We stopped by at Amberly Museum today and visited the Print Works. They are home to a number of beautiful antique printing presses.
As I'm doing a Letterpress workshop next week at Harrington & Squires in London they were kind enough to show me around and give me a quick lesson in the history of Letterpress...
It's amazing how complicated and involved it used to be and crazy that all we have to do now is just press print on the computer. The finished product doesn't really compare though...Give me a letterpressed print any day!
Dave Sinfield (a former teacher at the LCP) showed me how to weld movable type together and even let me keep the final product. He told me that movable type was first invented in 1440 by Johannes Gutenberg which was considered a break through in modern technology at the time and led to the mass production of printed books.
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To Letterpress an illustration you can expose your image onto a zinc plate (left) or onto a wooden block (Right) which is then printed onto paper using a letterpress...
Some other forms of printing back in the day were Intaglio Printing, Monotype Printing and Linotype printing.
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| Intaglio |
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| Monotype |
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| Linotype |
I can't wait to learn more about the letterpress printing process next week! Maybe I'll even buy one of these...
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| 8-5 Adana tabletop print press |
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