More letterpress adventures

There are no pictures of me in action this time as I was the only one in the studio Book Studio, due to term break and Caren is having a well deserved research break- part of which was at Otago printing press, Dunedin. So it was just me and The Beast. I was a little nervous so I did venture into the nearby honours studios and ask the conscientious students socialising working to come running is if they heard screams. But I am please to say that I did not fuck up the press or rip the paper drum (I have forgotten it's Proper Name) although I did print red hate and silver love onto it once or twice. It does sound as if it has a new wheeze but I could just be being paranoid.

I was printing up a couple of things- the extra chapzines (which is still in process but fairly straight forward as the chases are already set), and a cover for the new Flaps: Hate Mail #3. With Caren not being there to check my chases I made several mistakes. Not so many on the first plate- which I printed in red- so I could so straight over the orange of the chapzine plate and not have to clean the rollers. But with the second plate- silver- it took a a while to work out how I should set the chase and place it on the bed.

Take one:

Take Two:

There are four changes that you can see. There was more padding to bring short letters up to type high. With photocopying it's so easy to make a change to where you put a page and my mind is so geared to reversing and the paper and printing face down that it was a little weird thinking through how I had to place and set each plate. Caren would have answered all my questions in two seconds before I had placed it on the bed, where there is not enough space to turn the chases without lifting them up and therefore losing loose letters and all the paper padding you have in place.

The original idea was to have the two plates printed over each other as you can see below:

But as you can see it wasn't working. I set both plates with wooden type as they are a lot larger and you can quickly create a solid page of type. However the same scale makes over printing in this style harder read. I was realising then what was working with the two colour plates in the Nature Strip Chapzine. But the biggest and mist painful aspect about making changes when you have the chase in place , is that it takes many hours to set the plate, and a good hour to clean up so you feel very committed to getting something printed- or using the plates that you have. So an emergency decision was made to print the second plate on the back side. Here's the two sides:

It still needed something to make it work and to make it clear what the zine was about and who by. So we stamped the cover with our trusty rubber stamps- used in three Flaps editions now, the other two being Sad Sack Saturday Night and Joe Jobs.

You can buy Flaps and other zines at Sticky in Melbourne and online with Smells like zines and hopefully soon Format.

Procrastinating- Berlin alphabet

I bought this set of type 10 years ago in Berlin. At the time I thought they where rubber stamps- and it might turn out that they are in fact rubber stamps, but lately my theory is that they are some hybrid letterpress. They seem to be a very hard rubber that has been glued onto some pine bases. For the arguments pro and contra them being letterpress:-

Pro:

The rubber is too hard for rubber stamps and it seems to reject water based inks. The ink tends to separate on the surface of the letter making it hard to get good coverage and a dark print (in next post). As I bought them in Berlin from someone selling various pillaged things from the former East, it could have just been bad quality rubber.

Contra:

The bases seem to be some kind of pine or other soft wood. Pine is not usually used in moveable type as it gets dented too easily. I have been wondering though whether the rubber tops have been removed from their original bases and remounted as the bases have no ink stains and x heights are also not consistent. The other fact that counts against these being moveable type is that the profile is too high for moveable type.

I can’t remember what the standard measurement is for type, Caren has it pasted helpfully on the wall opposite from where you would stand in order to set the pressure of the press: the beast (I’m not sure whether it has a nickname or gender- for me it is gender neutral). My memory says .987 but maybe that’s from an inch? All the measurements for type and furniture we have in the Book Studio are in inches (is all moveable type like this?), which make all the measurements really abstract for me.

However whatever the original use of these letters, I am going to cut the bases and use them as moveable type. And as there is only one alphabet I have started to make several sets of letters in polymer by filling up some of the negative spaces on the films I set to get the centre of the Nature Strip chapzine made.

Of course I have absolutely no spare time to be doing this or writing this entry- I am filming part of the Aichi work tomorrow and have things to do before then- but I find myself being quiet fascinated by this little project.

Along with the questions above my main question is: What is the type font? And what would the capitals look like? Any ideas out there?

What I have been up to #1

photos top to bottom: Caren doing some fine tuning of the furniture so it fix printing shadows on the irregular type; wooden type of first plate; dancing with the Graphix cylinder proofing press.

I’ve been pretty busy in the last couple of weeks, finishing the editing of a new part to walking through clear fells, and printing quiet a bit in the Book Studio at ANU. I have set plates in the past but had out sourced the printing. The exciting thing over the last couple of weeks is that I have started driving the beast of the press. Caren uses the driving metaphor quiet a bit but I found for me it was a bit more like dancing- once I had worked out which foot was going to step on the release that grabs the paper and which hand would hold the paper to the drum and press the print button, it all started to flow.

Shots above are from the first layer of translucent fluro orange.

Posting this now and will post second plate and more images and explanation next post- which will hopefully be tomorrow but as Lateline Business is on the TV it means it’s time to go to bed.