Where the Hell Did You Learn That?!
One of the first memories I have of my father & his print shop is standing in front of his press, staring at the treadle. I remember this most easily because I had been told early on in life to leave Dad's stuff alone. Get hurt. Lose fingers. But I also remember one day in Indianapolis when I got snagged by the neighbor's rose bush by the fence and thought "If I just slip my hand away contrary to the way I was moving, it won't hurt." So at some point I stood in front of that press and thought that it would be easy to push the treadle as long as I didn't put my fingers anywhere near the rest of the mechanism.
So I did it. I put my foot on the treadle and, since the treadle was at the bottom of its movement relative to the press, nothing happened.
I remember smiling.
And I remember ratting myself out to Dad later on – maybe a few days later – and not catching hell for it. From that it's quite easy for me to understand how that moment became one of the first memories I have of my father's shop.
The next real memory I have is having learned at some point early on how to hold a composing stick. I think there might have been a lay-of-the-case lesson in there somewhere, but the proper way of holding the stick is a solid memory.
After that we get to the lesson of how to lock up a form in the chase, even if it's a linoleum block or maybe a couple lines of type. That memory is solid because it's associated with my wanting to have a business card like the character Paladin had in the television western Have Gun, Will Travel. To that end I had carved a lino cut of the chess piece on the card and then, having printed that, setting the words in type, followed by the lesson about locking up the form.
As general knowledge this information was stored in memory by the reinforcement of having pilfered my way through some composition for a business card that I printed, first for a now-defunct and then barely-existent jazz band, and later for a hippie Indian music "group" that I'd formed in a moment of considerable petrification.
So let's just say that I learned enough early on to print on my own and not pinch my fingers. And that I had this knowledge stuffed away somewhere when, after Dad died, I started reconnecting myself with a piece of his past that I could keep alive in me. But it was not a single-handed venture at all. Years in college and years of time spent keeping up with the rest of the planet long before had made a book-reader of me. And I can easily credit my mother most with that, since she taught my sister and me to read before we got to kindergarten age.
I remember at some point in the process of setting type for the jazz band thinking "There's got to be some kind of reference book around here." It only made sense at the time because Dad was a collector of books and reference books in particular. He had two or three dictionaries, a couple thesauri, a book on rhetoric & a few other word and language-related books. I couldn't imagine that he wouldn't have a book on printing around as well. But all my searches and all the cobwebs I pulled out of my then resplendent mane proved fruitless.
"Papa i no got buk tasol," as they say in Tok Pijin.
Thus, when it was time for me to re-establish my understanding of the art of printing and thus keep my father's memory most alive in me, I turned again to the world of reference material and found The Practice of Printing by Ralph W. Polk in the university library. I checked the book out on the usual thirty days allowed faculty & staff and then renewed that check out another couple weeks.
Everything in the book was familiar territory to me: the composing stick, the lock up, the press parts, the strings around the forms and the proper use of furniture, leading, quoins, gauge pins, tympan paper, make-ready, all of it. What I knew about but didn't know I learned from that book and all the while it was as if my father were standing there behind me urging me on, reminding me of this or that signature moment in whatever memories I revived.
I must have gotten pretty good at it, 'cause it just worked out so well. Over the course of the next ten or twelve years I managed to get high honors and awards from the two amateur press and hobby printer organizations to which I held membership. I got awards for writing and overall excellence on what was, in the end, a one-off sort of ephemera that will clutter a special collection somewhere after I've snuffed it.
My reset of the print shop clock dates back now nearly 25 years. Since that time and up to the present, every lesson I learned from my father, from books and from others in the printing game has made absolute sense.
Physics is a very broad discipline and its laws and rules and theories cover all the bases. You cannot expect things to stay in place if you only smash 'em together with one clamp. You cannot expect things to not wear down if you don't provide enough lubrication or isolation of parts rubbing together. You cannot print well if you don't lock up the form correctly, pay attention to how you hold the composing stick or perform other actions that prove a serious flaw in research or learning.
Así la vida. Such is life, as Dad said. That's the way it plays.
Prior to a recent discovery I did not know that letterpress was still interesting to anyone. Prior to that recent discovery I did not know that there are younger folks interested in this as a hobby – or, perhaps more importantly, as a business – and from that ignorance comes a huge lesson. It's a lesson that reinforces what I know and what my father taught me about setting up a job and getting it on the press and off again. The lesson comes down to a simple question:
Who the hell is teaching these people?
Look at the picture stolen off page 106 of Practice of Printing. It shows a form locked up in a chase. It's noted as the way to lock up a two column form. The same rules of locking up a single column or one line of type or a lino block of a chess piece. You'll notice that there are quoins on two sides, confirming the existence of a simple law of physic having to do with squeezing stuff so it don't fall out of the chase.
Now look at the next picture. It's a picture off the web, off a website that claims allegiance to letterpress printing. It's almost the same form
that is shown in a video where the presenter shows how to set type in the stick and how to lock the form up in a chase. And we'll get to the other problems in that video (and subsequent pictures on a web site) later. For right now let's just say that this picture is a fine example of a bad lock up.
See, the laws of physics say that the form shown is going to spring. The only tension holding the few lines of type in the chase – and notice they're all different lengths – is one quoin. Just one.
Now the way I was taught, a form is square first and tight second. If you start out setting in 20 picas and you have 10 picas full of copy and it needs to be centered, quad the line out until it's tight. Then the next line, on a 20 slug, for whatever space it takes and quad that one center. In the picture here, every line appears to be set on its own slug and none of them are square to the rest. It's a ragged looking lock up and, if the press were something more speedy than a Kelsey P, I'd bet the type would come flyin' out of the chase & make interesting noises as it passed through the press to the deck beneath.
Who the hell is teaching these people?
And then there's the packing, which in the next picture you will notice is comprised of the drawsheet paper and nothing more. In other words, the distance between the type and the steel of the platen is whatever micrometer's thickness the drawsheet. Only that and nothing more, Lenore. Only that and nothing more.
Now I know for a fact that there's supposed to be a chunk of press board in there, mainly 'cause (a) that's the way Dad did it, (b) that's the way I was taught to do it and (c) it says about as much on page 124 of Polk's book. To wit:
So either I'm nuts, the books are wrong or somebody ain't payin' attention. And the question of "Who the hell is teaching these people?" really should be more like "Where the hell did you learn that? with an interrobang on the end. That is, after all, what we're talking about here.
Somebody ain't doin' the research. There's tons of reference materials out there and nobody seems to either know about 'em or even want to know about 'em. And that leads to horrible violations of the laws of physic and a horrible break in the continuation of an artform that has for a long time recognized the need for a vigilance toward the laws of physics.
In order to dispel any further contention that I am a snooty old man stubborn to the extreme, let me say right now that I am simply trying to point out what I have seen as error on the part of some folks who went to the trouble of putting a helluvalot of effort into their web space and youtube.com space where such effort would be best served (if not better served) if they'd put some research time into how letterpress printing is supposed to work.
If this makes me a snooty old man stubborn to the extreme, tough.
And this is not to say that I am the pope. Like all monkeys with frontal lobes I do make mistakes and I have done shitty work. I have misspelled, misspoken and crushed my share of type. And not wanting to sound like Jimmy Swaggart, I will admit freely here and now that "I have sinned before yewwww!" Y-e-dubya!
It is to say that if you want to do something, you have a fifty-fifty shot.
You can either do a full ass job or a half ass job. And from what I've seen in my recent explorations of what is supposed to be a "revival" of letterpress printing and interest in such is pretty scary. Almost as scary as a half ass job.
So here's that book title again: The Practice of Printing, Ralph W. Polk, 1959. You can buy it online as noted or you can search it on Abebooks.com and/or Alibris.com.
Also from the Polk brothers is Elementary Platen Presswork
There's also this 'n, a bit more recent and, since the author does show a proper lockup on the visible pages, probably a good way to start in PostModernist stylee, Letterpress: New Applications for Traditional Skills, David Jury.
Or you could find a copy of Practice of Presswork by Craig Spicher, 1929. That's if you order today. It may not be available in a couple days hence. I might even buy it. Have two copies that way.
An interesting side note to Spicher's book is the fact that it was Linotype/Intertype cast, at least as evidenced by a huge pile of text that stops on one page and continues elsewhere. Once you get past that, it's still a very reasonable how-to & should at least be read if not bought for your library.
And last but not least, there's Printshop Practice by Loomis.
If that ain't enough to get the point across I don't know what'll set the record straight. The way I was taught and the way I learned it and the way I relearned it – and all my experience from handset through the three-magazine Intertype machine that I ran for a while says that what I saw on the InterWeb is wrong. And those who are working like this cannot, in good faith or honesty, call themselves printers.
And for all my mistakes and sloppy work, I will snuff it some day proud to have been taught what I do know by a man who did the work for a long time before he got into hard-core journalism, that kind of journalism that's three or floors up and two hallways away from the composing room or the pressroom. And that man, my father, even to his last days, was a printer. He was a printer and I'm just tagging along.
So I did it. I put my foot on the treadle and, since the treadle was at the bottom of its movement relative to the press, nothing happened.
I remember smiling.
And I remember ratting myself out to Dad later on – maybe a few days later – and not catching hell for it. From that it's quite easy for me to understand how that moment became one of the first memories I have of my father's shop.
The next real memory I have is having learned at some point early on how to hold a composing stick. I think there might have been a lay-of-the-case lesson in there somewhere, but the proper way of holding the stick is a solid memory.
After that we get to the lesson of how to lock up a form in the chase, even if it's a linoleum block or maybe a couple lines of type. That memory is solid because it's associated with my wanting to have a business card like the character Paladin had in the television western Have Gun, Will Travel. To that end I had carved a lino cut of the chess piece on the card and then, having printed that, setting the words in type, followed by the lesson about locking up the form.
As general knowledge this information was stored in memory by the reinforcement of having pilfered my way through some composition for a business card that I printed, first for a now-defunct and then barely-existent jazz band, and later for a hippie Indian music "group" that I'd formed in a moment of considerable petrification.So let's just say that I learned enough early on to print on my own and not pinch my fingers. And that I had this knowledge stuffed away somewhere when, after Dad died, I started reconnecting myself with a piece of his past that I could keep alive in me. But it was not a single-handed venture at all. Years in college and years of time spent keeping up with the rest of the planet long before had made a book-reader of me. And I can easily credit my mother most with that, since she taught my sister and me to read before we got to kindergarten age.
I remember at some point in the process of setting type for the jazz band thinking "There's got to be some kind of reference book around here." It only made sense at the time because Dad was a collector of books and reference books in particular. He had two or three dictionaries, a couple thesauri, a book on rhetoric & a few other word and language-related books. I couldn't imagine that he wouldn't have a book on printing around as well. But all my searches and all the cobwebs I pulled out of my then resplendent mane proved fruitless.
"Papa i no got buk tasol," as they say in Tok Pijin.
Thus, when it was time for me to re-establish my understanding of the art of printing and thus keep my father's memory most alive in me, I turned again to the world of reference material and found The Practice of Printing by Ralph W. Polk in the university library. I checked the book out on the usual thirty days allowed faculty & staff and then renewed that check out another couple weeks.
Everything in the book was familiar territory to me: the composing stick, the lock up, the press parts, the strings around the forms and the proper use of furniture, leading, quoins, gauge pins, tympan paper, make-ready, all of it. What I knew about but didn't know I learned from that book and all the while it was as if my father were standing there behind me urging me on, reminding me of this or that signature moment in whatever memories I revived.
I must have gotten pretty good at it, 'cause it just worked out so well. Over the course of the next ten or twelve years I managed to get high honors and awards from the two amateur press and hobby printer organizations to which I held membership. I got awards for writing and overall excellence on what was, in the end, a one-off sort of ephemera that will clutter a special collection somewhere after I've snuffed it.
My reset of the print shop clock dates back now nearly 25 years. Since that time and up to the present, every lesson I learned from my father, from books and from others in the printing game has made absolute sense.
Physics is a very broad discipline and its laws and rules and theories cover all the bases. You cannot expect things to stay in place if you only smash 'em together with one clamp. You cannot expect things to not wear down if you don't provide enough lubrication or isolation of parts rubbing together. You cannot print well if you don't lock up the form correctly, pay attention to how you hold the composing stick or perform other actions that prove a serious flaw in research or learning.
Así la vida. Such is life, as Dad said. That's the way it plays.
Prior to a recent discovery I did not know that letterpress was still interesting to anyone. Prior to that recent discovery I did not know that there are younger folks interested in this as a hobby – or, perhaps more importantly, as a business – and from that ignorance comes a huge lesson. It's a lesson that reinforces what I know and what my father taught me about setting up a job and getting it on the press and off again. The lesson comes down to a simple question:
Who the hell is teaching these people?
Look at the picture stolen off page 106 of Practice of Printing. It shows a form locked up in a chase. It's noted as the way to lock up a two column form. The same rules of locking up a single column or one line of type or a lino block of a chess piece. You'll notice that there are quoins on two sides, confirming the existence of a simple law of physic having to do with squeezing stuff so it don't fall out of the chase.Now look at the next picture. It's a picture off the web, off a website that claims allegiance to letterpress printing. It's almost the same form
that is shown in a video where the presenter shows how to set type in the stick and how to lock the form up in a chase. And we'll get to the other problems in that video (and subsequent pictures on a web site) later. For right now let's just say that this picture is a fine example of a bad lock up.See, the laws of physics say that the form shown is going to spring. The only tension holding the few lines of type in the chase – and notice they're all different lengths – is one quoin. Just one.
Now the way I was taught, a form is square first and tight second. If you start out setting in 20 picas and you have 10 picas full of copy and it needs to be centered, quad the line out until it's tight. Then the next line, on a 20 slug, for whatever space it takes and quad that one center. In the picture here, every line appears to be set on its own slug and none of them are square to the rest. It's a ragged looking lock up and, if the press were something more speedy than a Kelsey P, I'd bet the type would come flyin' out of the chase & make interesting noises as it passed through the press to the deck beneath.
Who the hell is teaching these people?
And then there's the packing, which in the next picture you will notice is comprised of the drawsheet paper and nothing more. In other words, the distance between the type and the steel of the platen is whatever micrometer's thickness the drawsheet. Only that and nothing more, Lenore. Only that and nothing more.Now I know for a fact that there's supposed to be a chunk of press board in there, mainly 'cause (a) that's the way Dad did it, (b) that's the way I was taught to do it and (c) it says about as much on page 124 of Polk's book. To wit:
"The tympan usually consists of one or two sheets of pressboard, possibly a sheet of tag, and three or four sheets of book paper, under a heavy manila drawsheet. A hard tympan, i.e., one consisting of hard materials, is ordinarily better than tympan of soft packing, as the former gives a sharp, strong impression, without punching the type into the paper. It also causes less wear on the type. The platen should be adjusted for an even impression."Which is exactly as I was taught and is exactly what was taught – at least until the "revival" of letterpress began, probably upon the death of so many folks who really know how it works – by folks using Ralph Polk's book as well as many other such books from era of letterpress.
So either I'm nuts, the books are wrong or somebody ain't payin' attention. And the question of "Who the hell is teaching these people?" really should be more like "Where the hell did you learn that? with an interrobang on the end. That is, after all, what we're talking about here.
Somebody ain't doin' the research. There's tons of reference materials out there and nobody seems to either know about 'em or even want to know about 'em. And that leads to horrible violations of the laws of physic and a horrible break in the continuation of an artform that has for a long time recognized the need for a vigilance toward the laws of physics.
In order to dispel any further contention that I am a snooty old man stubborn to the extreme, let me say right now that I am simply trying to point out what I have seen as error on the part of some folks who went to the trouble of putting a helluvalot of effort into their web space and youtube.com space where such effort would be best served (if not better served) if they'd put some research time into how letterpress printing is supposed to work.
If this makes me a snooty old man stubborn to the extreme, tough.
And this is not to say that I am the pope. Like all monkeys with frontal lobes I do make mistakes and I have done shitty work. I have misspelled, misspoken and crushed my share of type. And not wanting to sound like Jimmy Swaggart, I will admit freely here and now that "I have sinned before yewwww!" Y-e-dubya!
It is to say that if you want to do something, you have a fifty-fifty shot.
You can either do a full ass job or a half ass job. And from what I've seen in my recent explorations of what is supposed to be a "revival" of letterpress printing and interest in such is pretty scary. Almost as scary as a half ass job.
So here's that book title again: The Practice of Printing, Ralph W. Polk, 1959. You can buy it online as noted or you can search it on Abebooks.com and/or Alibris.com.
Also from the Polk brothers is Elementary Platen Presswork
There's also this 'n, a bit more recent and, since the author does show a proper lockup on the visible pages, probably a good way to start in PostModernist stylee, Letterpress: New Applications for Traditional Skills, David Jury.
Or you could find a copy of Practice of Presswork by Craig Spicher, 1929. That's if you order today. It may not be available in a couple days hence. I might even buy it. Have two copies that way.
An interesting side note to Spicher's book is the fact that it was Linotype/Intertype cast, at least as evidenced by a huge pile of text that stops on one page and continues elsewhere. Once you get past that, it's still a very reasonable how-to & should at least be read if not bought for your library.
And last but not least, there's Printshop Practice by Loomis.
If that ain't enough to get the point across I don't know what'll set the record straight. The way I was taught and the way I learned it and the way I relearned it – and all my experience from handset through the three-magazine Intertype machine that I ran for a while says that what I saw on the InterWeb is wrong. And those who are working like this cannot, in good faith or honesty, call themselves printers.
And for all my mistakes and sloppy work, I will snuff it some day proud to have been taught what I do know by a man who did the work for a long time before he got into hard-core journalism, that kind of journalism that's three or floors up and two hallways away from the composing room or the pressroom. And that man, my father, even to his last days, was a printer. He was a printer and I'm just tagging along.
posted by the printer at 8:10 AM
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