Letterpress – the beauty of paper at your fingertips!
LetterPress, which stands for movable type letterpress printing process, is a great invention in China. In the West, since the invention of lead type and wood printing devices by the German Johannes Gutenberg in the 15th century, Letterpress is the most widely used printing method, and was used until the 19th century, until the 20th century, when it was gradually replaced by offset printing. In our country, the most glorious period of manual letterpress was in the 40-50s of the 20th century, when many newspapers were using letterpress levers imported from Germany, and after a large number of offset printing in the 80s and 90s, this old-fashioned letterpress printing process gradually disappeared.
▲This is a letterpress press from 1942
Nowadays, the embossing process presented on fine magazines and high-end packaging is more often made by large letterpress printing and gravure printing machines in large printing houses. Generally speaking, this type of printing process is often difficult for freelance artists to achieve due to the high cost of plate making and large print volumes.
As a result, the traditional letterpress printing method has gradually become the favorite of design studios, and designers are trying to dig out this obsolete hand-made letterpress printing machine from various sources, in order to enjoy the process of making plates, mixing ink, loading and printing by themselves. This embossing effect gives the paper product more layers to the plane design, and is more free and rich than the paper products printed by large-scale gravure and letterpress machines, bringing more surprises to users.
In recent years, letterpress studios have become very popular in Europe and the United States, and slowly, a small number of letterpress studios have begun to appear in Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and other Asian regions. Designers are finally no longer constrained by a single printing method, and can add a lot of special effects to their creations with one hand and one foot.
Let's take a tour of the letterpress studios of domestic and foreign artists.
This is the 9th Letter Press studio in Florida, USA, and the interior design alone is already very interesting, and the designer deliberately decorated the studio in the style of an early 20th century café, and at the same time, the designer wanted to display his work in the form of an exhibition in the style of old New York.
The designers used a lot of old wooden furniture to create this retro atmosphere, the most important of which was their old letterpress press, St. Peter, which is now 119 years old. This old machine, despite its occasional bad temper, has been working very hard, and the designers have made it a must-see friend every day!
This is the designer's ink cabinet, each color is bottled and sorted in the cabinet.
This is the earliest Letterpress studio in the country. Sun Yang, graduated from Beijing Institute of Graphic Communication, majoring in design art, a few years ago because of a chance to see foreign letterpress paper, he fell in love with it out of control, after resigning, he decided to find the last remaining letterpress printing press in China, devoted himself to the paper laboratory and has been pursuing his dream, creating his own letterpress brand iloovee, over the years, Iloovee has always been tailor-made for its customers to create their own letterpress papers.
Letterproeftuin is a Dutch design team, and in fact their experiments prove that everyone can make their own Letterpress with the simplest tools! They made their own small mobile screen printing + letterpress printing device, and integrated the processes of plate making, inking, and plate pressing in this simple movable type printing device, making it the smallest printing studio in the world. The miniature printing installation, ideal for printing small folio books and posters on site, was eventually presented at the 2013 Chaumont International Poster and Graphic Design Festival.
Carolyn Fraser, who works at the Victorian State Library in Melbourne, Australia, is an author, teacher, and Letterpress enthusiast who owns her own Letterpress studio. Although the business of this studio is also small-scale, she enjoys her life by sticking to her hobby. Carolyn not only uses letterpress to print some art paper products for customers, but also is very obsessed with the history and culture of hand-printing.
