An experiment in printing

I was sitting in my book history lecture and looking at a picture of a compositor putting his type into a galley. Later, we watched a video of John Kristensen talking up letterpress. It shows him laying out illumination by hand. It also shows his linotype, but he still spent a fair bit of time laying out type.

John got me interested in letterpress. I don’t think I’ve seen a letterpress book in person yet, and though I have opportunity to in the Fisher Rare Book Library, I figured it’d be more fun to make my own little booklet. I don’t have a linotype, but I do have access to a 500 dpi laser etcher. I’m sure it won’t meet John’s standards but I’ve decided to attempt to make a couple printing plates out of acrylic.

Book history buffs might immediately think of intaglio printing. While it’d be easier to etch the forms for intaglio printing, I’m a bit worried that it’ll be a lot harder in the long run. It’ll certainly mean I’ve got more work since I need to clean excess ink off the plate. I’m not sure if it works with straight-down pressure rather than a roller and, if it does, it looks like it’ll need more than your standard movable type press. I think a roller is more likely to break off parts of the acrylic than pressing right down; pieces like the circle inside an engraved “a” would be easy to snap. The worst part is it’s impossible to accurately control the depth of the cut in our laser etcher, there might be a problem with the grooves or maybe it’ll be too deep or too shallow.

Instead I’ll try to carve out the equivalent to a movable type form, burning down the majority of the acrylic. The downside here is running the laser that long. A single plate will take ages, and I worry about the heat and exhaust. There’s still a chance that the acrylic will just break when put through the press.

I’m going to make a small plate for each type of printing and give it a go before I make what’ll likely be a pair of plates for a quarto print.

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