December 8th, 2004
appy olibAys
Those of you who know me may or may not get a genuine letterpress Christmas card this year.
If you don’t, it’s because I couldn’t get it finished. But it won’t be my fault. If you’re looking for someone to blame, blame German goldsmith and inventor Johannes Gutenberg. He and his stupid movable type.
I recently inherited a 5×8 Kelsey letterpress, which was purchased by my great-grandpa at some point early last century. My grandpa had a side business printing tickets and stationery with it, then my Uncle John took it up and used it all through junior high and high school. As far as family heirlooms go, totally legit.
For the past 30 years now, it has been sitting, untouched, in my grandma’s basement. Until this summer, that is, when she had to be moved out of her house. No one else in the family wanted the press and there was talk of throwing it away. The very idea made me cringe. Dad and Kate were nice enough to make the trip to Michigan with me and help rescue it.
Along with the press I got about 20 trays of type in various states of organization, a cabinet for the trays, a “composing table” (as we “printers” call it), and 30 or so wooden cigar boxes full of miscellaneous letters and other various metal and wood parts that I believe are all involved in the letterpress printing process in some wa. Not that I’d know.
Loading it all up I gained a new appreciation for the expression “heavy as lead.” The family van wasn’t too happy about the extra weight, either. Particularly the front right brakes, which, somewhere in the mountains of West Virginia, decided they had had enough. They were definitely trying to lead a revolution on their way out too. “Join me, fellow parts! Put down your shovels! Rise up against the bourgeois swine!” It was faint, but I heard it coming from that wheel well. It should have concerned me more, but at the time I thought it was just Kate talking in her sleep.
Thankfully only one brake went out, otherwise I probably wouldn’t be here today, wasting your time with my website.
After spending the night in Beckley, West Virginia; getting up the next morning and going to the parts store owned by the one nice person in Beckley, West Virginia; buying a new rotor, pads, and a caliper; and putting them on in the owner’s garage ’round back, we made it the rest of the way home.
It’s been fun cleaning the press up and getting it in working order. I’ve done a little type-setting now, which is a fascinating process. It calls for a lot of planning, and careful consideration as you go. When you know you’re going to be hunched over the form trying to make everything fit together, with tweezers and magnifying glass in hand, you really think about how to get more with less.
Typesetting can also be extremely frustrating. I invite any of my fellow communication-artists looking for incite into what the computer has done for (and, in some cases, to) our field, to come over and try “graphic designing” the old-fashioned way. I guarantee you’ll run into problems you’ve never even thought about.
For example, what if Adobe Illustrator only let you use a limited number of each letter. How do you tell people to “Come See Asheville’s Newest Real Estate Development,” when you only have ten lowercase e’s in the typeface you’ve chosen?
Or say you type in…“Wait I’m a designer. We don’t have to type.” Sorry, you have no choice. There’s no such thing as “copy” or “paste.” Everything has to be reentered manually.
So say you type three lines of text in InDesign then, when you go to save the file, the last line falls straight off the bottom of the screen. It’s the shortest line in the paragraph, but you still have to space it out so it matches the others in length.
So you reenter the line and start hitting the spacebar to make it fit, but that last space over-shoots the line-length of the first two by a hair. Now the bottom line is too long. You get an error message: “Adobe needs to use a different spacing unit here. Go dig through that bulky, heavy, dirty tray, and find the exact space that will make this line-length match the others. It looks like you need a four-to-the-em right there. No, you picked up a three-to-the-em, keep looking. No that’s a five. Listen, I’m just going to go to sleep, when you find the four-to-the-em, wake me up and we’ll talk.”
Oh yeah, and when a 27-character-line goes crashing to the floor, and some of the tiny letters fall down a heat vent, there’s no “undo” command.
Unless you have a time machine.
And in the unlikely event that you do, I’d like to borrow it. If I can’t get these cards done, I’m going to pay a little visit to 15th century. I’m going to tell Gutenberg exactly what I think of his stupid movable type.
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