This morning the air is cold. Not chilly, but cold. One can only assume that snow will soon cover the ground, and at long last the 2009 scooter riding season will have come to an end.
It was a good, long season this year and mixing hot days of letterpress work with warm evenings of scooter riding with friends made for a wonderful summer. The winter months will be filled with (no surprise here) letterpress printing, but it is also time to lay the ground work for the 2010 Rattle My Bones Scooter Rally.
2010 will mark the 4th year that I have worked with other scooterists to coordinate the annual Twin Cities scooter rally. So as winter blankets the world with frozen white, I will warm myself at pallets of brightly colored inks, and work on plans for one of the largest gatherings of scooterists in North America.
And I never am sure which is work and which is play.
Like many of the people that I know, or work with, I have been picking up the design annuals for years. This year has been no different and I have again taken great pleasure in looking at the fine work displayed in the pages of How, Print and Communication arts. 
Some deep impressions and some lighter impressions work together in this piece to give this it a multi-layered look.
A wood engraved illustration consists of a series of incisions which have been made into a piece of end-grain wood. The finished block is then inked and a relief print is taken from it.
There are a lot of tasty, thick papers that can be used to nice effect when printing with the letterpress process.
When I was helping to plan my own wedding (nearly 20 years ago now) I had the opportunity to create the greatest wedding invitation in the history of weddings. I was a budding letterpress printer and had just started my printing company, The Nomadic Press, and my best friend (and bride-to-be) was a graphic designer. 
Magnetic letters stuck to the front of the refrigerator were the first contact that many a modern day letterpress printer had with movable type. Silly words, notes, love letters to one’s mother appeared in bright dimensional colors.
Within the history of letterpress printing there has been, at its heart, a struggle to ride the line between light and heavy impressions. Too light an impression and the ink will not transfer well to the paper, while too much impression damages metal type (which, ideally, is to be laid back into the case and used again and again).