Because anyone can just throw a plate on the press and print it. Reba: Yeah, I’ve done a couple postcards with the photopolymer, but I try for the most part to hand set everything because I feel that it’s more sincere, more of a craft.
I love the fact that I can touch everything and I’m putting it in place. I feel certain type speaks a certain way and has a certain kind of thing to it. Reba: It’s the history and I think that it’s also like I’m touching the letters. So what do you love about the letterpress type that you do? Is it that sense of history? I don’t know I kind of have a hatred for that. And then there’s also photopolymer, which is another process, this plastic plate kind of thing. Or you can do linoleum cuts and print them on the press but they’re not as crisp. My big complaint with letterpress now is that you can easily design something on the computer and then have a plate made – send someone a file and they’ll make a zinc-based plate, so zinc mounted on wood, of what you want to print, which you do a lot for images. And then after that they started doing more photo processed and that’s when offset press came into the picture. And that metal would get melted back down and made into the new type the next day.
Actually for a while there was a system almost like a typewriter that would cast a whole line of text at once. You know, because letterpress evolved and there was a mechanical mechanism that came into it where paper would feed and it would run more on its own, instead of doing it manually. Reba: A proof press is to do a test run, make sure that there’s no spelling errors, and then you put on a larger machine. I use Vandercooks mostly, which are actually more of a proof press. And then you lock it into the press and you have to use pieces of wood, which are called furniture to make a solid block to hold it all in place tightly. And the i and s are right next to each other for is, and a and r are right next to each other for are, you know, ar is kind of a typical combination. So they figured out to write the, which is such a common word, those letters are all in a line with each other. There were lots of different case designs, and they tried to figure out the one that made it go the fastest because the newspaper was completely in letterpress. The letters are always in the same place. Each drawer of type, it’s called a California case, has a basic set-up. So let’s say you have a paragraph of type that you want to print, you hand set all the letters. Reba: Letterpress is basically just individual letters that are put into sentences, put together. We took an area and went through the boxes, figured out what was there, and put some stuff into drawers Can you explain what letterpress means and the process?
I went there with Columbia for a weekend. They have a huge warehouse of stuff they haven’t even gone through yet. They have the equipment to make type and they still do cut type, it’s pretty pricey, though, and then they just have cases and cases of type. It is a museum in Two Rivers, WI and they actually produced a majority of the wood type that came out back in the day and now it’s a museum. On your Flikr pages I saw pictures of the Hamilton Type Museum. I guess a bag of avocados so I could make some guacamole. If I had a present to give you, which would you prefer: a ceramic breast-shaped mug, a Mercedes Benz belt and buckle or a bag of avocados? She gave me the low down on letterpress over a delicious dinner of fake sausage and shell pasta with escarole and raisins. She keeps track of her comings and goings at. She sells her letterpressed postcards and posters on Etsy, at Permanent Records, at craft fairs nationwide and at No Coast, a muli-use space and studio that has a sincere interest in building on the artistic community in Pilsen with workshops, potlucks, book and record releases and hangouts.
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