letterpress

so, metal or wooden type arranged in the "bed" of a printing press gets a layer of ink applied to the surface and is then a piece of paper is pressed against the type to leave an inked impression in the paper... such a simple process, but oh so beautiful! i am in a letterpress class now and learning all i can about the letterpress printing process. just today i finally got to see a really nice impression and learn how to correctly run a Vandercook proof press. the best way to make a great print is to start with the right paper:

this is the watermark of some nice 100 percent cotton paper that i used for the "real" print of a layout that was a sort of class collaboration
i made at the top of the page. these are called "cognate anagrams" which means: "the letters of a word or phrase are transposed to form another word or phrase which redefines, or is closely related in meaning to, the original." as defined in a handout from my teacher. this second sheet is just on crappy newsprint but it is actually the first two prints of the layout i made... two because we made the first impression and then later were asked to print it again on top of what we had printed to see if our registration was good (registration is how the text is aligned when printing multiple times (this is important when printing multiple colors)), i used this sheet to record the names of the fonts that were used

this is just a shot of one of the anagrams that used a really nice couple of fonts and unfortunately i don't know which fonts they are right now.

this is the back of the paper which shows very nicely the "punch" of the type (i'm sure you can guess what punch means. GRIN)

another

this is the anagram that i chose to set in type

from another angle that starts to show the beauty of letterpress

a better angle that shows how the letters are pressed into the paper. i'm very excited to keep you updated as to the progress of this class.