of over twenty years had never had a request for this museum and had never even heard of the street. After driving a good amount of time and stopping several times to ask for directions, it appeared that we wouldn’t find the museum. With the help of a few more locals, we found our street, Ararufa, and pulled up to #8. We approached the gate and there was no printing museum to be found. After buzzing a resident down, she confirmed that there was indeed no Printing Museum in this specific building, just an empty warehouse. With a few more questions we surmised that there had been a print museum in this location . . . TWENTY YEARS AGO!

Just to clarify. There is no National Printing Museum at No. 8 Mar Ararufa St., Tacuba area in Mexico City.

So if you happen to be in Mexico City . . . just take the Turibus and enjoy the ride.

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I thought about sharing a portion of my week at Hatch Show Print for my part of this Be Aware, but I will save that for a full fledged post (I’m still trying to figure out how to distill it into one post). However, on the trip down to Nashville, we stopped at a place that is almost as fascinating as Hatch … Hammerpress in Kansas City. Their posters are a completely different take on the letterpress poster. The intricate detail and ornamentation on the posters at first, made me think they were printed with plates from digital files… but apparently they are all meticulously hand set. Check out the site.

One other bit of letterpress news I picked up while at Hammerpress, was that Ready Made did an article featuring two letterpress and two silkscreen shops. Hammepress and Yee-Haw were representing letterpress. It was the April/May issue (the new issue is already out), but you might still be able to find one on newsstands.

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Consider this a late night rant, from a tired designer.

Why do I print letterpress? Is it to learn more typography? To get my hands dirty when I spend all day on a computer? Is it just the hip thing to do? Do I think I am going to win awards just because it has a slight deboss or that it is printed from damaged wood type? Maybe I just have a need to do something different? Is it worth collecting trays of type and thousand pound presses to be able to print a cool poster or business card here and there? It must be, because now I am on the hunt for the ever elusive Vandercook proofing press. Someone feed my addiction.

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Cylinder vs. Clamshell: If you are thinking about getting into letterpress or you just want to get something printed you should know the difference between these two presses. I am making some generalization in the descriptions below, but hopefully it will help you out a little bit.

Cylinder Press: Most of the Cylinder presses that you find today were made for proofing purposes. These proofing presses, like the Vandercook shown above (left) are extremely accurate and very popular with printmakers. If you want deep impression printing you will probably want to print with a cylinder press. Since these presses are so accurate and adjustable you can also print perfectly on the surface of the paper. The cylinder proofing press is perfect for short runs with tight registration. Here is a animated gif of me (with the help of my mother-in-law) printing the HOW/BADG bookmarks on a Vandercook SP15. (480 KB)

Clamshell Press/Platen Jobber: My own Chandler & Price and my little Kelsey are both considered platen presses. The desired effect with a clamshell is to have all of the type and image “kiss” the paper at the same point. Many of the old small town newspapers around the county were printed with a “platen jobber” press. Unless you have a very large clamshell press, it is much harder to get the deep impression you can get with a cylinder press. With a motor attached or even with a treadle you can get a much larger quantity printed than you can with a hand operated cylinder press.
Here is an animated gif of Nate Voss and I printing the AIGA 365 Posters on my Chandler & Price 12″ x 18″ circa 1918. (320 KB)

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I thought it would be nice to share a little bit of my letterpress collection with all of the readers of Be A Design Group. While a single “sort” of my limited collection of wood type wouldn’t do you much good, I thought a scan of a letterpress alphabet (800 KB) might be useful. Feel free to use this as a you would a royalty free image. One catch. If you end up using it in a piece of design, send me a jpeg or post a link to it on this very post (email to: bennett at beadesigngroup dot com). As with most royalty free images, please don’t use this on, or as products you are going to sell.

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SAVE THE PRESS: Some of you may have heard me say that I have an old letterpress in my garage. I had promised to show it on the site, but I have neglected to do so. I am sharing these photos with you for a few reasons. One reason is to just share what inspires a fellow designer. Another reason would be to encourage you to be active in pursuing other interests outside of the monitor. The third would be to let you know that it is possible to acquire something like this with minimal financial resources.

If you have any interest in letterpress and some extra space in your garage (sorry New Yorkers), then it is entirely possible that you could pick up a vintage letterpress for next to nothing. Just keep your eyes open. A family member knew that I had an interest in finding an old letterpress, so she started calling small local print shops to see if they had an old one sitting around. Within a couple calls she found that one such shop had one sitting outside their back door (rust and all). A few calls later, two borrowed fork lifts, one new ink roller, some elbow grease and I had a running letterpress in my garage. Of course you might want to start out with a little hand press to make sure that this sort of thing interests you. I now have a 12″ x 18″ 2000 lb Chandler & Price clamshell press, circa 1918. Click here for larger image. In this GIF I have included a before photo, a restored photo and a photo of the press in action. The print shop didn’t charge me a penny, although they did charge for the few trays of wood type they had sitting around. If I wouldn’t have saved this press, it would probably have been melted down and sent to Detroit (just a guess). I also hear that old metal type is often used to make bullets. If you can’t find a press locally, check out the presses for sale at Briar Press.

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If you have a pica of interest in letterpress you have probably visited Briar Press. If you want to know how to get started in letterpress or would like some answers about any letterpress question, jump into the forum over at Briar Press. Read past topics, create you own or throw your own expertise into the mix. If you fear that you won’t recognize any names in that forum, never fear, regular design blog commenter JonSel, is also a part of the discussion.

P.S. Check out the brand new article on Hatch Show Print in the February issue of HOW (The Typography Issue). I can never read or hear too much on Jim and the gang at Hatch.

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Letterpress Word Scramble: When an acquaintance gave me his small collection of letterpress equipment he immediately became a good friend and also started my very “weighty” addiction. Amongst the varied type cases and press pieces was some orphaned metal type (aka pied type). I was of course drawn to the larger sizes and started sorting. There was not near enough to create an entire font, but I automatically tried to figure out what this 48 pt. and 60 pt. type once spelled out (if anything). A couple months later I tried again, and this time I figured it out! It had some small historical significance as well. I was even able to track down a piece that was printed from this type.

If you like . . . try to figure it out for yourself. Anyone living within 50 miles of Grand Island, Nebraska has a distinct advantage, if that gives you any clue. I will post the answer in a few days. And yes, the two different typefaces spell the same thing.

ANSWER: After playing letterpress word scramble for a while, I finally figured out that these letters spelled out “The Giltner Gazette”. I assumed they were for the masthead to a now defunct small-town newspaper in nearby Giltner, Nebraska. After a few phone calls I found that a museum about an hour away had the entire newspaper archive and were more than willing to let me browse through their collection.

While starting in the 1930’s and moving forward, I started to think that I would never find where my type was actually used. Absolutely none of the mastheads matched my samples. At this point I started looking on the inside of the papers and stumbled on an ad inside the newspaper that was encouraging people to give a subscription to the Giltner Gazette as a present. On the ad is not just one, but both of the “Giltner Gazettes” that I was looking for. I didn’t know it until that moment, but I even have some of the subhead type.

I had solved my little mystery and was a little bit surprised to find that this paper was still being printed via letterpress as late as 1962. This is yet another example of something I am finding to be fairly universal. Small town newspapers still used letterpress printing decades after the rest of the world had moved on. I am just glad that I am able to preserve a little bit of that history, in my own print shop. I smile every time I see that metal type sitting on my shelf.

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When you live in a small town, you have to seek out things that would interest a designer. I was pleased to find out that our local history museum owns one of the original Chandler & Price presses that Edwin Perkins used to print materials for Kool-Aid. In the late 1920s, Mr. Perkins invented Kool-Aid in the small town of Hastings, Nebraska. There is an entire section of the museum dedicated to Kool-Aid. Side Note: Before he became an inventor and successful business man, Edwin Perkins was a printer.

I am looking for a little advice from the more experienced letterpress printers out there. Here is a photo I took of an enlargement of the original “Kool-Ade” packaging. I assumed that Mr. Perkins used letterpress to print these packages, but something tells me this isn’t letterpress. Does this look more like lithography than letterpress to anyone else? Please advise.

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On a recent trip to Portland, Oregon I had the opportunity to stop by and visit Oblation Papers & Press. They are a letterpress printer/paper maker/boutique shop. While they specialize in designing and printing letterpress wedding invitations, their retail store is enough to entertain for hours on end. You can take a look at the century old presses in action, feel the grain of their handmade papers or look through some of the fascinating letterpress work from other artisans from around the country. If you happen to be in this neck of the woods, head on down to the Pearl District and do your best to restrain yourself from buying too many letterpressed greeting cards.

Oblation had a good number of companies represented in the varied greeting cards that they sold. I purchased beautifully crafted cards from each of these companies: Egg Press, Manifesto Letterpress, Old School Stationers, Pancake & Franks, Saturn Press and Two Piglets

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If you would like to read an overview of the history and current state of letterpress, check out David Jury’s book, Letterpress: The Allure of the Handmade. There are some great examples of work and an overview of where letterpress has come from and where it is today. To someone just mildly interested in letterpress, it might be a little dry. However, this is also not an instruction manual of how to do letterpress. It does come off as a bit snobish in some parts as well. The complete exclusion of Hatch Show Print is one thing that confused me. Mr. Jury also doesn’t appreciate the deliberate use of inconsistent printing or printing that shows up on the back of the paper (both of which I am gladly guilty of). Most of the examples shown are helpful and beautiful, but some of the photography is lacking. Overall this book is a great resource despite a few flaws.

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If you happen to be in north central Kanas anytime soon I would recommend visiting what I would like to call the “ghost” letterpress shop. Jewel Kansas has a little history museum with an old practically untouched letterpress printshop in the back. It is sad to see the rollers melted on the ink plates, but it is fascinating to look at the tympan paper and still be able to see what the last job printed was. Just be sure to call and make an appointment before you go, because that is the only way to get in.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 21st, 2006 at 9:14 am and is filed under Letterpress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.