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Columbia Letterpress

This past summer I had the opportunity to take a class on letterpress printing at the Columbia College Center for Book and Paper Arts. It was an inspiring break from the rat race and a great birthday present from Firebelly.

I've had a love affair with letterpress since college and even have a collection of type, including an ATF specimen book from 1923. Working at the Newberry Library only intensified my fascination with wood and lead type. I think it's particularly interesting that some of the type collection and presses at Columbia used to hold residence in the basement of the Newberry way back in the day. After years of collecting and studying letterpress, I would finally have the chance to set type by hand.

I had an idea of what I wanted to do in my head and just went for it—digging through the drawers of type, looking for symbols and building from the center out. Typesetting is tedious and can make for some soar fingers without a good pair of tweezers. As the sounds of Madlib bumped through my iPod, I carefully set the imagery and structure I wanted to create and then started filling in the white space with the lead em quads and em spaces. This aspect is sort of like playing an ancient form of premeditated Tetris.

I chose a thick cotton paper sheet for my final prints. For some posters I painted backgrounds with acrylic. I printed on the front and back of large wood type blocks for others. I wanted to create a layered effect and hopefully provoke some interesting interaction between the background and the letterpress impressions. In the end, I almost ran out of time, but managed to print off about 14 posters. I must of spent 3.5 out of 4 days just setting up the job tray.

The experience gave me a true appreciation for this labor-intensive trade. Letterpress is a wonderful medium as an artistic pursuit that yields beautiful results. It was extremely gratifying to crank each print off the press after spending so much time meticulously preparing my design. That said, it's obvious why letterpress became obsolete as society's hunger for faster communication increased at the beginning of the 20th century. Never before have I appreciated the ease and simplicity of my typesetting functions in InDesign.

A big thanks to my instructor Stacy Stern of Steracle Press.