Letterpress Workshop at Center for Book Arts

My TypeLab peers and I took a long-anticipated workshop in letterpress at the Center for Book Arts a few weeks ago! We pulled text from a Moth recording we attended and set our type in our chosen typefaces. Our lines were set on a poster that each of us pressed a copy of.

Forming paragraphs upside-down and backwards is surely tricky at first, but once you get into a rhythm and become more familiar with the arrangement of the letters in their drawer, the process becomes very focused and meditative. I found myself thinking very intensely about every word I set, probably due to the way hand typesetting makes your brain slow down to the speed of your own two hands; we've become so accustomed to being able to produce paragraphs in minutes with the help of our keyboards.

When everything appeared to be set correctly and ready to press, our instructor Amber spread ink on the roller and inked the type. After pressing a test sheet, she showed us how some characters did not press fully due to being worn, and that they'd have to be replaced by other pieces. The type sitting on the sides of our composition are the ones we used to replace the characters you can see did not recieve the ink fully.