Letterpress printing

• 1. The Perfect Measurement

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  Letterpress printing was built on a single, oddly specific measurement. That measurement is 0.918 inches, the exact height that lets a raised type surface touch paper cleanly. In theory, anything that reaches exactly that height can be printed letterpress: metal type, wood engravings, photo-etched zinc plates, even linoleum blocks. This precision made it possible to combine different printing elements in a single press run. From the mid-15th century through the 19th century, letterpress was the normal form of printing text. How did it fall from the center of civilization to the edge of extinction? And why do people today seek out a process their grandparents considered obsolete?

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• 2. From Bi Sheng to Gutenberg

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  In AD 1040, a Chinese inventor named Bi Sheng assembled the world's first movable type from ceramic pieces. Bi Sheng lived from 990 to 1051 and worked during the Northern Song dynasty. He developed ceramic movable type nearly four centuries before anyone in Europe imagined printing this way.

  Johannes Gutenberg developed his own version in the West around 1440. He cast individual letters from metal that could be used and reused indefinitely, setting them into a "forme," a frame that held the assembled type for printing. His press was modeled on the wine press then used across Europe. Leather-covered ink balls coated the raised type surface before each impression. Paper was laid carefully on top of the inked type by hand, then slid under a padded surface. A large threaded screw applied pressure from above. This "screw press" was used to print 180 copies of the Bible. The project ran to 1,282 pages and required Gutenberg and a staff of 20 nearly three years to complete. Of those 180 Bibles, 48 remain intact today.

  Printers' workshops were unknown in Europe before the mid-15th century. By 1500, they could be found in every important metropolis on the continent. Later metal presses replaced the screw with a knuckle and lever arrangement. Ink rollers made of composition material replaced the old ink balls. That change made inking faster and pointed the way toward further automation.

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• 3. The Industrial Press

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  The "Original" Heidelberg Platen, nicknamed the "Windmill," incorporated pneumatic sheet feed and delivery, automating the paper handling that had always required human hands. The Kluge press matched this level of automation for a different class of work. As the Industrial Revolution transformed manufacturing, letterpress gained powered rollers that swept across the face of the type. Those rollers then withdrew to an ink plate to pick up a fresh film of ink for the next sheet. A hinged platen held each fresh sheet of paper and pressed it against the inked type. It then swung back to release the printed page and accept another.

  For newspaper presses, even platen automation was not fast enough. In the oscillating press, the forme slid under a drum around which each sheet of paper was wrapped for the impression. The forme slid back under the inking rollers while the sheet was removed and the next positioned. Newspaper presses went further still. A papier-mâché mixture called a flong was used to make a mould of the entire assembled form of type. Once dried and bent, the flong served as the template for casting a curved metal stereotype plate. Those plates clipped to a rotating drum and printed against a continuous reel of paper at the speeds overnight newspaper production required. The keyboard-actuated Linotype and Monotype machines, introduced in the 1890s, would transform how compositors assembled the type that fed these presses.

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• 4. Letter by Letter

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  The Ludlow Typograph Machine, first manufactured in Chicago in 1912, cast type-high slugs from hand-gathered brass matrices. It remained widely used until the 1980s, and service and parts are still available for existing machines today. The Elrod machine, invented in 1920, produced strip material from molten metal: leads and slugs for spacing between lines, not for printing.

  Compositors working by hand began at the type case, selecting individual letters one by one and placing them in a composing stick. After filling several lines, they transferred the assembled type to a larger galley, building the page letter by letter. Once a galley was filled to make a page, the type was tied together for transport. A galley proof was then made and inspected by a proof-reader for errors.

  The imposition stone, sometimes made of iron rather than actual stone, was a large flat surface used for arranging the pages. A worker called the stoneman or stonehand assembled the pages into a forme ready for the press. Low-height pieces of wood or metal furniture filled blank areas of each page. A mallet and wooden block ensured that only the tops of the raised type blocks were aligned for contact with the paper. Lock-up was the final stage. The printer removed the cords holding the type together, then expanded the quoins with a key or lever. This locked the type, blocks, furniture, and chase into a single rigid forme. In newspaper production, each assembled forme required its own truck for transport, so that two pages together became what the trade called a "double truck."

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• 5. New World First Impressions

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  Bartholomew Green left Boston for Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1751 with the goal of starting a newspaper. There had never been one anywhere in the area. John Bushell had apprenticed under Green in Boston before this journey. Two weeks and a day after the press Green planned to use arrived in Halifax, Green died. When news reached Bushell in Boston, he moved north to carry out what Green had started. The Halifax Gazette, first published on the 23rd of March 1752, became Canada's first newspaper. Bushell became the first letterpress printer in any part of what would later become Canada. Only one copy of that first edition is known to survive, preserved in the Massachusetts Historical Society.

  The history of letterpress in what is now the United States reaches further back still. Benjamin Harris published Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick on the 25th of September 1690, the first newspaper with multiple pages in the Americas. It predated Bushell's Halifax Gazette by more than sixty years.

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• 6. The Kiss and the Impression

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  In the 1970s, computers began making letterpress printing largely obsolete. Throughout the 1980s-1990s, printing establishments closed down and sold their presses. Commercial print shops discarded these machines, making them affordable and available to artisans who wanted them. Among the most sought-after were Vandercook cylinder proof presses and Chandler & Price platen presses. In the UK, there was particular affection for the Arab press, built by Josiah Wade in Halifax.

  "The kiss" was the name letterpress printers gave their most valued technique: type just barely touching the paper to transfer ink, leaving no impression. A traditional printer who left an indentation in the paper would have had the print run rejected. The revival changed what printers wanted. Many practitioners today actively seek a visible impression of the type in the paper, treating the debossed lettering as a mark of authenticity. Printing with too much impression damages both the machines and the type, but some practitioners accept that trade-off. Martha Stewart Weddings magazine stoked popular interest in the 1990s by publishing pictures of letterpress invitations. A 2004 statement from the magazine described letterpress as capable of enlivening wedding stationery exquisitely. Couples began choosing letterpress invitations over engraved, thermographed, or offset-printed alternatives.

  Practitioners who had remained committed to letterpress found a new path forward in the 1980s. They created raised printing surfaces by placing a negative over a photopolymer plate and exposing it to ultraviolet light. The light hardened the exposed areas; the unexposed areas washed away with water, leaving the relief surface ready to print. With photopolymer plates, designers were no longer limited to the typefaces available in physical metal or wood. By 2015, the New York Times was reporting a renaissance of letterpress printing as an art form.

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• 7. Living Craft

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  In 2006, Abigail Uhteg founded the College & University Letterpress Printers' Association, known as CULPA, at the Maryland Institute College of Art. CULPA's purpose was to help university letterpress programs across the United States stay connected and share resources. Institutions including Oregon College of Art and Craft and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago offer degree programs in letterpress. Indiana University, Rochester Institute of Technology, and several others do as well.

  In Berkeley, California, printer and lithographer David Lance Goines maintains a studio equipped with platen and cylinder letterpresses as well as lithography presses. Goines collaborated with Alice Waters, the restaurateur and free speech activist who owns Chez Panisse, on her book 30 Recipes Suitable for Framing. He has produced large, colorful posters for Bay Area institutions including Acme Bread and UC Berkeley. Another Berkeley practitioner, Peter Rutledge Koch, focuses on artist books and small published volumes.

  In London, St Bride Library holds a collection of roughly 50,000 books on printing technique, visual style, typography, and graphic design. Located off Fleet Street in the heart of London's old printing district, St Bride hosts regular talks, conferences, exhibitions, and demonstrations. Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and London College of Communication both offer letterpress study. Several other British institutions include it in their graphic design degree courses.

  In Two Rivers, Wisconsin, the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum occupies one of the factory buildings of the Hamilton Manufacturing Company. The museum holds one of the largest collections of wood type and wood cuts in the world, alongside presses and vintage prints. It welcomes student groups from universities across the United States throughout the year. Alongside these institutions, a new generation of small-scale type foundries has emerged, producing fresh metal type on Monotype equipment, Thompson casters, and the original machines of the American Type Founders.

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