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Letterpress

What is Letterpress?

Elegant for its simplicity, Letterpress printing is the process of printing from a relief image, not unlike the linoleum cuts or even the potato cuts that you may have done in school as a child. The image is in reverse as you view it (mirror image); it is then inked and pressed directly onto the paper, producing an impression that is somewhat indented into the paper.

A similar process had been in use by the Chinese many centuries before, and even closer to home, pre-Columbian cultures in our continent used "seals" or stencils to transfer designs onto pottery and "amate" paper way before the European press was developed. 1550, is the ability to print with movable and interchangeable type cast of durable metal alloys that could be composed into pages to reproduce bibles in a matter of weeks. Before this invention which is attributed to the German goldsmith Johann Guttenberg of Mainz on the Rhine, monks spent a cloistered lifetime to hand-reproduce a portion of the Bible.

The printing press produced the first great revolution in mass communication, books soon became plentiful and at a price that allowed them to become accessible to many. The first books printed in England were done at William Caxton's wooden press at installed in the Almonry, near Westminster abbey in 1477. Letterpress technology was commercially viable for 500 years, after which it came into disuse and many fine printing presses found their way into the scrap yards.
Letterpress today is a fine handcraft practiced by a few experienced letterpress operators, such as A. Maciel Printing and is used for the most elegant printing projects, such as wedding and birth announcements.

Capabilities

Our Letterpress is an original 1950 Heidelberg Windmill. On this press we can run paper up 10" x 14" with an image are up to 9" x 13". It can run sheets with up to 20 pt. caliper thickness. The Windmill can do lithography, debossing, embossing, scoring, perforating, and numbering. We can run any and as many spot colors on the press (letterpress is not recommended for large solids) as you would like. Thanks to modern technologies any vector image design created in Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, and Corel Draw can be made into a letterpress die and printed.

Uses for Letterpress:

• Wedding Invitations
• Business Cards
• Commercial Announcements
• Thank You Cards
• Stationary
• ...and many other uses!

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