ink on paper

The letterpress side of the studio.

I haven't posted in a long time, which at this point is actually a good thing, because it means I have been very, very, very busy. A lot, of course, has happened while I have been busy not posting, but you probably know that already.

I started a new job in February, which means my weekends are now more concentrated than they once were, but also means that I actually have weekends instead of days where all my friends are off work but I am trying to finish some freelance thing or another before Monday. My weekends, so far, have been spent mostly here at the studio, alternating between fighting the endless war against dust and actually printing things. As I type this, somebody is sanding marble outside. I didn't even know you could sand marble. But there you go.

The majority of my letterpress work as of late has been in the form of business and calling cards for friends and associates. I've been enjoying these immensely, mostly because the design of each has been a wonderful collaboration, and the end results have been worth the effort (and cost!).

The Vandercook, ready to print.

A few weeks ago I did a lovely set of business cards as a trade with my friend Nicky, who is a massage therapist, and have been reaping the benefits of Thai massage ever since. My friend Heather has offered me a stay in her flat in Paris in exchange for the ones I did for her. The latest set was for my dear friend ms. meriko, who was also a pleasure to work with; this time, I had my camera with me and decided to take some pictures of the process.

Every project I do is custom designed for the person who requests it. First we figure out together what will appear on the card and exchange some general ideas about how it will look and what it will convey. Then I get to work finding the paper stock, typefaces and any illustrations we'll use. In this case, meriko already had a beautiful pen and ink illustration of a pomegranate drawn for her by the immensely talented Tammy Stellanova. I converted the bitmap of the scanned drawing to an eps and cleaned it up in Illustrator, so it would scale properly to any size. We emailed PDFs back and forth a few times and eventually settled on a design that worked. Once meriko approved of the final design, I made separate files for each color and emailed off the files to the platemaker. I actually do have a few fonts of lead type, but in this case it was better to use photopolymer plates, especially since everything had to be proofed long-distance (meriko lives in San Francisco).

Ink mixing table

With polymer plates, the platemaker creates a photonegative and uses it to expose a sheet of light-sensitive plastic polymer, which leaves the image as raised plastic on a thin steel backing. I then attach it to a magnetized ceramic base, which I put on the bed of my Vandercook 4 press and lock it into place using little mechanical wonders called quoins (or if I'm using a platen press like my Chandler & Price Pilot, I lock it into what's called a chase). The joy of the polymer plates is if something comes out crooked or just a little bit out of place, I can easily pry the thing off and snap it back on in the correct position.

Then comes the ink. As printing ink comes in one pound cans, it's pretty much impossible for me to buy ink in every possible color I want, so I mix them myself. If you're a designer, you probably have a Pantone book and are accustomed to picking colors out of it. I do this too, but then I have to look at the little formulas next to the colors, which tell me how to mix that color out of the standard colors I have. I take an ink spatula and take a little dab out of one can, and a little dab out of another, and a big dab out of another, and then I smash them around on a glass plate until they look about right. There are all kinds of "rules" about mixing ink by weighing each color out on a scale or whatever, but I just eyeball it and then test it by rolling some ink on a piece of wood type and stamping it onto a piece of paper to see how it looks.

Operating the press

Once I've got the ink color how I want it, it's time for makeready, which means, well, everything you have to do to make the press ready to print. I take the spatula and smudge some ink onto the powered metal rollers, and add it until it makes the proper velvety swishswish sound as the rollers turn. The metal rollers automatically spread the ink evenly across the rubber rollers below them. The rubber rollers in turn spread ink across the top of the polymer plate as I operate the press, and, on my Vandercook at least, the paper is attached around a cylinder which rolls over the polymer plate, pressing the ink into the paper.

Sheet on press, ready for a second color.

Then I adjust the packing, which is the material (in this case, paper) that goes under the actual piece of paper being printed upon, so that there is just the right amount of impression when it rolls over the polymer plate. Real letterpress printers, that is, the old men like the ones who operated this press at the Danish newspaper in its previous life, say the impression is perfect when the letters are nice and crisp and you can't see that it's been pressed into the paper at all. All those men are turning in their graves as I add packing to the cylinder in order to get a deeper impression.

After I've finished with makeready, it's time to start printing. I set meriko's cards up to print six at a time. I learned this the hard way after realizing just how much my arm hurt after cranking the press back and forth 250 times the first time I decided to make calling cards for someone.

The finished sheet.

I put an 8.5x11" sheet of paper into the grippers on the cylinder, run it through once, then turn it around to print the same thing on the other half of the page. This is called a work-and-turn for, I think, obvious reasons. Twice through the press and I have twelve cards, complete with registration and crop marks. Much happier. Once I have enough sheets with the first color, I clean off the press with a horribly toxic solvent (which I think the old pressmen would approve of) and re-ink with the next color and do it all again.

When I've finished all the sheets with the second color, I'm done printing and clean off the rollers one more time with the horribly toxic solvent and wipe everything down with an oily rag to keep it all from rusting. I let the ink dry overnight, and then I stack all the printed sheets up, and hopefully I've lined everything up right, because I'm about to use my scary stack paper cutter to chop everything into proper 2 inch by 3 1/2 inch rectangles. In the end, I've got a few hundred calling cards for ms. meriko, and I keep a few for myself and wrap the rest in brown paper and bubble wrap and overnight mail them at the post office.

Then I go ask Nicky for a massage, because all that cranking the cylinder back and forth does a number on my arm after a while.