I was lucky enough to attend a one day letterpress workshop at GTO Printers in Birkenhead on Saturday. I didn’t know much about letterpress and had never had any letterpress work printed for myself or a client before. I had seen trays of lead type and the like at a printers before but had never thought I would get to lay out type in the old school fashion!

The first thing we got to do was print an alphabet, which took me forever! haha. As you can see, it took me a couple of goes to get it all right, on the top postcard the last two lines are backwards. It was quite difficult to get the hang of, and what was especially difficult was getting the spacing right and the allignment. After you lay out your type, you lock it up:

which involves getting this thing called a chase and placing bits of metal in it to get it all square. Then you use a key to tighten the (don’t remember what they are called!) lock things so you can pick up the chase without the letters all falling out. This takes a wee while to get perfect. You’ll think it’s all good, then pick it up and heaps of parts are loose. It involves a lot of guess work and fiddling around.

Next, you insert the chase into the Adana printing press, which the ink goes onto the circle at the top. So you coat the rollers and the chase with enough ink before inserting the paper to print on. Here is a short video of one in action. It can be quite hard to line it up perfectly, so a few test pieces were needed. I used gold ink and printed on white, silver and black card.

After doing this, I really want to get some business cards made using letterpress as it looks and feels really cool! I hope to one day own my own Adana as well to print things like cards and zine covers :) Thanks to Graham and Greg for running such an awesome workshop!