Hello. I am absolutely fascinated by the world of printmaking. I have a lot of questions, and I wonder if you have written them up before, but tumblr search is bad and none of your links seemed to lead to these.
1. This seems to be your private business? Is that so? Or is this a shared business/you’re an employee?
2. How did this business get started? How did you source all the equipment? What were the startup costs?
3. What sorts of end results do you find get ordered most?
4. Do you have any process information centrally documented in a nicer place than tumblr that I can refer to in order to study this?
5. Do you have any resources that are helpful to you? Communities, forums, websites, blogs, art guilds, consortiums, organizations, societies, whatever?
Printmaking as a repairable, sustainable, low-impact/footprint, human scale, tangible technology and method for publishing and information and art dissemination/proliferation is a strong interest and value of mine. I intend to study it in college, and help preserve any and all methods of analog printmaking. I’d love to establish a print shop local to me, as there are none where I am.
Thank you so much for sharing your videos and your work online! And thank you for your time.
Hello!! So happy to hear you've been afflicted with the printmaking obsession. It holds such a wide range of creative possibilities! but it's also really very small and niche in the world, which i think is part of why the communities of printers & artists I've seen have always been really welcoming.
i have sort of answered a little bit of this before in the an sword tag but i never did put that in the header and I have no idea why! it's up there now. anyway. i'll also say, all my answers are going to be letterpress-specific, since that's primarily what i do, but there's a whole lot more sub-disciplines out there under printmaking that encapsulate similar principles as repairable/salvaged equipment, low-impact production, independent publishing history, etc. college is a great time to explore all those options, although worth mentioning, where you go to school might be extremely determinant on what printing types are available to learn! my understanding is lots of colleges would've had their equipment donated by a printer or small publisher, or maybe they bought things in lots from estate sales; the curriculum could be determined by what equipment they have to work on, as well as the experience of the faculty, which are sometimes not quite the same. like, i went to Whitman and i have no complaints about the art department faculty! they taught me a ton of really valuable things from their experience that expanded my ability to make art but they all had very different training than the vanity publisher that donated his whole shop to their printmaking department, you know what i mean? so i also learned a lot of stuff at home relevant to job-printing that just wasn't in the same wheelhouse as any of my teachers. anyway all that to say you can probably check out what is actually living in a school's printmaking department and bios of its faculty to get some clues as to what kinds of process/production will be best supported there.
1: cyclesprefect is my personal imprint name, which i used to use more and still use for a handful of projects that are technically separate from my day-job letterpress work, but mostly it's just useful here as a slightly less professional account than my letterpress-as-day-job things which are primarily on instagram as Day Moon Press. Day Moon Press is the family business, which my mother ran from '76 until she had to retire around 2016. technically it's just me doing all of it these days, but both my parents are still pretty involved one way or another.
2: unfortunately by the family business nature i do not have any useful answers for you on sourcing/startup costs. my mother bought her first press in '75 and it was an extremely different market for equipment back then—most commercial print shops were of the opinion that letterpress was dying (and it was pretty financially inviable as a sole operation for a good 20 years there) and they were dumping the equipment or recycling the metal for $$. she got the big clamshell C&P that i still use all the time for………$75 plus the effort of moving it herself because that's what the guy would've gotten for recycling the cast iron body. the majority of the type collection came from one shop that was liquidating their letterpress department, i believe the guy pointed to two pillars in the warehouse and said, take everything between here and here—could've been as many as 400 founts—for $2000. these days the standing clamshell type of presses are more like $1500-5000 depending on size & condition, and you're still getting it moved it yourself. flatbed presses, which are more in demand as ideal tools for introductory classes, posters, and certain kinds of printmaking, i've seen those listed at anywhere between 5 and 15k. i mean i have questions for the people listing some of these things at over 10k, but it's pretty normal.
but like. this is still not a stable industry in any way yknow. sometimes a person is just selling a whole shop from storage for $4000?? and sometimes people need more space in their garage shop and they just list free presses for pickup. vet at your own risk obviously but. i guess in that way it's still the same as the 70s: keep an eye out for what's available local to you, and people are out there still trying to pass down the equipment to somebody who's going to use it rather than scrap it.
i will also say that at least where i am (seattle) by far the most expensive thing is the real estate to house the equipment. especially if you're interested in being able to work with handset type (which to be clear i recommend highly!! all the low-impact, tangible qualities, handset type is a prime example of those principles), all the tools that go into it can take up a bit more room than lots of other art material. there are definitely options for small, tabletop-size clamshells that can be just a few hundred dollars, but fully refurbished ones can top 1k too. not seeing a lot of tabletop flatbed/proofing presses out there right now, but vandercook no. 0s or similar could be good for a smaller studio as well. anyway something garage-sized or even a second-bedroom sized studio is absolutely workable, you don't need hundreds of square footage to do really really cool stuff, but in big cities it is definitely a hurdle just finding the space to utilize the equipment you find. but i also think that's generally what a lot of printers do anyway: work backwards from the equipment they find to a process that works for them. there's a lot of possibilities in any one press type, you just gotta explore what they're capable of.
if you can find any kind of community print studio around you i've seen that work well for people getting started—work with what they have for a while, get comfortable with a couple kinds of printing, take some stuff for a test drive, and then do more targeted searching for equipment so that you only need to find space for what you really want to use.
3. a lot of custom stuff i do is stationery, professional or personal—lots of business cards/letterhead/etc. for small local businesses, a bunch of wedding invitations, sometimes personalized notecards. i also do custom art prints/poetry broadsides, often for some kind of event/anniversary, like an excerpt from a wedding song for an anniversary type of thing, or very small (1-10 copies usually) editions of hand-bound books, typically where the author comes to me and needs a couple copies for friends/family. i also do retail notecards/prints/small books, but tbh i don't spend the time to make that contribute to the business model most of the year. holiday season i go to as many art markets as i can and it really does help, but there's other printers out there making their whole living off retail/wholesale of their designs and that's not me. i'm way more invested in making time for the custom projects.
4. this is the closest i get to centralized, unfortunately :( i'm happy to answer specific questions about printing process or any wips i post, but i don't really try to make it like, generally educational. most ways of learning in print are i think very case-specific anyway, dictated by the materials/equipment available and the desired end results. once there's a skeleton of tools and subject matter, it's a lot easier to figure out what information is important.
5. there's definitely a strong online community of printers/printmakers! partly because we're a small group scattered all over, partly because exchange of information is pretty central to the survival of the craft. Briar Press is where those classified links come from, it's a pretty active place not just for equipment sales but also general discussion and they've got a specific category for beginners in letterpress. i was just dinking around on there looking for those classifieds and bumped into interesting stuff all on accident. drinking milk to prevent lead poisoning used to be a thing?? it doesn't work, don't try that, but apparently that used to be shop policy in some places. anyway.
unfortunately instagram is the social media platform i find most active with print community, but ah well. chances are there's some group local to you that you could link up with for in-person type things, even if you have to expand the definition of printing to more disciplines (engraving, intaglio, riso, etc) to get a cluster going. you can also expand your search to orgs around book arts, you'll find a lot of printmakers/printer types there too. i keep meaning to go to an in-person Seattle Print Arts event but i always forget to make the time. PiP has a physical location again but they're keeping some of their remote programming, i think mostly shop talks. again depends where you are/if you can travel much, but look for any Wayzgoose events near you if you want to find people in person! they're like a printer-specific type of event, usually these days they're set up like conferences, with talks & workshops and equipment swaps and probably some vending. you meet tons of people there that all have their own niche interests within print, it's great. there's a couple regular/large ones in California, there's two in washington state that i go to often, i'm sure there's more all over. don't ask me about hamilton wayzgoose, i don't know anything more than what other people are posting
last thing on resource gathering, can't recommend enough just getting a couple old books. even regular old original manuals for specific types of equipment, which you can frequently find somewhere on archive.org, or scanned & logged on a janky-looking website some old guy (affectionate) posted 20-30 years ago. antiquarian book fairs, antique shops? poke around and you might find something quite dry and extremely useful about how printing was done 50-100 years ago. at a book fair ages ago my parents got this pair of little "pocket" books that are way too fucking thick to fit in a pocket that were printed in the 1890s, and it's just this one printer in England talking about how to set up your print business, how much to pay what kind of workers, what to charge for this kind of work, how to lay out your type cases when some of your employees probably can't read, etc. they're SO cool.
that's was a lot and i still probably missed something or forgot something important!! but yeah the ask box is always open, im just slow because i say too many words. have fun exploring the medium & good luck finding your print people, i know they're out there!
hi! I love your work and the process vids are so cool. it's so neat to get a look under the hood like this! in the latest one, what does american spacing mean in typesetting?? is it the one or two spaces after a period thing?
hello!! unfortunately what it means is that lead type cast in America and type cast in Europe used different units of measure, and the proportional maths involved aren't compatible. it's very very annoying. the way typesetting is handled is exactly the same, but the Didot & American systems use a different base unit to determine the size of a single point. You can basically get away with using 12pt American spacing with the closest Didot size of type, it'll just be off by a point and a half or so, but it's not best practices to mix and match if you don't have to. it makes for a fundamentally unsteady form, and a form with justified margins is already inherently kind of springy.
I've got a handful of European-cast type faces and a chunk of spacing to match it which is great! but it's hard to keep the two different types completely separate. some Didot stuff is only, like, a half a point off or less from some other size of American spacing :/ Most of the Didot i have has been painted pink on its feet to ID it, and I don't put any of it in the general spacing cabinets, only in appropriate type cases and some specially marked compartments. I had to use some American spacing in the project in that video since it's so long I ran out of my Didot supply, and when I distribute it all i'll have to check every piece to make sure I don't put any American into that case.
#op how do you make the custom metal logo plate @xactodreams
i don't make them myself, i prep the art from digital files and get the magnesium plates from evergreen engravers! been buying from them for years and years, totally consistent & they're close by to me. I hear good things about beaver engraving in oregon as well, but i don't know much about specific engravers outside the pnw. the engraving is a pretty cool process, there's a photoexposure step that fixes a protective film to the surface of the plate, and then some kind of. acid mist part that removes the negative space with a sloping edge.
idk how much context you have for commercial letterpress backend so ignore me if i'm repeating things you know! letterpress classes might do at least one project where you make plates directly from a digital file like these, but they'll usually use photopolymer rather than magnesium. It's a way cheaper material (NOT worse to print from, seriously, there's just a lot of other factors that make magnesium worth the price for some things), but the file preparation is basically the same. vector art is vastly preferable, use if at all possible, but raster is workable as long as it's at least 600 ppi. 1200 is ideal.
i also use photopolymer for some things, & the differences between polymer & magnesium plates are……complicated. also there's a bunch of options within each category about thickness & engraving depth & mounting & other file prep finessing etc etc, anyway! happy to answer any specific questions about it if you have them but that's the short version.
Hi! I put a note in the tags but I’m worried I will have no way of seeing/remembering to look for a response to this so I’m sorry upfront if you don’t hear back form me. Your are more than welcome to send this in chat to me.
What is a long s?
AH it's the out-of-use form of the lowercase s! the italic form might be more familiar to most people. it’s still used in sheet music sometimes, i think?
[image description: a photo of a type specimen page for Caslon, showing the “quaint” characters. the long s in a Roman face looks like an f where the crossbar doesn’t go all the way through; the italic long s looks like a swooping f with no crossbar at all. the long s also comes with several ligatures for closer kerning between specific letter combinations: sb, sk, st, ex. end description.]
when to use it and when not to becomes a little convoluted when you get into hyphens and abbreviations and stuff, but basically the short s of modern use used to be largely terminal, for use at the ends of words, and only used at the beginning or middle to solve kerning problems between particular letter combinations—sb, sk, etc. that Babelstone blog cites really good sources for the guidelines for use from the time, but it doesn't get into whys, and I'm assuming the why is all about casting lead type. it describes a change in the 18th century where those letter combinations stop using the short s and start using the long s, which i figure was probably about improvements in type casting technology.
hmm by which i mean, in the same way we still use ligatures in some digital fonts to kern f’s and i’s and l’s closer together, the long s requires special ligature characters to fit it with i’s and l’s and k’s together on one body, so that the overhanging bowl doesn’t knock into dots and stems and stuff. and that’s a ton of special characters beyond the regular alphabet to have to make for a full font!! so, i assume, before some kind of technological efficiency was achieved in the foundries, the short s was the solution for letter combinations that otherwise wouldn’t kern properly.
and then the long s kind of dies in English usage at the end of the 18th century anyway because, probably, typecasters & typesetters got fucking sick of having to dedicate 12 whole boxes in the case to the letter s, which, fair. but the Look of that sweet spot where the ligatures are all figured out and delicate and the finial short is doing a cool texture thing, i like it! it’s got a visual rhythm i’m into, for some reason.
ſkins :D ſubſtrates :DD ſucceſſors :DDD i just think it’s neat!!
huh! this camera angle makes this machine look much less likely to tear your arm off if you move wrong while using it.
which is a thing I've been meaning to ask about for a while; how careful do you have to be? and is there anything you have to do to make it close each time around, or does it just do that every time (so if you fumble it goes ahead anyway)?
oh boy do i need a disclaimer about this topic? maybe. it seems wise. i am not presuming to remotely teach anons on the internet how to use a dangerous piece of equipment here, i'm just describing my own safety standards for my own person and fingers etc., and with that out of the way, anon, i tell you what, i love to talk about shop safety—
the main answer is, very careful!! the C&P will absolutely just crush my bones if my hands are still in there when it closes. For the most part it would be difficult to get hands into any other moving parts, the gears and things are enclosed or behind the flywheels. but there's one slyly available part—it's underneath the board where i place the printed sheets—that pinches closed every rotation and did, hmm, remove the last third of somebody's finger that I personally know of.
All of our clamshell presses were originally built to run on treadle power, like i peddle it with my foot, which gives pretty good control over slowing down the speed in the middle of a rotation if i need extra time with it open! and there's a foot brake on em that kills the momentum surprisingly quickly. except, with this big one, the treadle got taken off and the flywheel was connected with a belt to a variable speed motor, so, now i kickstart it at the flywheel and once the motor is on the brake does nothing. (i am told these presses also had available some kind of optional Safety Guard bar across the top that like. i don't know. smacked the back of your hands if you left them in there too long?? i've never seen one, my mother threw it in the garbage decades ago because all it really did was reduce the time you had to place the sheets, and occasionally startled her in the middle of a feed. not all that safe actually!! aside—i have not injured myself on any of my own presses, but i did break a finger on somebody else's #4 Vandercook, the flatbed kind where the cylinder rolls across the horizontal bed, which are supposed to be the safer ones, and it's really nearly the same as my Vandercook SP15, but it had this safety bar i wasn't expecting across the front of the cylinder and i jammed my finger right under there!! you're supposed to just safely let the whole back end of the sheet flop around the cylinder uncontrolled?? hmm. the joint still complains in cold weather harrumph harrumph, anyway, i guess the lesson here is, not only is this not safety instructional material, it's not even necessarily informative regarding anybody else's equipment, or even anybody else's practices on the same equipment.)
so like, i have to be careful, yes, but on the other hand, the Safety Rules for me on the clamshell presses are pretty basic, just ironclad, you know? the machine is going to do the exact same thing every time, especially on the motor. as long as i also do the same thing every time, i will be fine. and no fluttering, oof, and no tentative tapping sheets into the pins. scariest thing in the world to me is watching a feed where people's hands do anything other than direct, steady, a to b motions.
and when i do fumble a sheet, step one is drop it, let it just fall into the press. step two is to throw off the impression lever if i have time, so it still closes but doesn't quite hit the sheet, and maybe that saves the paper and i can just retake it. but my hands are more valuable than a sheet of paper, even the really fancy stuff from Italy.
alright, I intend to say this almost every time I see you post but keep forgetting. so:
the stuff you do is extremely cool? and I feel like I would watch the hell out of, for example, if you had a youtube channel going into all the intricacies of how this stuff works and what you're up to. (it could go in the pile with the bookbinding and the machinists.)
Tumblr and one minute videos being what they are, I can kinda understand what's going on and how it works, but nonetheless: It's very cool, and always an enjoyable addition to the feed. Cheers. 💙
f;aslksskld;ks thank you anon!! to be honest i have considered something like that, or maybe some kind of very chill creative stream—it's just hard to imagine being able to work and manage the camera stuff by myself, i would need at least three hands to get useful views of everything. i might figure it out someday!
for now i try to be both accurate and concise about describing what im doing, but concise often means Jargon, so, always feel free to ask if it's not clear what i'm doing or mean or just what a Jargon is!
Hello! You do really lovely and fantastic work! I was curious; what led you to become a letterpress printer? Or just do printing in general?
ah thank you!! the short answer is maybe sort of boring in that it was less of a lead-up and more of a constant? i grew up in the apartment above my mother’s letterpress shop, and my dad grew up in his grandpa’s shop, so the whole subject of book arts and printing & printmaking was everywhere in the house. i was doing little linoleum cuts when i was a kid, and typesetting and file prep for mom’s shop in high school, and i always enjoyed it. i could go on for hours!! sorry, i will not, but among many things, i like the physicality and problem-solving of it, and the engineering, and the necessity of attention to both very small & literally invisible details—
to be clear my mother never expected me to take over the business, but in college i did uuuh study basically every available art medium except printing/book arts, which was great on a lot of levels and really helped me articulate why letterpress is my absolute favorite to work with. came back to work with my mother full time after college, and as she’s retiring the shop is becoming mine! i pay myself less in actual earth dollars and more in studio time for my own projects which is, i mean in most ways it’s a steal, and it keeps me from getting bored with the same-ness inherent to commercial letterpress work.
