Try to strike a balance between whan the instructor thinks you should
learn and what you want to learn. You are, after all, the customer.

hhp

Try contacting a few of these folks:
Briar Press resources
Five Roses Press

Get used to the sound of heavy breathing, if the Vandercook is anything like our Heidelberg windmill.

No, Vandercooks are cylinder presses, so their noise is mostly rumbles and clangs.
Those Heidelbergs are scary - I have trouble turning my back to them.

hhp

Indeed, the windmill is a bizarre device: a truly mad (but perversely brilliant) scientist must have devised it…

The Vandercook is a very friendly creature. Very “hand operated” except for ink spread and washup.

Just enjoy it Chris. Don’t get the packing too tight or your crush your type. You only need a kiss impression. Make sure the packing has been changed to get even impression. We used to do kerning with a bandsaw on big type but there was plenty of it in those days. Don’t forget to lock up your form and DON’T PUT YOUR FEET UP ON THE FURNITURE :-)

Oh, and don’t wear a tie :-) it can get caught in the rollers. ChrisL

From my experience, woodtype is spaced much more poorly ‘out of the box’ than metal — so there are plenty of opportunities to play with reglets and tweak the little things. If that’s what you’re into.

If you’re going the metal type route, try to leaf through a copy of Geoffrey Dowding’s Finer Points in the Spacing and Arrangement of Type. If the instructor is more of a fine arts bent, I’d doubt that they’ll delve too deeply into that realm of spacing.

If they don’t supply paper, make sure you get something decent to print on. I’ve had good luck in the past with Mohawk, Neenah, Cougar, and French. Past that, there’s always the pricier fine art papers (Arches, BFK, Stonehenge, etc.).

And as Chris says, be sure you’re not packed too tight (esp. if you’re using cover weight stock).

And, of course, have a ball.

If you’re in the market for woodtype, bargains can be had on eBay. I have a modest collection that, for the nonce, has cost me but a pittance, yea, verily, yea…forgive me, I just rewatched “The Court Jester” for the umpteenth time, and my vocabulary seems to have taken a leap back about five hundred years.

> You only need a kiss impression.

Indeed. But the “more fine-arts oriented instructor” is something that raises a red flag for me in this respect: murderous impression depth is sadly considered more artsy.

Paper: I’ve used BFK for “presentation” pieces, but if you’re interested in getting honest, super sharp black-on-white printing (as I generally am) you know what works amazingly well? Inkjet paper! And it’s cheaper. I’ve had the best luck with Epson’s “Matte Paper Heavyweight”.

hhp

> Epson’s “Matte Paper Heavyweight”.

Jay-zuz. Sweet tip Hrant. I’ll have to give to give that a shot next week. Cheers.

Thanks! This is all good stuff.

Yeah, the fine-arts aspect makes me a little wary. But at the same time, it’ll break me out of my very conventions-oriented mindest a little and I won’t judge until I’m doing it. I’m looking for a nice balance: nice meaty, deep impressions of funky forms and big type, along with some well set, well printed text. We’ll see. This is also a way for me to argue getting a Kelsey,(or the like) some time in the future. Damned if we have the space, but that’s not really the point, is it?

Hrant, it makes sense that Epson’s heavyweight matte is good for printing. On my 880i inkjet, the blacks are so rich and lush they’re velvety.

Oh yeah. A lot of folks keep more 3-to-em spaces in their case than 4- or 5-to-ems. IMHO, 3-to-ems suck as word spaces, so don’t let it fool you. Use the mids and thins. If you need to, order some more from NA Graphics — they’re pretty cheap and well worth it.

Don’t forget to moisture the paper properly. Too dry makes for terrible presswork. And bring along a lot of Rizla cigarette paper. You’ll need it to adjust spacing and impression, haha (don’t smoke artound presses!).
Oh, and wash your hands before eating. The lead and antimony are deadly. ; )

bert

Lead and antimony are not deadly, you’d need to turn the lead into a vapor for it to be so. But washing your hands is a good idea since mice like to live in typecases.

Cigarette paper for spacing adjustments and impression? Dude, what are you smoking?

Gerald Lange
The Bieler Press

Oh, yeah, almost forgot. Since the average Joe can no longer use the News feature here (sigh). I, no fine-arts oriented instructor, am offering my tried and true cult course Finer Points in Letterpress Typography for the fall session at Art Center College of Design through Art Center at Night. The course is held at Archetype Press in Pasadena, on Tuesday nights from 7pm to 10pm and runs 14 weeks from September 13 to December 13. I’ve suffered through Hrant and am still around so I’m pretty good.

Further information here:
http://BielerPress.blogspot.com

So, I’ve been to 2 classes, and will be doing my first solo composition lockup tonight (I think). I got to set and print a line of metal type in the first class, which was slipped into a pre-fab lockup and printed. I really enjoyed it. I had no idea how…disorienting?…it would feel. I think of type as this flexible mesh, a fabric that can be stretched and pulled on the computer (no, I don’t scale my type). The solid, immutable nature of the metal type (especially if you only have one size) is so foreign to me, but also kind of…reassuring? Knowing that x word in x font will be x picas wide and that’s what you have to work with is simultaneously annoying and really nice. It creates solid design posts around which you need to slalom; it limits the variables. The downside is the kerning. I’m not sure how much (if any) adjustment I’m permitted to make (to letters like ‘T’, for example) to the University’s type.

The teacher doesn’t push typography on us, but is very open to my attention to it and has kind of tagged me as the ‘expert’ for letter spacing. I’m still trying to figure out where the character palette is to adjust the kerning on the Vandercook. ;)

Anyway, I’m bringing my camera in and hopefully I can post some photos from the UArts shop. I don’t have enough experience to say whether it’s a good or an OK shop, but it’s got a nice selection of faces (metal and wood) and seems well-organized.

Again, thanks for the tips. Hopefully, I’ll be able to post my composition for critique in the next week or two.

Oh, the other nice thing is how much of the above comments now make complete sense to me, rather than partial sense.

> I had no idea how…disorienting?…it would feel.

Metal composition was one reason why typographers could relate text block color as mass — literally!

Curious to know what you begin to experience or comprehend as you physically move type and your re-orientation to letters which are upside down & backwards.

“Curious to know what you begin to experience or comprehend as you physically move type and your re-orientation to letters which are upside down & backwards.”

Every so often, my brain wigs out and I have to shake my head, but it’s not as hard as I thought. Punctuation seems to be my weakness. I’m learning the value of a clean type surface. So much easier to read shiny type on a dark background than cruddy type.

It’s interesting that older metal type is set, in a way, in reverse from its typical output (light on dark vs. dark on light).

Yes, grasshopper…
light and dark, yin and yang, notan, ever shifting balance from one to the other.
— Master Po

or

Come over to the darkside, Luke.
— Darth Vader

“The solid, immutable nature of the metal type (especially if you only have one size) is so foreign to me, but also kind of…reassuring? Knowing that x word in x font will be x picas wide and that’s what you have to work with is simultaneously annoying and really nice.”

Untill someone has done a bad job of redistributing the type and you get a wrong font or a u for an n in you job case.

Wait until you drop your first galley. This won’t happen with one line. Waituntil you have spent numerous hours setting it and then try to transfer it to the press bed :-)

Can you spell oh f*%#@ upsidedown and backwards?

ChrisL

> Wait until you drop your first galley.

I did that once, and early on (and in the presence of a dozen people). And I had to buy the type as a result! What was most spooky about the experience was that for many seconds after it happened I was thinking “Damn, I have to start over”; but then the much worse reality, “Oh my god, I’ve damaged this wonderful type”, gave me a body blow, and I alternated between chalk-white and fire-engine red for about an hour.

hhp