A while back, we reviewed the L Letterpress and provided some printing tricks and tips for achieving good quality prints with the L Letterpress and our KF152 photopolymer plates. Amy Graham recently put our tips to the test, ordered a set of plates and with a little and trial and error, printed her own letterpress wedding invitations. They look great! Amy shares, “The results are impressive, using your suggestions. I achieved the best results using minimal ink and cleaning the plates, roller and inking block about every six prints.”
And check out her invitations -
Great work, Amy, and thanks for sharing! You can check out Amy’s design work at avail & company.
The L Letterpress can produce nice printing. No, really, it’s possible. Note: I didn’t say “easy.”
When I first saw the QuickKutz L Letterpress earlier this year I was troubled (as were many of the other professional letterpress printers I knew). It seemed like it would cheapen and denigrate our 550 year old craft and confuse people who are used to high quality letterpress printing. If you comb the internet, you might still be able to find some of my irate comments on blogs denouncing the machine.
But rather than writing the machine off, I’ve recently tried to come to terms with the machine. Whether I like it or not lots of people will be buying this press and hoping to have fun printing. (They’ll probably have a lot more fun than many of us professionals making a living by printing!) Some of the new printers will hope to sell quality printing made from it. It’s really in everyone’s best interest to make sure these new additions to our tiny letterpress community have the best materials and techniques at hand…so that they make letterpress look as good as possible. I don’t want letterpress to have a bad name!
My hope is that by sharing some time-tested letterpress techniques (that aren’t in the manual), I can help L Letterpress printers from getting discouraged. And without help, I think the press can be very discouraging. Eventually, my hope is that these new printers will use the L Letterpress as a stepping stone to a more substantial press, say a 13×18 Heidelberg Windmill, and that they will help preserve the craft and equipment for future generations to cherish.
After spending a few days tinkering with my own L Letterpress, I’m convinced that quality printing is possible on this machine, but it’s not going to happen “out of the box.” It’s not going to be very easy, either, but with enough patience and effort it can be done. Anyone who wants to make nice prints on this press is going to need to make five changes right off the bat. These often reflect techniques that letterpress printers have used for over 500 years, but somehow didn’t seem important to the L Letterpress manufacturer. The press itself is fine. Don’t tell anyone with a Kelsey that I said this, but for single-color printing it’s probably going to give you better results than an old cast iron Kelsey press, if you use it right! You just have to learn how to “mod” it to print well:
1) Throw away the supplied ink roller and buy yourself one that will work.
Why? This is the most important thing you can do to improve your printing on the L Letterpress. As with a big cast iron press, you will never get quality printing without quality rollers…and the manufacturer has not shipped a quality roller. The manufacturer’s ink roller was too hard for letterpress printing. It wasn’t even round, and had “dry spots” when I rolled out ink on an ink slab.
I didn’t even try to pull a print with the supplied roller because it was so obviously problematic. Fortunately I had a big printmaking brayer that’s used in hand printing woodblocks laying around the shop. (You don’t need one that’s nearly so big, this roller is definitely overkill. My point is that you need a soft roller that’s round and wide. )
How to do this? Purchase a printmaking brayer. You can get these for under $10 from your local art store, but I’ll recommend a few that are a little more “up-market” so that you can be assured your roller will work.
(This second brayer is also available at many art stores around the world. The key is the word soft.)
You’ll see why I’m suggesting such a wide (6 inch) roller in my third tip. Also, you’ll probably want an ink knife (shown in the background of the photo above) from a hardware store—check the paint section. This should only cost you a couple bucks. I’ll post shortly with some more specifics on how to ink more consistently. Start here, though!
2) Throw away the supplied plates and make yourselves custom KF152 photopolymer plates.
Why? With just two impressions on the L Letterpress, we had shattered the plastic plates the manufacturer had supplied. A quick Google search showed that we were not alone. Clearly, the plates that ship with the press are made from a material that is not suited to the pressure involved in letterpress printing. Thankfully, we have been making custom photopolymer plates for years that do withstand the pressure of letterpress printing. Our plates are resilient and bounce back after each impression. They won’t shatter if you handle them correctly (keep them out of light when unused and sealed in the ziplock bag provided).
How to do this?Order letterpress plates from us! Our plates are designed to handle the stresses of letterpress printing. Just request the KF152 plate material from our online order form. Our plates come with adhesive backing already on the plate and with a letterpress-printed proof to show what the plate will print like when you start—and when you finish—your printing! You’ll receive them sealed in a bag, so all you have to do is remove them, peel, and stick.
Please note that every plate we made is custom, and we don’t have a catalog of stock plates. We just ask that you send us a PDF or a file suitable for graphic design (AI, EPS, etc.) and we’ll ship you back a plate of what you see on the screen. Also, read over our tips for file submission, which has detailed instructions on preparing custom artwork for letterpress. Real quickly: make sure everything is 100% black, line art, crisp. Feel free to contact us with any questions or concerns you might have about sending us custom artwork for your L Letterpress!
The KF152 is the same thickness as the plates supplied with the L Letterpress:
3) Use roller bearers to ink your plate consistenly.
Why? You’re hand inking on an L Letterpress. Inking in letterpress is very touchy, so slight deviations in the pressure or the angle of the roller are going to be visible on the printing. This problem dates back to the handpress era of letterpress, when rollers were first invented in the 19th century. The solution always has been to put roller bearers to support the roller alongside the part that you want to ink. This will be easier to show with a photograph (again, ignore the massive roller, which is overkill):
You can see that two thin strips of plate material—which are the exact same thickness as the plate—are supporting the ink roller on either side of the plate. This keeps the roller parallel thereby keeping it from exerting too much pressure on the plate. You’ll know you need to do this if your printing appears splotchy, bloated, or isn’t crisp; it will probably never be crisp without roller bearers unless you are superhuman!
How to do this? There’s no additional cost—how about that? Prior to shipping your plate, we have a border around the plate material that would make perfect roller bearers. We usually cut this off prior to shipping the plate out because most people don’t ink by hand. You can simply request that the plate is not trimmed down when you place an order, which will give you strips of material which you can cut down to place alongside your printing plate.
Ink up with the roller bearers perpendicular to the direction you’re rolling the roller. When you’re done inking for each print, remove the bearers and set them aside to use on the next print. It’ll add a few seconds to each print but it will improve your printing considerably!
Make sure to peel off the inked-up bearers when you go to pull your print (you don’t actually want these to go through the press). You can put them back down when you’re ready to ink up your next print.
4) Throw away the sponge foam for positioning the paper and use paper “gauge pins” instead.
Why? There are several things keeping you from printing in good “register” on the L Letterpress. The biggest problem is easily solved with a few pieces of paper and double stick tape. The manufacturer instructs you to position your paper with pieces of adhesive foam that stick down to the press bed. One look at that idea and I said, “no way!”
First of all, the foam pieces are not very re-positionable if I want to move them to align the printing. And secondly, the foam is very squishy so I can never be sure where the paper will rest. No letterpress printer in their right mind would use foam to hold their paper in position! We (printers) are accustomed to much more accurate placement of the paper because we have to print multiple colors in register on top of each other. If you’re planning on multiple colors printed on your piece, listen up! While it’s not a traditional solution, people have been making paper “gauge pins” (this is the name of the pins that hold the paper) for ages as a way to hold the paper in a tight squeeze.
How to do this? I used a few pieces of the paper supplied by the manufacturer to make my gauge pins. First I cut six ¼ inch by ½ inch strips.
Then I used double-stick tape to adhere three of the tabs down the press bed where I wanted the paper to be. Finally, I adhered a thin strip on top of these tabs to hold the paper down and in place. The paper we print on will slip under these top strips and bump (securely) up against the bottom tabs. Since the paper is much thinner than the printing plate, you won’t see any indentation where the top strips overlap your piece of paper after squeezing them in the press. If you need to re-position the gauge pins, they peel up nicely and you can move them around to square up your plate to the sheet you’re printing on.
Note: I used our Boxcar film adhesive for the double stick tape, which we sell as a way to mount printing plates. Since this is a re-positionable double stick tape, it fit the bill for this application as well.
In this photo, you can see a comparison of our KF152 plate (top) with the cupped plastic plate that ships with the machine (bottom). You can also see how the paper gauge pins are holding the paper in position.
5) Tape the press bed down to keep it from moving around.
Why? After a few impressions I noticed that the press bed itself was getting warped. At this point, I also realized that the press bed doesn’t fit perfectly into the machine, it actually has some slop in it. This means that the paper will not be registered to the plate every time you pull a print. To keep this from happening, tape down the press bed at the corners to keep it from moving around.
How to do this? Scotch tape! Letterpress printers are very fond of this supply. Make sure you always have some on hand in your L Letterpress print shop.
Note: I still noticed slop in the registration of the machine, because the hinge that the plate sits on also is pretty sloppy. I can’t figure out a quick or cheap way to improve this, so you’ll just want to be mindful of this looseness if you’re planning on printing multiple colors on top of each other in tight register. Always try to position the panel that flaps down over the plate in the same spot relative to the press bed.
Printing on this machine is still going to take a lot of practice. How much ink do you put on the plate? How do you get multiple plates positioned correctly? I’ll post some more ideas to help you out with your printing in some upcoming blog posts. But for now, I just wanted to point out quick, simple ways to make good printing possible. It’s my opinion that the L Letterpress printing press can actually print well—if start by following these five tips when you start using it, and keep at it long enough. There is going to be a bit of a learning curve, but I hope these tips will at least get you started in the right direction.
I hope this is helpful! If you’ve just bought an L Letterpress, welcome to the wonderful letterpress community! I think you’ll find you’re in good company. It’s a very fun craft to pursue and I hope that these techniques will help you get off to the right start. Let us know if you have any questions or concerns via the comments here and we’ll try to help you out as best as possible!
Here’s a nice print we made for Paper Crave. Her blog post got me started on this project. Thanks Kristen!
Debbie and I, the co-owners of Boxcar Press, found ourselves for a week in Chicagoland visiting her parents last week. While the kids ran amuck upstairs, Debbie’s father and I combed through the basement looking for films on printing. Larry Urbanski, as it happens, owns the largest film archive in the Midwest, and his basement is filled wall-to-wall (and floor-to-ceiling) with stacks of printing films. “Looking for films” involves skirting on tip-toes through stacks of precariously stacked film cases with flashlight in hand, hoping to find a gem.
Well, despite hours combing through a small portion of the basement, I didn’t find anything related to printing. Freight trains? Yes. 1898 footage of NYC subway construction? Yes. 1950’s dating advice? Yes. Nothing on printing in all my searching. It was quite fun and I hope that someday Larry and I can visit his 5,000 square foot warehouse of film in downtown Chicago to spend a few days combing there.
But thankfully Larry had two already pulled aside from the archive when we arrived. Larry took the time to help transfer the one below from 16mm film to a disk, then I got this in format to share with you. This film is about Ginn and Company, a large textbook publisher. The first 9 minutes are a little slow, but you can skip ahead to watch the printing and bookbinding of a textbook on 1925 equipment. I found the machinery and craftsmen & craftswomen very interesting to watch. Grab some popcorn and enjoy!
Also, he had pulled another film called Newspaper Story, from 1950. This movie shows a lot of interesting footage from the Rockford, Illinois newspaper at the time. The parts that weren’t about printing were even worth watching. Here’s the video courtesy of archive.org:
Here’s hoping that the Moviecraft archive can continue to produce printing films to share on future visits to the in-laws!
One of the coolest collaborations Boxcar is proud to be a part of is our sweet partnership with the YMCA’s Downtown Writer’s Center here in Syracuse. In 2002, the Downtown Writer’s Center launched a broadside series as fundraiser for their reading series. Two poets are selected annually and Boxcar’s own Harold Kyle takes the lead on designing and printing the broadsides in support of the series.
This recent broadside is for Jane Hirshfield’s poem, “Critique of Pure Reason” and Phil Memmer of the Downtown Writer’s Center calls it one of his favorites from the series. As Phil notes, “The detail in both the border and background is marvelous, and serves to echo the subject of the poem…and the careful way in which the poem itself is presented is simply perfect.” Phil also shares that the best commentary on the broadside might be from Jane herself, who gasped aloud when she first saw it – we love that!
You can check out other broadsides in the series in our letterpress portfolio. The Jane Hirshfield broadside, $25, and others in the series are available through the Downtown Writer’s Center by emailing phil@ymcaarts.org
We love it when we get to letterpress cool things for Syracuse folks, so we were so excited to letterpress up these cards for the Everson Museum, our local art museum. They’re designed by the fabulous folks at Eric Mower & Associates, whose designers are just bright baubles of joy to work with. The cards are available for purchase via the Everson. Since, over the weekend, Boxcar Press & Syracuse finally got its first substantial snow fall (hooray!), it seemed the perfect time to post pictures of these letterpress holiday cards that make us feel all warm and cozy.
Thanks to Boxcar Press’s Cathy Smith for finding this gem of a book cover.
From One Hot Summer by Eve Gladstone. Copyright 1988, Harlequin Books.
I only wish Jenna was printing on her Golding Jobber on page 124 when we read: “She found a cry of resistance welling up in her throat, but as he [censored by Debbie], [censored by Debbie], something happened that changed it, turned the sound into a moan of sheer, unexpected joy.”
Compare Dave Tribby’s excellent list of letterpress resources today with the same list in 1995. It’s amazing how much the online letterpress community has blossomed. Even more amazing: that Dave has been updating this resource since 1994 (pre-Internet Explorer, pre-Netscape, from the era when you would use Mosaic to access the web). Way to go Dave!
You may laugh about how much snow we get in the winter (well, so do we), but our other three seasons in Syracuse more than make up for our hours of shoveling. The New York Times today profiled how well we eat while wandering Finger Lakes roads during the summer months. Yum!
