Sunday, May 27, 2007

heyde does letterpress

That's right.

I took my first class yesterday at the San Francisco Center for the Book and loved it.

Here's my portion of our collaborative class project, on the subject of summer vacation:



Each student came up with a few lines of text and composed it in a composing stick. Then we laid all the text bits out at once on press (a Vandercook), locked them in (with tools called 'quoins' and 'furniture' and took turns printing (a somewhat athletic task!) full sheets of our composite work.

We ran the text in blue ink - and then re-ran it - with all new ink - to add some green (not visible above).

Above, you can see the 'bite' of the press (the indentation made by the lead lettertype into the grain of the paper). Love how the effect of the bite - when seen from the back of the page - is called the 'kiss'...

More tomorrow on my finds at the Capsule Festival!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello Camilla, I too liked the Virginia Johnson dresses... lovely. Do you feel "Gutenburg" vibes when you do the printing? the process sounds neat.
Keep up the good work.

Camilla said...

thanks! i do feel 'gutenburg' vibes.... at least in the sense that i am doing something revolutionary (and really good feeling) for me! the whole process is very hands-on and rewarding. once you get your text composed and the press rolling, you get a pretty (ok, relatively) immediate result. i think i am hooked. thanks for the post!