Book Arts and Photography » Letterpress

How to set movable type

Jim — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 01:10:10 +0000

It is easy, just watch this very short animation. Set the type upside down or “wrong reading” Click here if you have trouble getting the video to play.

Your printing may need some pressure!

Jim — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 10:56:15 +0000

Over a year ago, students in my Art 356 Print Production class designed layouts for a tutorial hand-out on Pressure Printing, also known as Stratography.

Tracy Honn provided the text from a hand-out that she used at a conference. I took photos of Carol Parker’s book that she created when she was in graduate school along with the original plates. Tracy Honn and Sarah Noreen printed a demo for photographs at the Silver Buckle Press. Two solutions are available for download. Alyssa Grabski’s solution is here. A link to Meg Neuville’s is here. Let me know if you have any questions.

Hamilton Museum of Wood Type

Jim — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 02:18:36 +0000

Two Rivers Wisconsin is home to the Hamilton Museum of Wood Type. This link will take you to a gallery of images that I took during a tour with Phil Hamilton and John Rieben.

Polymer Platemaking in the type lab or room 6451

Jim — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 19:39:47 +0000

Dennis Michael Peterson drew a large arrow on frosted mylar. As an experiment, we thought it would be fun to take a digital photo of the drawing and scale it down to print it on our letterpress printing press. His original graphite drawing is about 2 x 3 feet. In Adobe Photoshop we converted the image to a greyscale, set the image size to 8.5 x 11 inches and set the resolution to 300 ppi. The kind folks at Smartset in Minneapolis, MN made the negative for us and quickly mailed it to us. These plates are actually smaller samples that we had made for printing on a post card. Once the larger version is done, we will add more images to this post.

Below is a sample of the original image.