EM Letterpress

Big Man Little Press

noreply@blogger.com (EM letterpress) — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 00:31:00 +0000

Our new part-timer is Dave, who is by several inches the tallest man in the shop. Dave has been running presses since high school, and is now happily back to letterpress (after spending far too long with a process we hear about from time to time called "Off Set" printing, whatever that is). His transition was a matter of slowing down, and nothing like creasing 75 seating cards on a lever operated table top press (often referred to as a "One Arm Bandit") to put some perspective on things.

The Heidelberg Windmill by contrast to the table top is a big press. It weights in at around 2200 pounds and occupies a good 16 square feet of floor space. But today as we ran a two color booklet I looked over and noticed that maybe the Windmill isn't such a large machine after all. It really is all a matter of perspective - or it could be the wide angle lens.

Padding

noreply@blogger.com (EM letterpress) — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 03:01:00 +0000

A note pad is a pretty simple thing. A stack of sheets glued to a piece of chipboard. With any paper cutter and a dab of glue anyone can make a pad. 250 50 sheet pads is another story. The press sheets start out as 4up, a piece of chipboard is inserted between every 50 press sheets while the press is running off the 3,125 impressions. Theses stacks of sheets and board are then trimmed, stacked, glued, and broken apart. It's been a standard job in many print shops for generations. Our new part time pressman showed off his technique for us today, and the tradition lives on.

Die Cutting

noreply@blogger.com (EM letterpress) — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 01:50:00 +0000

Designed by Merike Van Zanten of Double Dutch Design, die cut on one of our Heidelberg Windmills. The learning curve (pun intended) with this die was in getting the widths of the lines to meet the strictures of the die making process. Once that was figured out with the help of our very patient die maker, it was a simple process of press set up to cut 100 + sheets. Punching out all the shapes was not as easy, but our friend Merike was up to the task. Below is a shot of the back of the steel cutting die, to give an idea how well made it is.

CMYK + 1

noreply@blogger.com (EM letterpress) — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 20:44:00 +0000

Designed by Jen Strickland for Amy Clarkson. Both designer and customer were on press to help guide the process, mostly for the contrast the black plate gave. The four colors were run without the benefit of a densitometer, but the results were for the most part consistent and true. Text was printed in a spot pantone gray, instead of a screen of black. Screened type may look alright flat from an offset press, but it detracts from typography in letterpress. Process printing with letterpress is not just fun, it's reliable, and beautiful. There's an elegance to the layers of ink and impression that only letterpress can offer. In the case of a very short run like this (250 press sheets) it was also very practical.

Solids, Floods, Bleeds & Knockouts

noreply@blogger.com (EM letterpress) — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 15:35:00 +0000

What's the hardest thing to do in letterpress printing? Without a doubt it is the full coverage solid with the knock out. We do our best to discourage people from making us do them... but sometimes we recommend them. As far as we're concerned, difficulty isn't a good reason not to do something. There are times when letterpress does a better job than offset when it comes to solids. We put down more ink, much more, and we drive that ink into the paper. The result is better saturation, and less risk of rub off (for textured papers). The problem is that it's slow and with fine knockouts there is some compromise to the cleanliness of the outlines, with some papers we get a mottled look (that some clients ask for). A lot of ink gets used: one solid was 9.5 x 6.5, on very absorbent thick paper, an edition of 1800, and it used nearly 3 pounds of ink. The result was stunning (bright orange in last photo). The following images show the process, from ink fountain to the drying of short lifts, to final products. Enjoy.

For solids especially, inks must be modified

The fountain must be used

Rider roller has to be put over the form rollers

Offset powder - lots of offset powder - or slip sheeting if that fails

Constant checking of press sheets throughout the run

Must be set aside to dry in short lifts

Product that is well worth the effort

Old School

noreply@blogger.com (EM letterpress) — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 16:25:00 +0000

There was time in the not too long ago when prayer cards were a staple of job shop work. My friend Ray of R. Deschamps Classic Letterpress Impressions used run quite a few of these for funeral homes (before the switch to ink-jets and digital service). He had the prayers in standing type, separated into into "His" and "Her" and all he did when the orders came in was typeset names and dates. The lockups were the same every time, and his hand fed 8x12 C&P was ready. At one time I ran some these for him. I wish had a quarter of the metal type Ray has - and his prized Intertype caster.

Last week a priest came by and asked if we could imprint these cards for his nephew's first communion. As it turned out he had asked all over town who could do this work for him, and someone told him that we were the last ones around who could. "You need one of those old letterpress machines to feed such a small card." And so we did. He gave us 75 cards, and we delivered 73. We lost none to printing, but three jammed in the laminator. It feels good to be still relevant and useful.

Sharing the Love

noreply@blogger.com (EM letterpress) — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 01:24:00 +0000

When I started teaching The Art of the Book at Brown University three years ago, I became reinvigorated in many ways. I began making and showing art again, my love of books and printing was taken back to the first time I saw a press and took in the smells of a pressroom, and to the slow contemplative rhythm of bookbinding and the beauty of paper. It's no mystery how that rebirth came about: the students. When you teach, it's like lighting a match and putting it to kindling. I hope you take the time to visit CTO Books and Boxes to see how one student took the match right out of my hand and lit her own fire. Keep up the good work Caitlyn.

A Busy Couple of Days

noreply@blogger.com (EM letterpress) — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 02:56:00 +0000

We've been having some fun here lately trying to crank through a bunch of very different jobs.

Edge painting is popular these days, and not wanting to be left out... In fact we've been edging cards for years, but as it's a tricky thing to do we've always been quiet about it. But this job is special, and here we're experimenting with different shades of red - our first "to spec" color posed some questions that we passed on to the designer, and that turned into a chance to try different shades. A small batch of cards can be edged very easily - even a single card - and who doesn't like R&D time?

Envelope lining is sticky business, but someone's got to do it. There was a debate about whether or not showing the UHU glue stick was giving away a trade secret. If so, here's another trade secret: you have to stand there and glue every one up, and slip each one into place, and make sure it's straight, and well adhered, and if it is, you do exactly what you did 199 more times.

Here's a debossed pattern with no ink, registered to the rubine red plate. Note how it wasn't referred to as a "blind" impression. "Blind" means not registered to anything else on the sheet - a little nomenclature for our fellow obsessive/compulsives.

Who do you have to know to get something printed around here? Our note paper has been months in the making... stay tuned.

Why Work With Letterpress Printers?

noreply@blogger.com (EM letterpress) — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 23:53:00 +0000

There are more reasons to hire a letterpress printer than just the printing. Something to keep in mind when contracting a letterpress printer is that most of the small shops around the country are run by artists with advanced degrees who know how to use heavy machinery. What that combination of sensibility and skill indicates (besides self indulgent over-education and the recklessness to tinker with big heavy toys) is a genuine aptitude for problem solving.

It’s the odd job that comes our way that doesn’t require at least one conversation with the designer to be sure all the possibilities have been explored. Many jobs begin with the sentence “What I’m trying to achieve is… do you think it’s feasible to…” We’ve been stumped a few times, but mostly we’ve been able to help.

The work pictured here started with a conversation about process and timing. 200 photos needed to be glued onto the cover of a pocket folder. The folders had to first be printed in two colors with a debossed panel for the photos to fit within. We’d never tipped photos into anything before. What kind of glue to use? Spray adhesive, double stick tape, a laminating glue (and if so what kind)? Resin coated photo paper doesn’t take any glue all that easily, and then there’s the problem having the paper folder accept the glue without warping, and not least of all the problem of timing and expense. Not to mention that the photos came off of a roll that produced stubbornly curly 12 up sheets that needed to be flattened and accurately trimmed apart.

Flattening and trimming the photos wasn’t as hard as doing similar work with fragile and thin rice paper for an artist’s book years ago, but it required similar technique and attention to detail. Art school paid off!

Tipping the photos in place on the folder’s cover came down to the right laminating glue, and the right amount of the right glue. The rest was about careful and clean hands, and consistent work. Our next door neighbor who just happens to be an amazing oil painter (with an MFA by the way) was able to help us meet our deadline.

Sustainable Printing

noreply@blogger.com (EM letterpress) — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 23:59:00 +0000

We are often asked whether or not our practice as letterpress printers is sustainable. The photo accompanying this blog post says it all - it's not our typical photo is it? It's a tulip. Note how there's no presses around it, no Mothers' Day cards hanging off of it, and no promise to create a limited edition print of it. Sometimes it seems that the most ecologically friendly printing is no printing at all. Like every other business we consume resources, materials, and produce waste. There is no way around it, except one: use less, waste less.
   Some printers advertise that they use Soy Based inks. It's a little known fact that almost all inks formulated for sheet fed presses (letterpress and offset) are soy based. If soy oil isn't used, then linseed oil is. Both soy and linseed are a product of American agriculture, both are renewable and efficiently farmed commodities, and both produce an oil that is VOC free, or close to it. Every sheet fed operation in the country uses soy based ink, or its ecological equal linseed based ink. But let this be understood soberly: is the harvesting and processing of the commercial crops that end up in our inks carbon neutral or sustainable? Is it truly an advantage to use a soy based ink? The more important question is how much soy based ink does a printer use? And what is it washed up with, and how is the waste from the wash-up being disposed of?
   Some printers advertise that they only ever print on recycled stock. Try to find a paper these days that doesn't contain some post-consumer content. Or better yet, try to find out what paper mill is still cutting down virgin forests, bleaching it's fibers, and then pouring the byproducts into rivers and wetlands. Consider that 100% cotton papers are only as affordable as they are because they don't use cotton from the farm, but the by product of knitting mills and recycling worldwide. The truth is that the production of paper is very efficient by necessity, and very clean by regulation. Your choice of paper these days is not between one that is bad for the environment and one that is good, but between one that is good and one that is better. There are other aspects of this to consider that are more relevant, like how much carbon was produced in getting the paper to press, and how much produced to print on it?
   We take these questions very seriously at EM Letterpress. We know that like other letterpress printers our presses use less energy to run than the bigger machines of conventional printing, but to be fair, we also know that we fire up our presses more often as we tend to do smaller jobs. We also know that compared with the conventional processes we use less sheets to set up with, and produce less waste in running. We use less ink, and yes of course, our inks are all vegetable oil based - mostly soy oil. We wash up with water soluble biodegradable non-hazardous VOC free solvents. We also use naptha based press wash, but very little - at most 10 gallons in a busy year. We collect our waste in a 50 gallon drum (to be disposed of properly when full), and as a testament to how little waste we produce, the drum has been in our shop for nearly 5 years, and it's not two-thirds full yet. We almost always print on cotton, or part post-consumer content papers, and all of our off-cuts are recycled. We buy our more popular papers in bulk to reduce both cost and delivery fuel. We ship with common carriers like UPS who've made efficient use of fuel and labor their business.
   It's not possible to print without some impact on the environment, but it is possible to limit that impact. The old adage "Waste not, want not" is our creed for sustainability, and we invite you all to work with us with that in mind. Specify two colors instead of three, run 500 cards instead of 250 now and 250 later, print shells (for one color imprinting in the future), use an ink that we have left-over (even if it's a shade off from your target), use paper that's already on our shelves. It's not always appropriate or reasonable to economize like that, but it's another way to think about sustainability. When an order needs to be perfect in every way, and using scraps and leftovers is out of the question, you can rest assured that when you print with us we make the effort to guard against waste, and we strive for sustainability in every way we can, and we're ready to have the conversation with you on what the best way to proceed is. We cannot be Green or Sustainable without you.

Further reading, and some of the sources that inspired this post:
Soybean Oil-Based Inks Gain in Popularity
WHAT'S THAT STUFF? - Ink
http://www.napim.org/PublicArea/Printers/EnvImp.pdf
http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/bitstream/20938/1/spgome01.pdf
Clark University | ActiveLearning | The Arts
A Nonprofit's Guide to Green Printing

Envelope Revolution

noreply@blogger.com (EM letterpress) — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 17:20:00 +0000

The post office recently proposed canceling Saturday delivery. The reason given is the drop in volume. So how many of you are not mailing note cards to each other? See what happens? Maybe if everybody had envelopes as cool as these there'd be a lot more snail mail going around.

Designed by Melanie Lowe at M Space Design in Cambridge, Mass.

Design for the Process

noreply@blogger.com (EM letterpress) — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 15:35:00 +0000

Here's a great example of what gets people excited about letterpress. A thick, textured sheet of paper, clean and elegant typography, plenty of impression. This card was printed on Crane's 134#, two sided letterpress. Designed by Melanie Lowe at M Space Design in Cambridge, Mass.

The Pantone® Press

noreply@blogger.com (EM letterpress) — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 13:27:00 +0000

What color is on that press?

The hardest thing about printing is color matching. It's not as simple as mixing or buying a can of the Pantone formula the client selected. The press has to be very clean. You'd be amazed how a yellow turns into green or brown when it's put on a dirty press - even a press that was washed well can have some of the last color in it. Each ink has to be mixed with the job in mind too. Heavy coverage for instance requires a diluted version of the color, and once an ink has been modified with either opaque or transparent white the other ingredients have to be modified as well. Even then, how a color appears on a sheet is dependent on the sheet. All inks are transparent and take on the color of the paper. Red ink on a blue sheet makes purple.

Another dilemma is that Pantone ink formulas are optimized for offset printing, not letterpress. That's why we mix all our ink in-house, the old fashioned way. Even inks that we buy as Pantone formulas end up getting modified. After years of trial and error, we've learned a few things about inks and letterpress.

Order after order we get the color to look how it needs to look. It's a part of the job that too often is taken for granted, and gets much less attention in letterpress than impression or paper choice. But when you know what a challenge it can be, and you're able to anticipate the difficulties that may come up, this challenge becomes part of the design process. Clients are demanding, designers are demanding, ink mixing is demanding, and EM Letterpress is demanding!

Tiny Press Sheet

noreply@blogger.com (EM letterpress) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 02:24:00 +0000

Not too many presses can print a 2.5"x3.75" press sheet. The Heidelberg "Windmill" is one such press. Here the feed board is shown set up to hold the tiny press sheet in position for gripping. This is something only letterpress can do - it's not just a fashionable way to make prints, it's still very practical.

Arturo Calling Cards are beautiful & elegant little sheets of mould made paper with four deckled edges that come in an assortment of colors, and even come with matching envelopes. They're perfect for one color printing where register to the sheet is not critical (it's possible to do multi color work on them, but there are some limitations). Here they're being used for "Web Cards" in a wedding invitation set (photos of which we will post later on), but they can be used for seating cards or gift cards as well. But really, how cool would it be to use this sheet for its intended purpose, and hand out your business card as a tiny fine art printmaking sheet in its little matching envelope?

Cutting Corners

noreply@blogger.com (EM letterpress) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 14:12:00 +0000

There are two ways a round corner can be put on a card or sheet. One is die cutting, which works very well for large quantities, the other is a hand operated table top corner rounder. It's not a matter of speed or volume. Quality trumps both. Some cards just cut better one at a time.

Zoom Zoom

noreply@blogger.com (EM letterpress) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 03:54:00 +0000

A very special antique racing car was being donated to a museum, and a party was being held to celebrate the event. Elias made a pen and ink drawing of the car from a color slide the client provided, and it was printed on a checkerboard background that matches the car's color scheme.

We don't always get to design, illustrate and print, but we can, and it's fun.

You can see a detail of the printed sheet and the press on our flickr page.

Hot time in the shop

noreply@blogger.com (EM letterpress) — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 15:00:00 +0000

There's been a certain madness about March. It came in like a Lion, and frankly there's no Lamb in sight.

We've had weddings, invitations, lots of ID (business cards, etc.), and the whopper of the month, the AIGA Boston 25th Anniversary.

For AIGA's big event we produced invitations and posters on Crane's Palette (generously donated) designed by Stoltze Design.

The big event is this weekend, March 28, and there will be a Wood Type/Handpress workshop here at our shop in New Bedford! Please check the AIGA site for details.

April promises more fun, No foolin'!

On press

noreply@blogger.com (EM letterpress) — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:31:00 +0000

A lovely blend fountain design. 3 colors, in 2 passes. The blended ink changes over the course of the run, so each card is unique.

In the news...

noreply@blogger.com (EM letterpress) — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 21:39:00 +0000

We were in the news a bit at the end of last year.

The holiday card for Northeastern University's president was featured on The Boston Globe site. The gallery page seems to change by the day, last time I looked we were page 9.

The card was designed by Stacey Bakaj. It's printed on Hahnemühle Copperplate, one of our favorites, with tight registration of a deep purple and gold.

Stacey beat the holiday rush by thinking Christmas in July!

Elsewhere in the Globe, was a feature on a special project initiated by Designer Rick Rawlins. Elias served as a printing consultant for the project, and we coordinated the materials to get silver ink onto tarpaper via steamroller!

Here are some of our images...