What is letterpress printing?
Letterpress printing is a form of relief printmaking using type and images carved or etched into wood, metal, and/or plastic. Rollers apply ink to the raised surface of the image, then the plate and paper are pressed together to make a print.
Image courtesy of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library.
Many cultures have made relief prints since the dawn of history, and moveable type was developed in Asia long before letterpress printing as we know it was perfected 500 years ago by Johannes Gutenberg. He and his associates in Mainz, Germany improved the press, developed a practical method to manufacture precise metal type, and concocted new inks, sparking a worldwide explosion of literacy. Printing facilitated most cultural and technological advancements that have come since.
After dominating the industry for hundreds of years, letterpress printing was mostly replaced in the mid-20th century by offset printing, which is faster, cheaper, and more precise. Improvements in digital printing are likely to render offset printing largely obsolete by the end of the 2020s. But letterpress printing remains popular thanks to artisan printers who enjoy keeping the history, machinery, and craftsmanship of letterpress alive.
What’s the appeal of letterpress printing?
You’ve read this far, so you hopefully have some nascent attraction to letterpress printing…
Strangely enough, many printers credit Martha Stewart for the current popularity of letterpress printing. In the Nineties, she popularized the idea that the deep impression that letterpress type makes in the paper is a mark of quality printing. That’s not strictly true… traditional printers and clients would scoff at a visible impression. But these days, a visible impression is a distinctive result of letterpress printing, and customers often seek it out.
We’re happy to exaggerate or minimize the print impression as you wish, but we’d argue that the biggest impression that letterpress makes is the impression made on the viewer.
Letterpress printing imparts soul into print. It takes a good bit of thought, skill, and time to design, typeset, and print a job. Every printed piece is literally touched by the hand of the printer, across every step of the process. It’s special. A little bit magic. There’s a story behind it. The carefully-chosen materials and handcrafted texture, and the tiniest hint of imperfection, restore the charm that’s lost with modern printing.
What are the limitations of letterpress printing?
Our main press is sixty years old, and based on a 200-year-old design that’s not much different than Gutenberg’s technology of the 1400s. The press is hand-fed: one sheet, one side, one color at a time.
At 12 one-color impressions per minute, we can’t compete with the blistering 300 six-color sheets per minute of a modern offset press. But offset’s ho-hum predictability can’t compete with the handmade personality of a letterpress piece.
There are some design limitations, as well. Full-color reproduction is possible, but that’s really more in offset and digital printing’s wheelhouse. Large areas of flat color tend to be a bit mottled (we call it “saltiness”) on some papers. Even though we hand-feed the press and print each color separately, the registration (alignment) of colors is surprisingly precise, but nothing like commercial offset.
But like all craftspeople, we exploit these disadvantages and turn them into advantages. We plan with the process in mind. Limiting (and layering) ink colors, working with available type and illustrations, using unexpected colors, incorporating the paper into the design… it’s an entirely different way of working. It quickly becomes clear that computers and 4-color offset printing are equally limiting, in their own ways.
I hear it’s expensive…
Letterpress printing is time-, equipment-, and labor- intensive, and we generally choose high-quality paper. So it can be expensive, but it’s also full of tricks and efficiencies that just aren’t possible with offset printing. So it’s sort of comparing apples to… really special apples that often end up costing about the same, depending on the job, artwork, and quantity. You can find more details about our pricing, and how to minimize expenses, on our “Working with us” page.
How is the design prepared for printing?
Traditionally, individual characters (or sorts) of cast metal or carved wood type are hand-typeset, letter by letter, word by word, line by line. By the late 1800s, most longer texts were cast line-by-line in slugs on a “hot metal” typesetting machine like a Linotype. The type is then locked into a forme with borders and illustrations (“cuts,”). The forme is locked (with quoins and furniture) into a chase (a metal frame) that holds the text in place. The chase is then mounted to the press bed.
Sounds like a lot of work, right? It is, and we can — and do — print just like that. We have dozens of vintage metal and wood fonts, we canc cast metal type on our Ludlow Typograph, and we order custom magnesium or copper ‘cuts’ as needed for logos and artwork.
Modern technology allows a simpler and more flexible alternative. A digital file can be converted to polymer plates and mounted to a block that fits into the press bed. It’s not quite as glamorous, but it’s much easier, often cheaper, and the results look the same.
We can do it either way; hand-set or polymer (or even mix them together, with some limitations), depending on the requirements and budget of the job.
What other processes are related to letterpress printing?
The “impression” that’s possible with letterpress printing is essentially a mild deboss, so yes, we can do that (with or without ink, though we recommend a tint to help it ‘pop.’ Deeper or more complicated debossing and embossing uses mostly the same equipment, but we generally farm that out to partners who can do it more efficiently. The same goes for foil-stamping (a colored or metallic foil is applied with heat and pressure) and die-cutting (punching out a shape)… though we can die cut small jobs in-house. We have vast experience working with friends and vendors (let’s call them friendors!) who do silk-screen printing, offset printing, digital printing, thermography, and any other process you can name. Finishing processes, like folding, trimming, drilling, stitching, and binding are done in-house for small jobs, and sent out for bigger ones.
Still wondering?
Please let us know if you have more questions, as you can see, we can (and do) talk about this stuff all day! Or make an appointment to come by the shop, we’d love to show you all the magic happening, in person.
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