Our Printing Presses
Our current favorite press is a 10×15″ Chandler and Price “Model N” platen press made in Cleveland. Aside from a few small improvements, these presses didn’t change much from the 1880s until they were discontinued in 1964. Our press was among the last C&P presses made. We acquired it in early 2021 an auction from a retired printer in Morris, IL, who bought it a decade earlier from a printer in Maine.
We share space with C’mon Home, another printer, who generously share their 1948 Vandercook #3 cylinder press. These were traditionally used for proofing book and newspaper pages, but these days they’re mostly used for posters, album covers, and bigger sheet sizes than the C&P can handle. This press was manufactured right here in Chicago, just a few miles from our shop! This model is entirely manually-powered, with cranks to ink the rollers and to roll the carriage over the print bed.
New to the shop and awaiting a good going-over is a10×15″ Kluge (KLOO-gee, hard “g,”) “M” model, manufactured in the 1930s. It’s roughly the same size and design as the C&P but has an automatic feeder, which will make our bigger jobs a lot easier.
Last but not least — well, technically it is least of the presses, by any quantifiable measure — is our 5×8″ Kelsey “Excelsior” tabletop platen press made in the 1950s in Connecticut. It’s also hand-powered and hand-fed, so it’s best for very small runs of business cards, tickets, postcards, and such.
Our Type
Here’s a catalog of the 60-ish fonts we have in the shop. It does not include most of our wood type. For traditional hand composition, we’re limited to these, though if time and budget allows, we can find other fonts on the used market or order from a few remaining metal and wood type foundries.
In mid-2024 we added a 1921 Ludlow Typograph Model L to our arsenal. The Ludlow is a hot-metal typesetting system that uses brass matrices locked into a “stick” to create lines of type from hot metal. It’s essentially a Mold-O-Rama for words. Here’s a catalog of our Ludlow matrices. The beauty of the Ludlow is that one can set an unlimited amount of copy using a limited number of mats.
Keep in mind that a “font,” in the traditional sense, is a specific size and style of a face (e.g. “Caslon Old Style Italic 14pt”), not the whole typeface family (“Caslon”). A letterpress typesetter can’t “bold” a word if we don’t have the bold font in the same size. And we’ve only got so many characters in each font. In large type sizes we may not have enough letters to compose more than a few words.
We’ve also got a big collection of vintage advertising “cuts;” logos, illustrations, headshots, catchwords, dingbats, and symbols.
Keep in mind, though, that polymer plates allow us to use any digital typeface or line art. Polymer is far more flexible than hand composition, and the results look the same, it’s just a matter of ordering the custom plates.
Our Inks
Our stockpile of ink is at your disposal at no charge. Special-ordering or custom-mixing a color will add some cost and time, but we can obtain any color you like.
Other Equipment
Of course, we’ve accumulated all the other odds and ends needed to set type and print: a paper cutter, a type saw, spacing, leading, quoins, reglets, furniture, galleys, guides, tympan paper, composing sticks, bodkins… you can never have enough bodkins.
Sustainability
We could greenwash you like most industries do, but we’re caring lefties, and wouldn’t want to be anything less than 100% straight about it: There’s plenty of good stuff to talk about, but a couple things that could be better…
- POWER: Our orthopedist can tell you that the Vandercook and Kelsey presses are entirely human-powered. The C&P press features a treadle for foot power, but it’s far more practical to use its 1/2hp motor. The press (and the rest of the shop) is powered by good old Chicago utility electrical juice. For most jobs, the press is only running for an hour or two. We’re not using any more electricity than your television. And if there’s a blackout, we can crank up some Art Tatum on the Victrola and print by candlelight. (I’m not even joking.)
- EQUIPMENT: Countless print-industry innovations have come and gone in my lifetime. I’ve seen several generations of multimillion-dollar typesetting, design, and printing systems rendered obsolete and useless within a few years. One of the coolest things about letterpress printing is keeping useful, well-built, old equipment off the scrap heap. Almost everything in our shop is between 50-100 years old. It’s all changed hands many times and if it breaks (or is mutilated by termites), it gets repaired, or worst case, scrapped and recycled. This equipment was built to last and will be perfectly functional for another lifetime, at least. We’ll never have to install a Chandler and Price firmware update.
- INK: We use a variety of inks. Most new inks are vegetable/soy-oil based, though some colors (mostly metallics) use a small percentage of petroleum oil. Our huge stash of second-hand ink from the 1990s is petroleum-based, but using it is more ecologically responsible than throwing hundreds of pounds of perfectly good ink in a dumpster.
- PAPER: Bryan’s dad grew up in a paper town. His grandpa worked at the mill most of his life. Back then, it was a very ugly, dirty business. Modern papermaking is much improved. Bryan has visited a variety of paper mills and has even witnessed logging operations first-hand, so he can talk at great length about the paper industry. Industry PR paints things a bit rosier than it probably is, and internationally there are questionable practices, but from what we’ve seen first-hand, the U.S. mills that make quality paper are surprisingly ecologically sound. Wood is responsibly sourced, manufacturing is generally powered with green energy (all paper mills are on a river, many are hydroelectric-powered). Some even create power for the local community. The chemicals they use are safe, and there’s surprisingly minimal waste. Turns out being efficient and ecological is also profitable. All paper is recyclable, of course, and recycled paper is available (though generally more expensive). We’re happy to talk about all this in more detail and make sure you’re comfortable with your paper choice.
- SUPPLY CHAIN: We get most of our paper, ink, and other supplies from small-ish distributors that cater specifically to our industry. Shipping is pollute-y (and expensive) so we do all we can to limit shipping and buy locally when we can. We use domestic suppliers, and avoid Amazon, Uline*, and other unsettlingly-large/powerful companies, which sometimes reduces our options and makes things slower and more expensive, but it’s worth it.
(*we would like to thank Uline for regularly sending their huge catalogs, we use their supercalendered catalog paper for free, recyclable press packing!) - SHOP WASTE: We recycle leftover paper (often re-using trimmings for another job), metal, and plastic (through Chicago’s admittedly-kind-of-questionable system). We — as most printers do — throw type slugs and leading scraps into a “hell box” which is melted down and re-used in the Ludlow. Metal type is made of a lead alloy that is safe if handled properly (please don’t lick our type). We clean the press with odorless mineral spirits and shop rags that are processed by a cleaning service and re-used.
As we grow with your support, our larger scale will allow us the leverage and income to address any remaining ecological concerns. Someday we hope to work in a green-powered space and brag about our practices, but in the meantime, we’ll be honest about our challenges and goals.
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