The International Printing Museum

I'd heard from many enthusiastic people about the International Printing Museum in Torrance but hadn't yet made a trip of my own.  Yesterday, I did. What an impressive place!

Located in an industrial park, there is plenty of room for all the vintage presses and cases of typeface. 

Many of the presses, no longer produced, are still in good running order.

This is an old fashioned newspaper printing press.

This operator is typing on an old linotype machine which sets rows of type.

Here, the crowd is watching the press operator print on a letterpress.

The International Printing Museum is open on Saturdays from 10 to 4. Tours are given to guests and you can also nose around on your own. There are many, many fascinating things to see. 

Last fall, the new Book Arts Institute moved in to one of the building on site. The Institute sponsors many excellent montly programs on printing, bookbinding, papermaking, and more. Yesterday's program was a collagraph demonstration by artist Sandy Cvar.

Letterpress Class Ends

I've enjoyed getting to know the world of letterpress through my August class at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena. Now used primarily for art printing, the letterpress method was once the primary way to print newspapers and commercial matter. Setting individual type pieces into lines, paragraphs, and pages was a career.

Since letterpresses, type pieces, and type cabinets are not routinely produced these days, the remains of that era are all the more valuable now. At the Armory, there are rows of cabinets holding vintage type and steel imagery. Beautiful small sculptural artifacts in steel and wood.

Today's post is a survey of some of them:

Whew! What a Day!

Yesterday was a jammed packed day, beginning with the letterpress class I'm taking in Pasadena in the morning and ending with the first session of the intaglio and screenprinting classes I'm teaching at night at Long Beach City College. Finally home at the end of it all, I wound down by watching an episode of Hung. Seemed like a nice counterbalance to the day.

Behold above, my first letterpress print. I got to use the fabulous Vandercook 4, pictured in an earlier post. Sixty prints in about half a minute, it seemed. Here's the routine: Step on the foot lever to open the paper clamp, slip in the paper just so, take foot off the lever to close the clamp. Turn the handle with the right hand to move the roller assembly along the track. Walk beside it as it moves while using the left hand to hold the end of the paper against the roller until it catches on the tape. Listen for the click at the end of the process, stop the roller and remove the paper. Roll the assembly back to starting position, ready for a new sheet.

It was a thrill.

Total student count between the two classes: 33. A good group. I had to turn many, many waitlisted students away, as did most of my colleagues across campus. These are sad times for education, especially in California where massive budget cuts are tearing huge holes into what used to be a good system.

Letterpress Class, Day Two

Today's focus was learning how to select and set type:

When creating a text in letterpress, you first pick the type you want to use. The place to start is this notebook which contains pages and pages of type samples. The possibilities are overwhelming! There are hundreds of styles, called "typefaces," and each typeface comes in four "fonts:" regular, bold, italic, and bold italic. I would still be leafing through the book in a daze had not Denise come by and said, "I think Bulmer Italic in size 30 would be perfect for your piece." Thanks, Denise! (I believe Denise knows everything there is to know about letterpress.)

Bulmer Italic is beautiful! It was developed in the late 1700's by William Martin for the Shakespeare Press. Isn't that nice? I am especially enamored with the Bulmer Italic f, which has very elegant curves, and I'm sad that the text for my project includes only one f.

So, this picture shows hand typesetting in progress. You can see in the lower right corner a steel contraption which is called a composing stick. The lever toward the left end of the composing stick is called a "knee" and can be set to a certain measurement according to the length of line you want to set. The wooden box above the composing stick has all sorts of spacers. I'll have to select some of the correct size to put in the open spaces around my line of type to hold it in place.

This is a box of vintage blocks of mechanically produced images for letterpress donated to the Armory Letterpress workshop. Images range from ones made for commercial uses and advertisements to images that seem to have been made for artistic purposes. People who work with letterpress today can use vintage blocks in their work or cut new images into linoleum blocks.

First Letterpress Project

The first project for the letterpress class I'm taking this month is a one-color print involving type and image. I've been working on a lino cut, above, of a boat at sea, which will be combined with text for a New Year's card. On Monday, if I assemble and space the type pieces together correctly, I'll be ready to print before the end of class.

That is one project I've been focused on this week. The other project is preparing for the printmaking classes I'll teach beginning August 16th. My prep activity involves a final review of the updated syllabi, organizing handouts, and preparing the demos for the first class sessions. One of the first projects for the intaglio group is monoprinting. I love monoprints but haven't done any for a while. So, this weekend, I hope to refresh my memory by creating a few monoprints in my studio at home. That will remind me about the sequence of steps and any extra pointers to mention when I show the class how to do them. It is always better to do a good demo rather than a bumbly, unsuccessful one, as you can imagine. We teachers call those "demos from hell."

So, wish me luck for "demos from heaven" this fall!

Some Fascinating History of Letters, Especially J and U

Back in the mid 19th century, when Samuel Morse was inventing the Morse code, he wanted to give the simplest codes to the most frequently used letters. He realized he had to find out out the frequency of letter use, so guess what he did - he consulted letterpress printers! He visited a printshop to count the number of letters in a set of printers' type, because printers had quantities of letter type based exactly on how frequently they needed to use them to set up a page for printing. How about that as a good example of not having to reinvent the wheel, so to speak?!

This was the frequency of English alphabet letter use, according to Morse. (Thanks, Oxford Dictionary website.) So, the least used letters are actually J, X, and Z while the most used letter of the English alphabet, by far, is E. (This chart might come in handy for Wheel of Fortune contestants.) I wonder how the frequency might change if we distinguished between upper and lower case letters, too? And has it all changed over time? English is, after all, a living language. Ahhh... so much to learn, so little time.

So, anyway, I was in error when I wrote in my last post that J and U were placed in the end cubbies of the California Job Case because they were the least used letters. Since I've now finished the assigned reading for my class, I'm oh so much better informed! (Note to my screenprinting students: It DOES help to read the assignments.) The alphabet used by early printers did not include J's and U's. When J and U were added later, printers would have had to spend a lot of time shifting all the letters into different cubbies in the multitude of font cases in the printshop to maintain correct letter sequencing. Printers apparently said, "To hell with THAT!" and put the J and U type pieces in the end cubbies. And that system remains in use today.

First Day of A Great Letterpress Class

For a long time, I've wanted to learn how to do letterpress printing. It is the old fashioned process of arranging individual metal or wood letters and images by hand and then printing the resulting relief surface using a press made with moveable parts specifically for this process. Letterpress printing is enjoying a new popularity and you've probably seen cards and small posters made this way.

The Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, about 45 minutes from where I live, offers Letterpress classes and I'm taking one that meets on each of the four Monday mornings in August. Denise Figueredo is our excellent teacher and we met for the first time today. Wow, there is a lot to learn!

Two rooms make up the letterpress area in the education wing of the Armory. Most of the walls of these two rooms are lined with old cabinets like these, filled with hundreds of individual letters in an amazing array of different typefaces.

Here is a sample drawer. This one is filled with spacers. There are many spacers in many sizes because exact spacing is required when putting together a plate.

Each drawer has multiple small cubby holes in which letters are kept in a specific order called the "California Job Case," diagramed above. The letters of the alphabet fall in the sequence we know, except for J and U, which are kept in the cubbyholes following Z. Why? Because J and U are the least used letters in the English language and it is more efficient to store them a bit out of the way.

Here is one of the two rooms of the letterpress area. This room may look crowded but that is because it is! It houses four presses, multiple letter cases, the ink cabinet and other storage cabinets, surfaces to work on, and a few stools. See the large mural hanging on the back wall? That came from the famous "Women's Building" in downtown Los Angeles. The Women's Building was the home of art workshops for women and space where women artists could work. It filled a real need, especially in the early days of the feminist movement. When the Women's Building closed in the mid-1980's most of the letterpress supplies came to the Armory, along with this wonderful mural. What a thrill it is to see it!

This is the favorite of the letterpresses there, called a Vandercook 4. Letterpresses are no longer made, so the ones in existence must be well cared for so they will last.

OK, enough for today! More to come in future posts...