Recently, I followed a one-day letterpress course organized by San Francisco Center for the Book, during which you learn the basics of typesetting, letterpress, and you get to print two notes in different colours. Here are some things that surprised me during that experience:
The limitations. You have fewer typefaces to begin with, which usually means the quality is much better (you don’t see the likes of Comic Sans or Chalkboard), but you are constrained in many other ways. I wanted to have both roman and italic type, and this limited my selection quite a bit. Eventually I went with Caslon 14pt, but, after I set my little quote, it turned out that the italic variant came from a different foundry, and was a tiny bit bigger, so I had to switch to Caslon 12pt Over Size.
Em dashes weren’t there, so I literally had to fish for something of a similar width and weight. I chose lowercase l from News Gothic 14pt, and set it horizontally, which required painstakingly surrounding it with spaces so it held in place. Similarly, I had to hunt for opening quotation marks (fortunately, I found some, otherwise I’d have to resort to reversing commas.)
Surprisingly, there are tons of various ornaments, including the usual suspects, but also typewriters, chickens, ballerinas, maides, and huge ones with maps of California, some medical charts, etc. Who would ever want to print that more than once?
The physicality of the whole experience. Type cases weigh a lot (italics seem to be heavier :·) ). Boxes with various types of spaces too. My right arm still hurts a bit from moving the press.
Manipulating type is easy when you’re talking about 72-point Helvetica. It’s completely different for, say, 12-point Caslon, and worse for even smaller typefaces. You quickly realize that proportional fonts are, yes, proportional — it’s easy to grab a W, but i is just a tiny millimeter of lead that is easy to lose among everything else. (And you can’t use tweezers, because they can damage the type.) So, dexterity is something of an importance too.
Moving letters from the case to the composing stick, then to the press, then to the gulley is always very tricky. I dropped an already set line because I wasn’t holding it carefully enough.
Aligning and centering text is very physical too. You measure your type using a pica stick, then surround it with different blocks of furniture to hold in place. There are rules about how you use them (bigger at the outside, smaller closer to the type), and if you want to move your type, you just move furniture from one side to the other — sometimes having to replace one bigger block into two thinner ones to split the difference.
Your first proof print is usually broken in many different ways. Some letters are just too worn out and you want to throw them away. Other need a little bit of love, for example by putting a sliver of paper below to bring them closer to the printed page. Others you just return to the bottom of the type case compartment, giving them another chance in days, weeks, or months from now (it’s interesting to think of where that particular letter you’re holding in your hand was used before, and what kind of words and books it was a part of.) And some are just missing.
Some fonts you pick up that haven’t been used in a while, you literally have to dust off. There are other cases that just have old type that you have to be careful with. Others just don’t really print that well.
Presses are demanding too (we used Vandercooks). They have to be oiled at the beginning of every day, and cleaned, carefully, according to the procedure, at the end. The moment you stop using them, you have to put the rollers up and turn the press off to reduce wear.
And they have personalities too. One was much smoother, and produced much deeper impressions. The other had much more resistance at the beginning.
The inherent disorder. Each type case should have letters in specific compartments according to a California Job Case layout. That’s very rarely true. Oftentimes, you will find wrong letters, wrong variants, or even altogether wrong fonts in a compartment. (What you do then is return them to a special jar, if you can't recognize them.) This chaos sometimes gives you great ideas, though.
The situation is even worse with spaces, which are much harder to distinguish. We’re talking about: em space, en = 1⁄2 em space, 1⁄3 em space, 1⁄4 em space, 1⁄5 em space, 1⁄6 em space, 1⁄12 em space, and brass and copper, which are even thinner, and they don’t have any distinguishable features apart from their width. But if you’re talking, say, about 10 point type, the width differences will be minimal. (The trick here is to get something bigger, like an em space, put the what you think is the equivalent amount of thinner spaces next to it, and run your fingernail along. If you can’t feel anything, you’re all set to go. Usually you aren’t. :·) ). There are attempts, time and again, to sort them, but you can’t really win with entropy.
(Slugs and leading, used to separate lines from one another, and furniture, which are bigger wooden blocks, suffer from the same, but fortunately they are bigger and easier to put in a proper place.)
You are literally always at a brink of a major disaster of dropping type cases or space cases, which would result in a “type pie” on the floor. One way to prevent that is to open the drawer below half way through to be support for the one you intend to open.
Fortunately, that did not happen to anyone yesterday. Neither did any of the either stories we’ve heard from our instructor: someone’s long hair being jammed in the press, somebody tightening the furniture too hard and having their composition literally explode under pressure, the press behaving funny.
Warnings abound, and you have to be careful, but it’s really very much common sense. The most important thing, respect for the presses aside, is remembering to wash your hands often — not only not to make the printouts you hold dirty, but also not to ingest lead (which is otherwise benign). And yes, you can get dirty, especially if you deal with ink or subsequent cleaning. But that’s why we had aprons and gloves.
In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a huge exciting vocabulary to go with everything. Deadline (a physical boundary in the press that won’t allow you to overprint), packing (furniture et al. making sure your type is held firmly in place on the printing press), bone folder (above; a device to fold paper, traditionally cut from animal bone, but more recently plastic), plainer (something to ensure the type is… well, plain), galley (wheat you use to transfer your set type from composing stick to the press), etc. The rules and best practices that evolved over decades, if not centuries. And the little tools with funny names. And all the simple ways in which you can mess things up… and, oftentimes, you end up being happy that you did, because it teaches you to appreciate it even more.
And the sheer beauty of it all. The elegance of the tools and machinery. Great typography even in the restroom. :·) That one pristine Helvetica Bold letter held up to the light. The metallic sheen of the ink on the rollers. The way you can feel what you typeset and printed, and not only see it. The minute imperfections that add to the experience. That moment when you look at that first thing you just printed. And the idea that — even after spending the whole day doing something you could conceivably set up on your computer within 10 minutes — this is really the only way this should ever be done.
— San Francisco, 2008.
