Letterpress printing is a technique of relief printing
for producing many copies by repeated direct impression of an inked,
raised surface against individual sheets of paper or a continuous roll
of paper.[1] A worker composes and locks movable type into the "bed" or "chase" of a press, inks it, and presses paper against it to transfer the ink from the type, which creates an impression on the paper.
In practice, letterpress also includes wood engravings; photo-etched zinc plates ("cuts"); linoleum blocks, which can be used alongside metal type; wood type in a single operation; stereotypes; and electrotypes of type and blocks.[2] With certain letterpress units, it is also possible to join movable type with slugs cast using hot metal typesetting.
In theory, anything that is "type high" (i.e. it forms a layer exactly
0.918 inches thick between the bed and the paper) can be printed using
letterpress.[3]
Letterpress printing was the normal form of printing text from its invention by Johannes Gutenberg
in the mid-15th century through the 19th century, and remained in wide
use for books and other uses until the second half of the 20th century.
The development of offset printing
in the early 20th century gradually supplanted its role in printing
books and newspapers. More recently, letterpress printing has seen a
revival in an artisanal form.
History
Main articles: Movable type, Printing press, Spread of the printing press, and Typography
Movable type printing was first invented in China using ceramic type in AD 1040 during the Northern Song dynasty by the inventor Bi Sheng (990–1051).[4]
Johannes Gutenberg
is credited with the development in the West, in about 1440, of modern
movable type printing from individually cast, reusable letters set
together in a "forme" (frame or chase). Gutenberg also invented a wooden
printing press, based on the extant wine press, where the type surface was inked with leather-covered ink balls
and paper laid carefully on top by hand, then slid under a padded
surface and pressure applied from above by a large threaded screw. It
was Gutenberg's "screw press" or hand press that was used to print 180
copies of the Bible. At 1,282 pages, it took him and his staff of 20
almost 3 years to complete. 48 copies remain intact today.[5]
This form of presswork gradually replaced the hand-copied manuscripts
of scribes and illuminators as the most prevalent form of printing.[6]
Printers' workshops, previously unknown in Europe before the mid-15th
century, were found in every important metropolis by 1500.[6] Later metal presses used a knuckle and lever arrangement instead of the screw, but the principle was the same. Ink rollers made of composition made inking faster and paved the way for further automation.
Industrialization
With the advent of industrial mechanisation,
inking was carried out by rollers that passed over the face of the
type, then moved out of the way onto an ink plate to pick up a fresh
film of ink for the next sheet. Meanwhile, a sheet of paper slid against
a hinged platen (see image), which then rapidly pressed onto the type
and swung back again as the sheet was removed and the next sheet
inserted. As the fresh sheet of paper replaced the printed paper, the
now freshly inked rollers ran over the type again. Fully automated
20th-century presses, such as the Kluge and "Original" Heidelberg Platen (the "Windmill"), incorporated pneumatic sheet feed and delivery.
Rotary presses
were used for high-speed work. In the oscillating press, the forme slid
under a drum around which each sheet of paper was wrapped for the
impression, sliding back under the inking rollers while the paper was
removed and a new sheet inserted. In a newspaper press, a papier-mâché mixture called a flong was used to make a mould of the entire form of type, then dried and bent, and a curved metal stereotype
plate cast against it. The plates were clipped to a rotating drum and
could print against a continuous reel of paper at the enormously high
speeds required for overnight newspaper production.
This invention helped aid the high demand for knowledge during this time
period.
North American history
Canada
Letterpress printing was introduced in Canada in 1752 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, by John Bushell in the newspaper format.[7] This paper was named the Halifax Gazette and became Canada's first newspaper. Bushell apprenticed under Bartholomew Green
in Boston. Green moved to Halifax in 1751 in hopes of starting a
newspaper, as there had never been one in the area. Two weeks and a day
after the press he was going to use for this new project arrived in
Halifax, Green died. Upon receiving word about what happened, Bushell
moved to Halifax and continued what Green had started. The Halifax Gazette
was first published on March 23, 1752, making Bushell the first
letterpress printer in any of the areas that later became Canada. There
is only one known surviving copy of the first number, which was found in
the Massachusetts Historical Society.[8]
United States
One of the first forms of letterpress printing in the United States was Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick started by Benjamin Harris. This was the first form of a newspaper with multiple pages in the Americas. The first publication of Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick was September 25, 1690.[9]
Revival and rise of craft letterpress
Letterpress started to become largely out-of-date in the 1970s
because of the rise of computers and new self-publishing print and
publish methods. Many printing establishments went out of business from
the 1980s to 1990s and sold their equipment after computers replaced
letterpress's abilities more efficiently. These commercial print shops
discarded presses, making them affordable and available to artisans
throughout the country. Popular presses include, in particular, Vandercook cylinder proof presses and Chandler & Price platen presses. In the UK there is particular affection for the Arab press, built by Josiah Wade in Halifax.
Letterpress recently has had a rebirth in popularity because of the "allure of hand-set type"[10]
and the differences today between traditional letterpress and
computerized printed text. Letterpress is unique and different from
standard printing formats that we are currently used to. Letterpress
commonly features a relief impression of the type, although this was
considered bad printing in traditional letterpress.[11]
Letterpress's goal before the recent revival of letterpress was to not
show any impression. The type touched the paper slightly to leave a
transfer of ink, but did not leave an impression. This is often referred
to as "the kiss".[12] An example of this former technique would be newspapers.
Some letterpress practitioners today have the distinct goal of showing
the impression of type, to distinctly note that it is letterpress, but
many printers choose to maintain the integrity of the traditional
methods. Printing with too much impression is destructive to both the
machines and to the type. Since its revival letterpress has largely been
used for fine art and stationery as its traditional use for newspaper
printing is no longer relevant for use.
Letterpress is considered a craft
as it involves using a skill and is done by hand. Fine letterpress work
is crisper than offset litho because of its impression into the paper,
giving greater visual definition to the type and artwork, although it is
not what letterpress traditionally was meant for. Today, many of these
small letterpress shops survive by printing fine editions of books or by
printing upscale invitations, stationery, and greeting cards.
These methods often use presses that require the press operator to feed
paper one sheet at a time by hand. Today, the juxtaposition of this
technique and offbeat humor for greeting cards has been proven by
letterpress shops to be marketable to independent boutiques and gift
shops. Some of these printmakers are just as likely to use new printing
methods as old, for instance by printing using photopolymer plates on
restored vintage presses.[citation needed]
Evidence of the range and strength of contemporary letterpress printing across North America was documented in The Itinerant Printer,
a 320-page book with 1,500 color photos by Christopher Fritton. From
2015 - 2017 Fritton, a poet, printer, and artist, crisscrossed the
United States and Canada traveling 47,000 miles as a “tramp printer”
visiting 137 presses, recording his impressions of each studio and
documenting the proprietors and their work. A full set of prints and
postcards from his travels while researching the book is in the
collection of the Library of Congress. Included in many libraries,[13] the book was the subject of Fritton's talks at a Buffalo, New York TED (conference),[14] at the Library of Congress,[15] and at the Los Angeles Printers Fair 2018.[16]
Martha Stewart's influence
Letterpress
publishing has recently undergone a revival in the US, Canada, and the
UK, under the general banner of the "Small Press Movement".[17] Renewed interest in letterpress was fueled by Martha Stewart Weddings magazine, which began using pictures of letterpress invitations in the 1990s.[18]
In 2004 they state "Great care is taken in choosing the perfect wedding
stationery – couples ponder details from the level of formality to the
flourishes of the typeface. The method of printing should be no less
important, as it can enliven the design exquisitely. That is certainly
the case with letterpress."[19]
In regards to having printed letterpress invitations, the beauty and
texture became appealing to couples who began wanting letterpress
invitations instead of engraved, thermographed, or offset-printed
invitations.
Education
The movement has been helped by the emergence of a number of organizations that teach letterpress such as Columbia College Chicago's Center for Book and Paper Arts, Art Center College of Design and Armory Center for the Arts both in Pasadena, Calif., New York's Center for Book Arts, Studio on the Square and The Arm NYC, the Wells College Book Arts Center in Aurora, New York, the San Francisco Center for the Book, Bookworks, Seattle's School of Visual Concepts, Olympia's The Evergreen State College, Black Rock Press, North Carolina State University, Washington, D.C.'s Corcoran College of Art and Design, Penland School of Crafts, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, the International Printing Museum in Carson, CA, Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA, Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA, and the Bowehouse Press at VCU in Richmond, VA.
Economical materials
Affordable
copper, magnesium and photopolymer platemakers and milled aluminum
bases have allowed letterpress printers to produce type and images
derived from digital artwork, fonts and scans. Economical plates have
encouraged the rise of "digital letterpress" in the 21st century,
allowing a small number of firms to flourish commercially and enabling a
larger number of boutique and hobby printers to avoid the limitations
and complications of acquiring and composing metal type. At the same
time there has been a renaissance in small-scale type foundries to produce new metal type on Monotype equipment, Thompson casters and the original American Type Founders machines.[citation needed]
Process
The
process of letterpress printing consists of several stages: composition,
imposition and lock-up, and printing. In a small shop, all would occur
in a single room, whereas in larger printing plants, such as with urban
newspapers and magazines, each might form a distinct department with its
own room, or even floor.
Composition
Main article: Typesetting
Composition, or typesetting, is the stage where pieces of movable
type are assembled to form the desired text. The person charged with
composition is called a "compositor" or "typesetter", setting letter by
letter and line by line.
Traditionally, as in manual composition, it involves selecting the individual type letters from a type case, placing them in a composing stick,
which holds several lines, then transferring those to a larger type
galley. By this method the compositor gradually builds out the text of
an individual page letter by letter. In mechanical typesetting, it may
involve using a keyboard to select the type, or even cast the desired
type on the spot, as in hot metal typesetting,
which are then added to a galley designed for the product of that
process. The first keyboard-actuated typesetting machines to be widely
accepted, the Linotype and the Monotype, were introduced in the 1890s.[1]
The Ludlow Typograph Machine, for casting of type-high slugs from
hand-gathered brass matrices, was first manufactured in Chicago in 1912
and was widely used until the 1980s. Many are still in use and although
no longer manufactured, service and parts are still available for them.
The Elrod machine, invented in 1920, casts strip material from
molten metal; leads and slugs that are not type-high (do not print) used
for spacing between lines and to fill blank areas of the type page.
After a galley is assembled to fill a page's worth of type, the
type is tied together into a single unit so that it may be transported
without falling apart. From this bundle a galley proof is made, which is inspected by a proof-reader to make sure that the particular page is accurate.
Imposition
Main article: Imposition
Broadly, imposition or imposing is the process by which the tied
assemblages of type are converted into a form (or forme) ready to use on
the press. A person charged with imposition is a stoneman or stonehand,
doing their work on a large, flat imposition stone (though some later
ones were instead made of iron).
In the more specific modern sense, imposition is the technique of
arranging the various pages of type with respect to one another.
Depending on page size and the sheet of paper used, several pages may be
printed at once on a single sheet. After printing, these are cut and
trimmed before folding or binding. In these steps, the imposition
process ensures that the pages face the right direction and in the right
order with the correct margins.
Low-height pieces of wood or metal furniture
are added to make up the blank areas of a page. The printer uses a
mallet to strike a wooden block, which ensures tops (and only the tops)
of the raised type blocks are all aligned so they will contact a flat
sheet of paper simultaneously.
Lock-up is the final step before printing. The printer removes the cords that hold the type together, and expands the quoins
with a key or lever to lock the entire complex of type, blocks,
furniture, and chase (frame) into place. This creates the final forme,
which the printer takes to the printing press. In a newspaper setting,
each page needs a truck to be transported – 2 pages need 2 trucks hence
the term double truck. The first copy is proofed again for errors before starting the printing run.
Printing
Main article: Printing press
The working of the printing process depends on the type of press
used, as well as any of its associated technologies (which varied by
time period).
Hand presses generally required two people to operate them: one to ink the type, the other to work the press. Later mechanized jobbing presses require a single operator to feed and remove the paper, as the inking and pressing are done automatically.
The completed sheets are then taken to dry and for finishing,
depending on the variety of printed matter being produced. With
newspapers, they are taken to a folding machine. Sheets for books are sent for bookbinding.
The output of traditional letterpress printing can be
distinguished from that of a digital printer by its debossed lettering
or imagery. A traditional letterpress printer made a heavy impression
into the stock and producing any indentation at all into the paper would
have resulted in the print run being rejected. Part of the skill of
operating a traditional letterpress printer was to adjust the machine
pressures just right so that the type just kissed the paper,
transferring the minimum amount of ink to create the crispest print with
no indentation. This was very important as when the print exited the
machine and was stacked having too much wet ink and an indentation would
have increased the risk of set-off (ink passing from the front of one
sheet onto the back of the next sheet on the stack).[20]
Photopolymer plates
Main article: Photopolymer
The letterpress printing process remained virtually unchanged until
the 1950s when it was replaced with the more efficient and commercially
viable offset printing process. The labor-intensive nature of the typesetting and need to store vast amounts of lead or wooden type resulted in the letterpress printing process falling out of favour.
In the 1980s dedicated letterpress practitioners revived the old craft by embracing a new manufacturing method[21] which allowed them to create raised surface printing plates from a negative and a photopolymer plate.[22]
Photopolymer plates are light sensitive. On one side the surface is cured when it is exposed to ultraviolet light and the other side is a metal or plastic backing that can be mounted on a base. The relief printing surface is created by placing a negative
of the piece to be printed on the photosensitive side of the plate; the
light passing through the clear regions of the negative causes the
photopolymer to harden. The unexposed areas remain soft and can be
washed away with water.
With these new printing plates, designers were no longer
inhibited by the limitations of handset wooden or lead type. New design
possibilities emerged and the letterpress printing process experienced a
revival. Today it is in high demand for wedding stationery however there are limitations to what can be printed and designers must adhere to some design for letterpress principles.[23]
Variants on the letterpress
The
invention of ultra-violet curing inks has helped keep the rotary
letterpress alive in areas like self-adhesive labels. There is also
still a large amount of flexographic printing, a similar process, which uses rubber plates to print on curved or awkward surfaces, and a lesser amount of relief printing from huge wooden letters for lower-quality poster work.
Rotary letterpress machines are still used on a wide scale for
printing self-adhesive and non-self-adhesive labels, tube laminate, cup
stock, etc. The printing quality achieved by a modern letterpress
machine with UV curing is on par with flexo presses. It is more
convenient and user friendly than a flexo press. It uses water-wash
photopolymer plates, which are as good as any solvent-washed flexo
plate. Today even CtP (computer-to-plate) plates are available making it a full-fledged, modern printing process. Because there is no anilox
roller in the process, the make-ready time also goes down when compared
to a flexo press. Inking is controlled by keys very much similar to an offset
press. UV inks for letterpress are in paste form, unlike flexo. Various
manufacturers produce UV rotary letterpress machines, viz. Dashen,
Nickel, Taiyo Kikai, KoPack, Gallus, etc. – and offer hot/cold foil
stamping, rotary die cutting, flatbed die cutting, sheeting, rotary
screen printing, adhesive side printing, and inkjet numbering. Central
impression presses are more popular than inline presses due to their
ease of registration and simple design. Printing of up to nine colours
plus varnish is possible with various online converting processes. But
as the letterpress machines are the same like a decade before, they can
furthermore only be used with one colour of choice simultaneously. If
there are more colours needed, they have to be exchanged one after the
other.[24]
Craftsmanship
Letterpress can produce work of high quality at high speed, but it
requires much time to adjust the press for varying thicknesses of type,
engravings, and plates called makeready.[1]
The process requires a high degree of craftsmanship. It is used by many
small presses that produce fine, handmade, limited-edition books, artists' books, and high-end ephemera such as greeting cards and broadsides.
Because of the time needed to make letterpress plates and to prepare
the press, setting type by hand has become less common with the
invention of the photopolymer plate, a photosensitive plastic sheet that can be mounted on metal to bring it up to type high.[1]
To bring out the best attributes of letterpress, printers must
understand the capabilities and advantages of the medium. For instance,
since most letterpress equipment prints only one color at a time,
printing multiple colors requires a separate press run in register with
the preceding color. When offset printing arrived in the 1950s, it cost
less, and made the color process easier.[25]
The inking system on letterpress equipment is the same as offset
presses, posing problems for some graphics. Detailed, white (or "knocked
out") areas, such as small, serif type, or very fine halftone surrounded by fields of color can fill in with ink and lose definition if rollers are not adjusted correctly.
Current initiatives
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Several dozen colleges and universities around the United States have
either begun or re-activated programs teaching letterpress printing in
fully equipped facilities. In many cases these letterpress shops are
affiliated with the college's library or art department, and in others
they are independent, student-run operations or extracurricular
activities sponsored by the college. The College & University
Letterpress Printers' Association (CULPA) was founded in 2006 by Abigail
Uhteg at the Maryland Institute College of Art to help these schools stay connected and share resources. Many universities offer degree programs such as: Oregon College of Art and Craft, Southwest School of Art, Middle Tennessee State University, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Indiana University, Miami University, Corcoran College of Art and Design, and Rochester Institute of Technology.[26]
The current renaissance of letterpress printing has created a
crop of hobby press shops that are owner-operated and driven by a love
of the craft. Several larger printers have added an environmental
component to the venerable art by using only wind-generated electricity to drive their presses and plant equipment. Notably, a few small boutique letterpress shops are using only solar power.
In Berkeley, California, letterpress printer and lithographer David Lance Goines maintains a studio with a variety of platen and cylinder letterpresses as well as lithography presses.[27]
He has drawn attention both from commercial printers and fine artists
for his wide knowledge and meticulous skill with letterpress printing.
He collaborated with restaurateur and free speech activist Alice Waters, the owner of Chez Panisse, on her book 30 Recipes Suitable for Framing.[28] He has created strikingly colorful large posters for such Bay Area businesses and institutions as Acme Bread and UC Berkeley.[27] Another Berkeley letterpress printer is Peter Rutledge Koch, who focuses on artist books and small published books.[29]
In London, St Bride Library
houses a large collection of letterpress information in its collection
of 50,000 books: all the classic works on printing technique, visual
style, typography, graphic design, calligraphy and more. This is one of
the world's foremost collections and is located off Fleet Street in the
heart of London's old printing and publishing district. In addition,
regular talks, conferences, exhibitions and demonstrations take place.
The St Bride Institute, Edinburgh College of Art, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, The Arts University Bournemouth, Plymouth University, University for the Creative Arts Farnham, London College of Communication
and Camberwell College of the Arts London run short courses in
letterpress as well as offering these facilities as part of their
Graphic Design Degree Courses.
The Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin,
houses one of the largest collections of wood type and wood cuts in the
world inside one of the Hamilton Manufacturing Company's factory
buildings. Also included are presses and vintage prints. The museum
holds many workshops and conferences throughout the year and regularly
welcomes groups of students from universities from across the United
States.
In 2015, the New York Times reported a renaissance of letterpress printing as an art form.[30]