Lesson The Third

The third week of the Letterpress class brought us more up to date with a modern method of letterpressing (photopolymer plates), then took us back a bit to a description of a Linotype machine (which I have seen in operation; the young 'uns of the class were as agog at the description as I was way back when I, too, was young, and had a gander at a line up of them all busily at work), the description of some work done by a couple of the artist-students at Cooper Union last year, the tale of along with a promise of a field trip to a fellow, Theo Rehak, who gathered up, by hook or by crook, the typecasting equipment of the American Type Foundry as it went out of business and continues today to cast type the old fashioned way (we fondled his book, "Practical Typecasting") ... and then we were introduced to the composing stick and the mysteries of the California Type Case layout.

By that time, the class had only an hour or so left in it, but I was determined to go ahead and set at least a line of type & print it off. You would think an hour would be enough time for that. And it was. Just. I set my name and the date (off by a day, however; I'd forgotten whether it was the 18th or the 19th, decided on the 19th, I was wrong), put the words HER WORK in all caps above that and found a couple of ornamental capitals of my initials to place on the bottom.

Directionally challenged as always, the lines ended up upside down -- what I'd wanted on top was on the bottom, and what I'd wanted on the bottom was on top. Arrrrgh. However, the type itself was set correctly right-reading. Well, except for a couple of letters, which I carefully corrected after the first pull through the press. I left the line-order as is, though, found some beautiful, soft paper, and pulled out two good copies on one sheet. Then there was time left only to put the letters away and clean up the press (actually, the instructor cleaned the press for me while I slaved over the type case).

I was mighty proud of that simple line of 16 pt. Garamond Italic, and packed it up to show around at work. Which has its own story: my employer, Frank, was not very impressed. He'd gone to printing high school, he said, and he just couldn't get excited about this stuff. Yeah, yeah, thanks a lot. So I also showed it to Frankie (not to be confused with my actual employer), who has the printing shop, and *he* was ... well ... surprised. And pleased. And said how he just got in a big letterpress job for which he'd be making his own photopolymer plates (I never knew he did this!), and said he'd hand me over to one of his pressmen to show me how it's done in the real world.

I'm gonna hold him to that.

Wow.