On the plus side, this press has a print area of 14x20 inches (35 x 51 cm), which allowed me to start out with some good-sized prints right away, using a fairly small machine (it weighs around 250 pounds (115 kg) and is mechanically very simple.Ī post shared by 33 Books Co.® My Second Press Not so bad when the print had one color (as with my Wine Bottle Taxonomy print), but when a print had two or more colors (like my Essential Gin Cocktails print), a finished print might take me more like 4-5 minutes to print, or roughly 12 per hour.
In those first days of printing, I had to re-ink my artwork after every print, which got pretty old pretty quick! At my absolute fastest, I could reliably produce one decent-quality print every two minutes or so. Some proof presses are self-inking, but my Vandercook (a "No. Seeing an error in a printed piece is bad, but much worse when you see it reproduced a thousand times! Once you had your words and pictures locked up in a forme, you could use a proof press to quickly ink up and print a copy or two to share with your customer or coworkers, spotting any errors in spelling, punctuation or grammar before they made it to the production presses that printed much faster. Proof presses were designed to be used in busy print shops as a kind of prototyping press.
I didn't, but thankfully, I got very lucky with a knowledgeable seller who made sure I had the parts I needed to actually use the thing. I bought mine on eBay from a helpful gentleman in California, which is a good place to look if you know what to look for. When I decided to get back into that kind of printing, that's basically what I started with: a simple, hand-cranked and hand-inked 1927 proof press made by the Vandercook company. I studied printmaking in college at the University of Iowa, using mainly etching presses with carved wooden blocks that I inked by hand, with a glorified paint roller called a "brayer." This simple, physical, mechanical and tactile quality is what makes letterpress so charming to me.Ī post shared by 33 Books Co.® My First Press Over the years, technological advancements have sped the process of letterpress up: improved type composition tools such as the Linotype machine, photopolymer print plates, self-inking mechanisms, and electric motors, to name just a few.īut the basics of pressing type into page, one color at a time, remain the same, hundreds of years later. after a few days, you have a page. In a week, you might have a few pages, and after a year or ten, you have a Bible. In Gutenberg's day, they didn't have Tiger King, so this kind of tedious activity filled the space between their plague outbreaks. If you compose a whole bunch of letters into individual words, sentences, paragraphs. Ink is applied to a piece of type – also known as a "letter" – and then pressed into a piece of paper. Succinctly, it's the kind of printing that Johannes Gutenberg did. Instead, I decided to learn to letterpress.Ībove: My " Wine Bottle Taxonomy" print, inked by hand and printed with a deep impression on a 1927 Vandercook Proof Press. I've been a sourdough baker since before it was cool, so that was not really an option. Like a lot of folks, I had some time to fill during the early days of quarantine.
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