A Passion for Letterpress: Refurbishing a Century-old Machine

While in England for the 2013 ITU Age Group World Championship last year, Jim and I did our usual jaunt around London-town, especially to familiar spots to purchase gifts for family and friends. One of our favorite places is Fortnum & Mason, the 300-year-old department store on Piccadilly.

During our stroll around the store, we took in the London Design Festival where SORT (Society of Revisionist Printmakers) Design was demoing their Letterpress printing process. I took some pictures and was helped in typesetting my name to print a souvenir notebook with one of their presses. Here are some photos I took of the event - ink, paper, samples, type, and most importantly, the press - I can still smell the ink (one of my favorite smells in the whole world):

A few months ago, I hooked up with another printmaker on Tumblr, Antiquated Press. One of their posts was about restoring an old letterpress machine, and it lit a fire under me to finally do something fun and productive with the tiny letterpress printer - a Baltimore No. 9 - that my father-in-law gave me for Christmas a couple years ago. He found it at an auction, and knowing my passion for old-school printing/printmaking, thought it would be a nice antique for me to have (the seller included the press, the lead type, and the old roller, from circa the 1890s).

The first thing I had to do was find out if it was in good enough shape to ever print again. Close inspection revealed that indeed it was. Although it had been repainted, all the parts were in some semblance of working order except the ink roller - which had pretty much reached a state of petrification. (Seriously, when I started cleaning up parts, it broke off its metal shaft like chunks of volcanic rock.)

I enlisted my husband Jim to help -- because guys always know exactly how to play with machine parts and solvents (think WD-40). He helped me take the press completely apart, get rid of the rust, and clean up all the pieces. Steel wool was involved. Here are some photos of this process:

The deconstructed press:

The springs, screws, and roller hooks soaking in one of those solvents, something called "PB Blaster":

The chase - which was in very good shape and the inking plate which had dried ink from God-knows-what-century on it:

The body of the press after cleaning it up:

The super-clean inking plate after scraping ink off and and steel-wooling, and the other parts nicely de-rusted and cleaned:

The sorted type (don't even ask how long it took me to sort type with my old blurry eyes and a tweezer after it was delivered in a plastic baggie):

The final task would be to find or make a new roller. Thank heavens for e-bay. Would you believe that someone actually builds these things? I purchased a brand new roller for a Baltimore No. 9 press on e-bay. It had new trucks and rubber that didn't look shriveled up like an old tree.

New roller next to shaft of old roller (after carving off what was left of the old rubber):

And then came the final assembly. The only thing I was afraid of was if everything would actually fit together with the new roller. Much to my surprise, it fit like a dream. Here are two shots of the roller in different positions - on the inking plate and along the chase - perfectly flush:

Stay tuned to see what I manage to print with this thing. The only thing I can guarantee is that any prints will be rather tiny since the platen (the plate that holds the paper) is not much larger than a business card. But I just got my first delivery of letterpress ink, and a friend at the museum is digging up additional artifacts (printing blocks and tools for positioning the printing plate and type in the chase) from his old letterpress printing days.

Artist. Slacker (sort of).

(SPOILER ALERT - if you want my xmas card to be a surprise, don't look)

I ran out of time and energy yesterday and the result was that I had no drawing to post. I did do something creative however. I printed the first color for this year's 4-color lino-cut xmas cards. This year, I've gotten more ambitious than in years past in several ways:

• At my husband Jim's insistence, I've come up with a registration mechanism that uses an old set of registration tabs and Post-It paper flags. We've put two hole-punched tabs on every card and now all we have to do is pray it works - because registration has always been the most difficult (read: next-to-impossible) part of the printing process because I kept thinking we could do it by just lining up the edges of the cards on the printing plate.
• I'll be attempting to represent many more than four colors in this year's four-color print. The most colors I've ever printed on my cards is four, but usually, I break the image down into four distinct colors and it consequently ends up all a bit cartoony. This year, I'm going to attempt to make realistic gradations of color using my linoleum carving skills. Yeah, I'm not expecting this to go perfectly.
• And, obviously, from the previous bullet, I'm going to attempt much more realism in this year's card.
• I'm planning on printing two colors in a not-recommended order: light over dark

Three and a half hours of last night were spent printing color number one. The first color always takes longest because the inking area of the plate is the largest, and rolling them takes much longer. It took even more time than it should have when I started fretting that I totally screwed up the initial registration. The pleasant surprise was that the first color - a slightly red-shifted light blue - turned out very good with the [mindlessly-chosen-yellow-shifted-off-white] paper color.

I'm not expecting miracles with the rest of the card, because of what I'm attempting in bullet number four above: printing two lighter colors over the darkest color. Using samples of printed color from old cards, I tried mixing the two lighter colors and layering them over a darker one, and it looks like it will work. But, execution is always the hardest part of printing. 

In theory, everything works, right?

Anyway, here's a teaser of the print process (yes, that's light blue, not gray, stupid phone cam):

Custom Greeting Cards -The Finished Product

With training and work I've not had time to post a blog about the finished greeting cards that I made for auction - but I have a moment before my long bike ride today to show you how they turned out.

The printing process went quite smoothly. I only had to print 5 of each card and they were all one color, so all I needed was an inking plate, black (oil-based Speedball) block printing ink, and a small 2.5 inch soft rubber brayer (Speedball). The inking plate is a cheap marble slab that I bought years ago at Home Depot in the tile area. You could just as simply use a pane of glass, it just has to be a non-porous flat surface:

I created a template out of a scrap piece of paper/newsprint with pencil lines drawn on it for lining up the block along two adjacent edges so that I have the correct margin. The block is placed with its edge on the pencil lines and the paper is placed to line up along the same two adjacent edges of the template border itself. The only tricky part of this step is to make sure that the card will fold with the image on the correct side. Here are some shots of how I line everything up:



And finally, I run it through my small etching press, with its roller adjusted to the height of the block with the paper on it. I do a dry run - a non-inked plate with paper on top - to adjust the height of the roller. You want pressure to offset the ink onto the paper, but not so much pressure to get ink to spread outside the lines or to damage the linoleum block:

You can see the finished cards in the first photo at the top of the page. I started the bidding at $5, in $1 minium increments and by day 2, the bidding was up to $12. Don't know how much they sold for, but I got requests by workshop attendees to do another edition of cards.

An Easy-week Art Project

This week is an easy training week which gave me time to work on an art project that needs to be done by 29 April.

Every year since 1994, I've made Christmas cards using either linoleum block printing or screenprinting. Until 2007, I did all the production by hand which was extremely time consuming and labor intensive. In 2007, I purchased a small etching press from Dick Blick to finally streamline the process! (much to the dismay of my right arm, which looked forward to the pain and muscle-building process every holiday season).

This year, I'm using the press to print my first set of cards for non-Christmas purposes and I wanted to blog about the process for everyone who asks me how I do it. The cards are a set of five animals, to be auctioned as a fundraiser for the Madagascar Fauna Group in conjunction with Cleveland Metroparks Zoo's 2009 Prosimian Husbandry Workshop. The prints are one-color (black), so there won't be any discussion about registering multiple colors.

I start with a photograph manipulated in Photoshop for size/color. I print it out at the proper size (the card image this time will be 1/4 the size of a 8.5x11 in slice of paper - so 4.25x5.5 and there will be five, two landscape, three portrait). Then I gather the necessities: music (most important - carving and printing MUST be done to good music!), linoleum block (I use Dick Blick's golden lino sheets, they're easier to cut than battleship gray linoleum and they don't seem to harden over time), lino cutters (speedball makes a set of 5 cutters with handles) and carbon paper to offset the image to the block:



The next step is to offset the image onto the paper and start carving. I usually start with the most interesting and intricate area, so if I screw up the carving, I can start over without too much time lost. For animals, this translates into: start with the face.

Here is the progression described above:

In my next blog I'll show the five finished blocks and the printing process. Now I have to go buy paper. My favorite paper for printing cards is called Stonehenge and it comes in several neutral colors. It's heavy 100% cotton acid-free paper and I can tear it to any size. I don't use the already cut and deckled-edge card stock, mainly because I want the finished piece to be a frame-able piece of fine art disguised as a greeting card.