Last Friday, November 13, 20 students came together at the Em Space Book Arts Center in Southeast Portland for a letterpress printing workshop. Two of the original founders of Em Space, Katy Meegan and Rory Sparks, spent four and a half hours teaching us the ins and outs of letterpress printing. We were led around their amazing workspace, shown the different types of presses they use, and given a brief history of movable type and how it relates to typography and design today.
Katy and Rory shared a love for the history of letterpress, and stressed the importance of a contemporary printer understanding where his or her craft came from. They spend a lot of time cleaning and restoring old presses to help the legacy of letterpress live on.
They encouraged us to be grateful for our digital capabilities: hundreds of fonts in one machine? An entire wooden case of type drawers can't hold more than a dozen! Think your laptop is heavy? Try lifting a drawer of type. Yikes!
Andy Nichols
We learned that certain adages and phrases we've heard forever trace their roots back to printing; "mind your p's and q's" and "out of sorts" are two examples that have very real applications in letterpress printing. We learned how uppercase and lowercase characters got their name, and why it's called a California Job Case.
After a run-down of some basics, we set off in teams to set one line each of wooden type. Our goal: to print a manifesto for the Friends of Graphic Design. With one team on the sign press making colored backgrounds and one team on the Vandercook SP 15 Proofing Press, we set to work.
In down time between tasks we made mini Vandercooks out of paper and leafed through folios from a printing exchange that took place in homage to Benjamin Franklin. There are some very talented printers in our midst!
Thank you to Andy Nichols and Alex Boyd for taking tons of awesome photographs. You can find (lots) more at their flickr accounts, linked above.
And THANK YOU to Rory, Katy and Em-Space for having us! We're hoping to come back in the spring for a book-binding workshop!
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