Letterpress

This year's Holiday card is ready to be addressed, stamped, and mailed.  We designed the card ourselves and had Owosso Graphic Arts make the magnesium dies for printing.  The letterpress printing was done at Pratt Fine Arts Center on one of their antique platen presses -- the one named "Franklin" to be exact.  Three ink colors (Red, Green, and Black), six dies, and three lines of hand set type required a total of five passes through the press.  I may not have to go to the gym next week after the amount of exercise Franklin gave me over the past two days.

The Santa Claus artwork was purchased from ClipArt.com (#998915).  ClipArt.com is a surprisingly good place to find black and white imagery for use in letterpress printing.  Since the image only had four of the eight reindeer mentioned in Clement Clarke Moore's[1] "The Night Before Christmas" poem, we decided to only refer to four of the reindeer on the front of the card: Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, and Vixen. 

The typeface used throughout the card -- except the three lines of hand set type on the back -- is American Scribe™, purchased from OldFonts.com.  American Scribe™ provided a critical piece of the vintage holiday aesthetic we were trying to achieve in the design.  Script typefaces look exceptional on the Crane Lettra™ paper we used[2], which is still my favorite letterpress paper even though Crane screwed up one of my paper orders so bad that I almost swore off ever using it again.

The card's inside contains the message "A Merry Christmas And A Happy New Year To You" -- the same message printed on the very first commercial Christmas card (circa 1843).  A separate block of text for our names, the month, and the year are printed in green. Not only did that approach cost less to craft the magnesium dies, it also enabled the flexibility to change out the year if we decided to use the design during future holidays.

[1] There is a controversy over who actually authored the poem.  It's possible that Clement Clarke Moore took credit for a poem that was actually authored by Henry Livingston several years earlier. See: http://www.iment.com/maida/familytree/henry/xmas/livingstonmoore/index.htm#author.

[2] We used the Crane Lettra™ 110lbs Pearl White for our wedding stationary. The Holiday card was made with Crane's 110lbs Fluorescent White Lettra™.  Lettra™ is readily available and has matching envelopes.

Let me just state from the very beginning that I know I'm a little bit crazy.  Nothing probably exemplifies that fact more than my decision to take a letterpress class and create letterpress invitations for our wedding.  I've just completed the fourth week of class, and last night spent four hours in the studio printing the front side of our RSVP cards.

Letterpress is exquisite!  The fine engraved lines combined with the texture of thick 100% cotton paper create a feel more like currency than stationary.  And, did I mention the operation of a 100 year-old press?  It's mesmerizing to watch the circular motion of the big cast iron flywheel turn into the back and forth, opening and closing, rollers inking motion that results in tiny works of art.  There's danger too!  An OSHA agent would drop to the floor in an epileptic fit if they saw how the operator has to stick their hands into the machine's jaws at each cycle to remove and add the paper, one sheet at a time.

The class (this one at Pratt Fine Arts Center) covers everything from setting lead type, mixing ink, embossing, wire printing, operating platen and proof presses, and all of the little nuances of making a perfect print. Why do this?  It's a chance to get out of that office chair and work with my hands.  It offers the satisfaction of creating something physical and unqiue -- a very rare quality in our mass-produced world. And, it takes me back to a lost time when I was allowed to paint, draw, or make linoleum cuts for pressure printing at the same time as I was required to studied math, business, geography, and law.

All of the remaining materials that I need to finish the invitations should arrive over the next few days.  I'll upload photos as I complete the individual pieces.  For now, I'll just leave you with some links to great letterpress work that has inspired me:


Annie Get Your Glue Gun: beautiful work on small, tabletop press.
Three Red Hens: great tutorial on how to convert a photograph into a letterpress cut.
Oh So Beautiful Paper: a blog with great letterpress examples from many different sources.