When I was in second grade, and was first learning to write, I violated all the rules of the solid line, dashed line, solid line format that we were asked to follow while practicing our letters. I opted instead for letterforms that, in retrospect, had much more in common with art deco display faces than they did with the samples we were given to emulate.

The long ascenders and small, geometric bowls of my early handwriting marked me with both rebellion and regression. Looking backwards (and out of the box) is a perspective which I have found comfort in over the years. Combined with my love of letterforms, this world view in retrograde has left me in the comfortable possition of being a letterpress printer.

I had my first exposure to letterpress printing in high school, learned a bit more after graduation on a solid oak lever press, and, after a stint at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, I started my work in earnest working for Coffee House Press at Minnesota Center for Book Arts when they first opened (25 years ago).

In 1987 I started The Nomadic Press. Working out of a basement (and a garage) worked fine for a while, but when my friend (and wife) Emily and I wanted to start a family something needed to change. After looking for over a year we found a building on the West Side in St. Paul which suited our needs.

The brick building we found was built in 1914 and it sits on a large lot with a nice big yard. Trees offer shade and the upstairs apartment provided a comfortable home in which to start our family.

Oh, and the print shop fit nicely on the main floor.

We now have two kids and own a house about a mile away from The Nomadic Press. Emily’s business (Aldrich Design) now operates out of the upstairs of the print shop.

At this point you may ask why I am telling you all this. Well, the reason for this rambling history of letterpress printing and friendship is to share some exciting news.

This last week we made the final mortgage payment on the building that houses The Nomadic Press. We now own it free and clear. And we owe a great deal of thanks for all the help and support we have received over the years from our families and our friends. As well as all of you who have seen fit to hire us now and again. Thanks.

As my grandfather said, its ours, now we can kick it. Brick, mortar and all.

And I say, kick it letterpress.

Because the edition number was fairly large, it turned out that it was nearly impossible to get a quantity of marbled sheets made to spec.

So I learned to marble paper.

I gotta’ tell you that there are many things in this world that have been intentionally invented by people who have combined chemicals and processes with an eye open to a specific end result. Paper marbleing is not one of them. Ox gall (the bile of an ox) is used to spread pigments onto the surface of a mixture of water and carragheenan (a seaweed derivative used widely today to thicken milkshakes). The pigments are then spotted, swirled and combed into complex patterns before being transfered to sheets of paper that have been coated with alum.

Whew.

The first time that somebody did all this had to be some sort of freakish accident. Now it is simply beautiful.

Foundry type, linotype, monotype are all forms of type that have been cast from molten metal. They are little pieces of sculpture carefully cast according to the strictly monitored vision of an artist.

Eric Gill (who’s art probably sits, in a derivative form, on your computer right now) was a sculptor. He worked in multiple mediums. He worked in stone, in a large scale,  and cut beautiful life-like pieces from inanimate rock. He also used the same sorts of reductive processes when he engraved sensuous images of passionate lovers into boxwood and maple. And those images he printed alongside of his type.

His type, too, is sculpture. Cut to size from steel punches and then struck into brass matrixes, Gill’s letterforms were cast in the millions. Like the human figure, we know what a letter should look like and we can recognize a lovely figure when we see it. Gill’s type forms have stood the tests of time and, even more than Michelangelo’s David, are visited daily by multitudes.

Eric Gill once said that “letters are things not pictures of things” and, like his other sculptures, his letter forms are things. They are beautiful things. They are sexy things.

In their original form they are hot.

So perhaps hot type is not such a retronym after all.

A couple of winters ago I was reading a pretty good book. As I finished reading a page I would tear it out and throw it in the fire. This meant that I was always reading just the top sheet of a book and I never had to hold the tome open (one of my pet peeves is books that are printed with no space in the gutter, thus forcing the reader to exert constant effort just to keep the damn pages spread apart).

This winter I decided to finally finish Homer’s “The Iliad” and finish it I did. I shredded my copy of it and built a display case for the leavings. I know, one might say that this puts things back into the world of the museum.

Rather, I consider it more of a object for a cabinet of curiosities. In any case it was fun to make.

Next on my reading list, the burnt ashes of “War and Peace” in an urn. And I’ll try not to set the Nomadic Press print studio on fire.

While searching for his love, the lead character comes across a man who’s task seems to be to coordinate all the output of the servant underclass. He is frantically working a mind numbing machine and is, in essence, a human toggle switch.  

It has been over 20 years since I have seen the movie but one image from it has stuck in my mind ever since. Near the switch operator is the pater noster, a device that looks very much like a small platen press with a spinning flywheel.

As the order of the underworld begins to go out of control (because of the pursuit of forbidden love between social classes) the flywheel spins faster and faster until it finally comes off its shaft and rolls and bounces around the room, thus symbolizing a descent into chaos and the destruction of social order. 

As a letterpress printer, a good deal of my time is spent standing at a printing press feeding paper into its maw. Just inches to my left spins a cast iron flywheel three feet in diameter.

While printing at top speed I can print about 2,000 impressions per hour. Since the fly wheel rotates three times for each impression taken, it is spinning around nearly three times per second.

I have often wondered what would happen if the flywheel came loose.

Yesterday it did.

And not much happened. The wheel did not punch through the wall, it did not bounce about and send me darting around the shop in a deadly game of industrial dodge ball. Truth be told, it was a bit of a let down.

The shaft key had come out of its keyway and the wheel came off. It spun, without getting any traction on the wood floor of the print shop, and then tipped over.

It took less than two minutes to get the fly wheel back on and I was printing again. 

So, while I continue to toil in the underworld of the letterpress print shop I will, in the future, stop every now and again to make sure that the keys are snugly seated in their keyways.

And thus I hope to stave off chaos in the coming new year.

Letterpress printing has always been about the cycle of use and reuse. Traditionally, metal type is set from cases into forms. Live forms sit in galleys awaiting their turn in the press.

After the prints are wrought off they become dead forms and are again placed in the galleys to wait for the time that they are laid back into their case.

Once back in the case, type is ready to be set once more into another job.

If the type has been damaged somewhere in the process then it is sent to Hell.

The metal type in this photo sits in the Hell can, waiting in Purgatory as it were, for the fire of the furnace to re-cast it. For its rebirth as another face.

At The Nomadic Press we hope that this last year has not been too Hellish for you, and that January brings you a fresh outlook on life, recast and standing with shoulders squared, ready to leave your impression on another year.

The problem that I run into is the same problem that I expect all of the designers who hire me at the last minute are confronted with. How does one find cold and snowy inspiration in the middle of summer? 

It is, understandably, difficult. So, go ahead, enjoy the weather this coming summer and I’ll be ready (again) for the December holiday rush of 2010.

When pressed about why they use the ink that they swear by, it almost always comes down to the fact that the ink they use is the ink that they learned with.

It is easy to understand why printers stick with what is familiar. A great deal of time and effort can be put into any printing project, and who wants to make things more difficult by introducing a unknown variable into the works.

Even if the ink they usually use has its drawbacks, as the old saying goes . . . “better the evil you know than the evil you don’t know”.

I have always worked with Van Son rubber based inks. Why? Because that is what I learned with. It is a fairly short ink and it stays live on the press for quite a while. As a rubber based ink, it dries half by absorption and half by evaporation, which serves me well because I use a lot of thick, fibrous papers.  

At the same time, I have used offset inks, provided to me by offset printers. Those have worked fine, and have even had their own advantages.

So, play around a bit, borrow a couple of tablespoons of ink from a friend. Keep an open mind.