March 30, 2004
Old School Moveable Type
Photos from our Pyramid Atlantic letterpress course this past weekend (that's my wife, Kari). Click any of the images for a more detailed look.
Type in a California Job Case and a galley tray.
Drawers of type with two small platten presses.
Language in the palm of my hand (12-point type).
Using a composing stick.
A bit further along.
Standing type (note the blanks for white space).
Locking up (the type is transferred from the composing stick to the bed of the press and wedged in place by the small pieces of wood, called "furniture").
The pressure on the furniture is reinforced by tightening the quoin key.
Ink.
At last we're ready to pull the press!
Another pull.
Where the furniture, quoins, and quoin keys are kept.
Two tiny little platten presses.
The fruit of our labor (excerpt from Ovid's Metamorphoses, as translated by John Dryden--a passage from the Procne and Philomela myth).
Outside Pyramid Atlantic on Georgia Avenue in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland.
Posted by mgk at March 30, 2004 05:31 PM
Matt,
That's pretty darn cool. Reminds me of my old school newspaper days -- not as old as setting movable type by hand, but old enough to use big typesetting computers (with horrible text editors that generated columns of text), printing out columns, waxing the columns, and hand cut-and-pasting up pages of a newspaper. Of course, all of that is now done on a computer screen. But I swear that experience of physically having to layout a page has helped me with all of my design projects.
ED
Posted by: ED at March 30, 2004 07:47 PMMatt, I was thinking of doing an old-fashioned, hand-set type version of Diderot's Encyclopedie. Interested?
Posted by: Joseph Byrne at March 31, 2004 03:29 PM