Retro Workshop, part 1

From time to time I've been known to dabble in retro
technology, but seldom quite so retro as a couple of weeks
ago, when I signed myself up for a one day "Introduction to
Letterpress Printing" workshop.

Why?  You might well ask.  Not so very long ago the Library
where I work opened up a new Book Arts space down in the
basement, adjacent to my Historic Computing Lab.  I'd been
quite fascinated to see it develop; a large-ish room slowly
filling up with various behemoth cast-iron presses and
drawers full of movable type.  Although I had some vague
idea of how letterpress printing works, I was curious to see
the presses and type in action, so now that it's open for
business I thought I'd dive in and get my hands
dirty. (Quite literally as it turned out).

And also, I must confess, I'd had an idea for a project I
was seriously thinking I might do: ASCII art, but done in
hand-set movable type.  A pointless and silly project to be
sure, but so much so that I couldn't quite shake the idea.
Hand-set cowsay fortunes, on premium rag paper!  And if you
looked really closely, you could see the slight embossing
from the leterpress process.  I was hoping the workshop
would give me a better sense of how feasible such a project
might be.

It was a fun day; we spent a couple of hours setting up a
few lines of type each, then loaded them all on to a
proofing press (all supervised, of course), following which
the instructor pulled a few prints so at the end of the
class we each had a single poster containing all the various
homilies, line engravings, etc, that the class had composed
into blocks earlier in the day.

And what did we learn from this exercise?

a) Setting type by hand is fiddly and time consuming. I
can't believe entire books were done this way.

b) Type is made of lead so is seriously toxic, exercise
extreme caution when using it.

c) While hand-set ASCII art is probably feasible, the type
available in our Book Arts space is not really optimal for
that purpose.  You'd typically need lots of punctuation
characters like forward and back slashes, pipes and so
forth, that aren't available in great abundance in most
standard sets of type. Also, monospaced fonts didn't really
seem to be a thing, or at least I didn't find any there. So,
to do letterpress ASCII art convincingly, you'd probably
need to source (or make!) your own set of type.  That's a
bit more work than I want to do, particularly given item a)
above, so I offer this idea up to the universe in case
someone else wants to take it and run with it.

As it turned out though, I got something even more useful
out of the class, that I'll write about next time.



Sun Jun 23 17:49:27 PDT 2024