(Not-so) Hot off the press
A Letter-press session in Brighton.
What seems like a lifetime ago, 2018, I did a short 5-hour letterpress course with Mister Magpie in his wonderful shop in the North Laine in Brighton.
The aim was to retrospectively illustrate a wedding poem I’d written for a couple of friends in 2013 (see below), ‘The Wondrous Tale of the Cat and the Fox’. And if you’ve ever done letterpress before, you’ll know that it involves a lot of prep, is highly technical and one mistake is a big mistake!
And, of course, I made not one, but two mistakes - misspelling Wondrous. Twice! And whilst one can get away with the more archaic spelling - Wonderous with an E - you most certainly can’t get away with Wonderdous! A lesson to learn - make sure you know exactly what you’re laying out before you ink things up! Because there’s no turning back!
One thing the session did was reinforce my admiration for the printer's skills in the ‘hot metal’ days when entire newspapers were set (backwards) in lightning-quick time. Insane when you think about it.
It also made me smile when Mr Magpie helped me set the ‘leading’ and ‘padding’ with bits of metal and Allen keys. I’m old (and fortunate) enough to remember Pica scales and letter pressing from my early college days but it’s a reminder of the provenance of the words and techniques we take for granted on our computers today and the skill and graft it required back then. My hat is well and truly doffed.
