Under My Tent at the Revival

I can still remember my father being physically moved in reaction to my statement about "pounding the type down." He was showing me how to set type – and this must have been back around 1958 – so I could have a business card like the character Paladin on the TV western Have Gun, Will Travel. We'd already gone through putting the lino cut that I'd made myself into the Kelsey 5x8 and had printed a handful of cards. Now we were setting the type to overprint the text. The card (original from the show seen here; I have no idea what happened to the ones I printed) ended up in two colors with the chess piece in a soft grey and the text over it in black.
     Dad had tried to show me the lay of the case but soon enough gave up when I got completely lost, other than knowing that it went from H to I and straight to K without J, which was at the bottom of the case after Z. With the type set and up on the stone, Dad put the chase over the form and laid in the furniture and the quoins to lock it up. At which point he asked me if I knew what to do next.
     "This is when we pound the type down."
     I remember that he flinched so hard that I thought he'd pinched a finger.
     "No," he said. "You never pound on type. You level it off on the stone with this block. It's called 'planing the form'." At which point he picked up the planning block, put it on top of the form and gently tapped with the end of the quoin key on the top of the block.
     "Never pound on type. And never plane a locked form."
     Coupled with this lesson was the admonition against changing the settings of the impression screws (which on a Kelsey is an exercise in counterintuition) and not putting so much packing on the platen that the type gets drilled into the paper (as suggested being done in this example by the shadows on the paper).
     Instead I was taught that the paper might bear a bit of the impression but that the best printing was done when the paper kissed the type (or the type kissed the paper) with the least amount of pressure on the paper.

Now I know and you know and everyone else who's ever done printing knows that there is no such thing as the perfect kiss, especially in printing and probably not so in human relationships. It's impossible to print on certain papers without a bit of embossing on the paper surface. Soft, thick paper will always feel the bite of the type on it and nothing you can do will make that not happen, unless your goal is to make the type kiss the paper only on the areas of the paper that touch the type.
     Hand-made, deckle edge whatever papers that show no touch of a mechanical process in the finishing of the surface are particularly given to this. You can't print on 'em without going a bit more ardent in the kissing, so to speak.
     So in effect, the example offered above is probably not that big a deal and not something that anyone should worry about. At least and especially if the type or the form or whatever bearing the ink is an engraving of some sort.

And that leads me directly into typography, type and what passes for letterpress today, at least among thems what's got studios instead of print shops.
     See, I was raised with the contention that there was typography such as one could do on letterpress equipment without the use of a camera, plate etching system and plate mounting stuff. Letterpress involved the use of letter type with a press that inked the face of the type and applied its kiss to the paper. That was it: letter & press = letterpress.
     Simple enough.
     But now it seems the letterpress scene (or is that milieu?) has moved beyond type and press to computer-generated text turned into type and made into plates which are subsequently inked and smashed lovingly into expensive paper.
     In other words – and no, I ain't about to quote another Norteña band – handset type and possibly machine set hot metal type is being replaced by computer type turned into printing plates. The hand justification of lines of type, with all of the contentious arguments about when to space in and when to space out, has been replaced by the "whatever?" version of text to type created in a Windows program or via Adobe whatever.
     Whatever.
     Now I ain't sayin' that computer typography sucks.
     There are tons of old type faces such as one finds in a copy of Phillips Old Fashion Type Book that are now being resurrected by such programs as Fontifier at $9 a whack, any of which can then end up computer type & subsequently turned into a plate to be further smashed into paper.

The big question in my mind ends up being whether or not this so-called "revival" of letterpress is indeed a revival when a good portion of what it means to print by the letterpress method has been taken up by computers & plate making. On the one hand I'm glad that someone younger than me is willing to take the time to learn how all this old-fashioned stuff works, to carry the tradition on, so to speak. On the other, I don't feel that just puking plates out of an engraving system when those plates carry, more often than not, computer typography is anything more than a use of an old technology in the worst possible way to give folks the feeling that they're getting something vintage and personal.
     In fact, there's a whole rant about personal and vintage in an essay by Julián Marías called "Unamuno en Forest Lawn" that speaks of this phony mass-produced personalization of life to which Gringos have become accustomed over the past two hundred years and certainly within the trailing edge of the Industrial Revolution.
     Truth up, it's a bit difficult to get personalized on a planet where there are nearly seven billion humans, a tenth of which number has access to all the good stuff and the other 90% of which living between grinding poverty and nominal trailer trashdom.
     One way letterpress will continue to be useful to somebody and those presses that we've worried about saving will remain, even if painted garish colors and used as a planter in the living room, beyond the reach of the Hindustani scrap yards. Somebody will actually read the books I have recommended or take one of the many classes and workshops available to folks interested in letterpress technique and technology. What I learned from my father will survive in the end. We can hope.
     The other way, even if the presses don't end up as coffee stands or planters, somebody will mangle type and defy the laws of physics, not caring in the least to learn from the past, and what passes for typography will go into the smashed and dent can at the end of the shop and eventually all those cast iron beauties will be mishandled, misused and broken, never more to stand in anyone's shop (or studio) and that will be the end of what was until recently an art and a living.
     If it sounds like I'm bitter about this, well, I am. I find it somewhat ironic that I choose to say these things – to point out the irony and the ineptitude – in a medium so distant & yet so close to the printed text. Printing & the subsequent publication of text bearing ideas continues on the InterWebs just as much as it appears to be ready to continue in print on paper, despite the Sony e-book system. What we put on the screen is still read and still attached to general literacy, but in a way that, to some, defeats the purposes of good typography. Whereas reading from a printed page is cognition about places on the paper where the light does not reflect into the eye, reading off the screen is cognition about the places on the screen where the light does not flicker and shine into the eye. So in this literacy is changed.
     Probably the most annoying thing to me about this so-called revival is the appearance of some to follow no suggestions about how to do things right. The worst example so far is a lockup on flickr.com that shows an intense amount of time spent on one of the most bizarre things I've found yet. Another site & photo that I found online carried in the comments an admonition from one commenter to learn how to do it right. The person who had posted the photo responded with a "I'll do it my way, dammit" statement that only reinforced my sense of despair.
     This leaves me thinking that the revival will be short-lived and the tendency toward youthful ignorance will lead eventually to nothing short of bad printing & the decay of heritage into an eBay version of what's vintage and antique and prime. Type cases will become drawers and folks will "pound the type down" until there's nothing left to print but polymer plates on aluminum blocks cut to the size of the chases that were broken because of lockups like the one referenced above.

It all comes down to traditions that make sense. Much of what we use in letterpress printing comes from the last days of the store-bought indulgences. That and the sudden availability of the Bible in print led to the upheaval that became the Protestant Reformation & led again subsequently to the Renaissance. This stuff, then, has worked pretty damn well through five hundred years of text printing, from wooden common presses to their cast iron equivalents, through platen presses and cylinder presses, from handset type & stereotype castings through slug-cast type and Monotype composition. Over the course of that time the engineering behind printing improved the quality of presses, type and composition but the basic works of it remained the same.
     All of that time using the same basic processes to set a line, to lock up a form, to register and make ready on the press counts for a pretty decent level of success. I'm not opposed to the fact that hot metal or hand set composition has been replaced by photopolymer plates of computer-set text. I'm not against using letterpress to emboss into or onto paper any number of designs, even inked. And I'm definitely not opposed to printing books on offset or quality-registration photocopy machines and then binding those pages in a letterpress printed – or letterpress embossed – cover for the consumption of the general or specific readers.
     I'm opposed to simple-minded, self-appointed punk thinking that makes a suggestion to lock a form up right or to set a line or lines of type with some adherence to what makes a text legible. Sloppy work, sure, I've done it too. But to see someone crow about having spent 40 hours setting up and locking up a form that is gonna blow up the minute the press kicks over at even a thousand impression an hour just galls me no end.
     So with all the revival talk in the air, I ain't too sure that it's good a deal. And yet, hope springs eternal, even with skeptics and cynics & crusty old curmudgeons like me. Even. Until such time I hope to be able to do it right on carefully-tended and resurrected presses with real type set by hand as a printer in a shop, no matter how beautiful or artistic I can get . . . or maybe in spite of all that, ironies well-considered & all.