The US letterpress community has a fierce sense of what letterpress offers over litho printing. Judith Berliner, a letterpress printer since the age of 14 who now runs Full Circle Press in Nevada, says: “It offers a really distinct look – the feel is different from offset. It’s tactile and the depth of impression adds a whole new dimension to the project.” The US community’s appreciation of those differences has, it seems, survived the advent of litho – and demand, although small compared with the demand for litho printing, is healthy. Which gives more than 1,000 professional letterpress shops across the US a fighting chance of making a living from their chosen trade.
Size matters
So what do the Americans have that we don’t? Marjorie Wilser, proprietor of California-based Three Toad Press, thinks that the unique American ingredient is something to do with numbers: “[There are] more people to get interested and more presses for newbies to snatch from oblivion. Also, there are probably more letterpress programs springing up in our universities.” But fellow letterpresser Robert Lilley has a different, more sardonic, opinion: “America has Martha Stewart, who lets it be known that she has her invitations printed letterpress. There are millions of sheep out there who do exactly as Martha would have them.” Whether it’s Martha Stewart driving the demand side, or American colleges feeding the supply side, the US letterpress community is far better resourced than its counterpart in the UK.
US letterpressers themselves are also keen to spread the word. Judith Berliner recently appeared on a webinar broadcast by US paper webzine PaperSpecs called ‘Impressed with Letterpress’, aimed at promoting letterpress to print buyers. Approximately 200 listeners tuned in to hear Berliner talk about the unique qualities of letterpress and how to specify a letterpress job. “Colours are more vivid because they go directly onto the sheet, whereas offset uses an indirect method and dilutes it with water,” explained Berliner. “And with letterpress, we can stop the press quickly or change stocks very fast, so we can print the same thing on two different grades of paper. We can also run much heavier sheets, because the stock almost always stays flat.” Breathtaking examples of Full Circle Press’s work drew admiring comments from webinar participants, who remarked on how adventurous it was and how modern and innovative an appearance this old-fashioned technology could produce.
Such a webinar would be unthinkable here in the UK. But, far from bemoaning the small market for their work, UK-based letterpressers are choosing to see it as a niche and are making the most of it.
Take Incline Press in Oldham, for instance. Run by Graham Moss, Incline grew out of its owner’s interest in paper conservation and book repair. In 1990, Moss acquired a small printing press to print labels for book spines and became fascinated by what the press could do. After a stint producing stationery and cards for friends and relations, Moss became a full-time book printer. “The technique and what it means in terms of art and skill has been pretty much buried over the past 30 years,” he says. “We need the proper publicity for the medium that they got with Martha Stewart in the US as, without that, there is virtually no profile for letterpress as art or craft.”
However, Moss’s view is not all doom: “Letterpress can be rebuilt as an industry, most likely through colleges returning to letterpress as the necessary concrete learning process for their new breed of Mac designers. But it really needs more than that.” He cites the Oxford Fine Book Press Fair, held every two years in the UK: “I think there’s a lot more going on in the UK than the internet suggests, both jobbing work for others and self-produced stuff sold by the maker. The amount of letterpress stuff at the fair is amazing.”
One aspect of modern letterpress that excites quite a few of its British exponents is the opportunity to mix old and new technology. Helen Ingham is a British letterpress printer who began as a Mac-based designer and moved into letterpress while doing a Masters degree at Central St Martins. Ingham now runs Hi-Artz Letterpress Studio in Luton, printing posters, cards, beermats and business cards from a mix of hand-inked woodletter, metal type and ornaments, halftones and elements of design produced in Adobe Illustrator then made into photopolymer blocks. “With the possibility of combining a number of related processes, old and new, very exciting and innovative work can be achieved,” she says.
US leading the way
During her degree, Ingham funded herself through an internship at legendary Nashville letterpress poster shop Hatch Show Print and as a result has long been fascinated by the comparison between letterpress in the US and the UK. “Basically, in comparison to the UK, there was more letterpress stuff around,” she says, “particularly after the second world war when mass production really kicked in, which in turn led to more being spent on advertising and printing. Also, there has been a tradition of having more extensive letterpress and print shops in schools and colleges in the US compared to the UK. It’s down to money and space.”
In Tufnell Park, London, two more St Martin’s graduates are plying their letterpress trade: Chrissie Charlton and Vicky Fullick, in their 1.2m-wide letterpress shop, Harrington & Squires, print everything from cotton handkerchiefs to calendars using “mainly Gill Sans” in woodletter and metal type on Adana hand-presses. But the duo still use a Mac to trial their designs.
In the US, letterpress printers are also mixing and matching their technology. Matt Borghi runs The Future of Letterpress, a group of new-generation letterpress printers who have an open mind about combining the Apple Mac with the iron hand-press. “If you want to stay in letterpress, you’ll have to develop skills with offset, toner machines and variable data functionality if you hope to make any kind of living,” says Borghi.
Is there a chance of renaissance for letterpress in the UK? High-end stationer Paperchase has recently started stocking a line of letterpress greetings cards. While some die-hard letterpressers snort at the fact – Moss calls them “cheap crap” – there is no doubt that the retro factor could play a part in a letterpress revival. Tim Honnor, proprietor of Piccolo Press in Nairn, near Inverness, thinks demand is beginning to be created by designers. “There are still a couple of colleges that teach letterpress as a foundation element to their graphic design courses. So some designers understand that letterpress has something to offer that bog-standard litho doesn’t. We do try to spread the word,” he says. “Here at Piccolo, we think letterpress is beautiful. We want other people to think so too. And to pay for it, of course.”
CASE STUDY: PICCOLO PRESS
In 1985, Tim Honnor left the Navy after 25 years and was looking for something to do. He had been hobby printing for a few years on an old Adana table-top press and decided, “really on a bit of a whim”, to make this into his new career. “I didn’t have a clever business plan, I just went in on a wing and a lot of prayer,” he says. He went to Exeter for a year to attend the local technical college’s letterpress printing course and set up Piccolo Press just over 20 years ago with his hobby press, the Adana.
But times have changed for Piccolo. It now runs four Heidelberg platens, a Heidelberg cylinder for cutting and creasing and four die-stamping presses. While the firm has a Royal warrant and prints the Queen’s garden party invitations among other things, the mainstay of its work in the past five years has become wedding stationery. “Quite a few brides now have been to the States, where nobody would consider anything but letterpress for their wedding stationery and they’re delighted to find it over here,” says Honnor.
The two biggest problems for would-be commercial letterpress printers in this country, Honnor believes, are “lack of machinery – it’s not really made any more and the old stuff is becoming really scarce” and “lack of training. That’s the problem with being in a niche – nobody knows the skills”.
Piccolo trains its press operators onsite, with Honnor taking a hands-on role. “There is no substitute for experience,” he says. “It’s not like a computer, where you just press a button and get the same thing every time. You have to know paper and know your press and know just how long to leave the platen dwell and how hard to pull the lever. Letterpress is beautifully individual and it depends entirely on the skill of the operator.”
Read the original article at www.printweek.com.
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