I found this very interesting.  I first encountered letterpress printing as a boy aged about 13yrs.  My first experience was as a messenger boy for a firm that made both line and tone zincos -  line artwork or screened photographs or combinations of both, etched into zinc and mounted on wooden blocks ready for use by letterpress printers. I used to ride around Tel Aviv on a bike delivering the day's output to newspapers and publishing houses. I learned how to powder shellac, prepare a shellac resist, apply it to the back of a zinc plate, and, after the plate had been sensitised and exposed, how to harden the image and then etch it in an acid bath.  They'd not long had a fire and having lost all of their machinery were reduced to doing nearly everything using traditional methods.  Don't ask why I was doing all this at 13 - but I was the breadwinner in the family cos my dad couldn't get a job.  Later, when I got to school back in England, I found that the school had a treadle-operated Heidelberg press and every boy had the opportunity at Christmas-time to make a lino-cut out of a 3 inch square of brown linoleum about 1/4 inch thick.  Each class would choose the best of its designs as the class Christmas card and these would be printed on the Heidelberg.  I also learned how to compose type, using a hand-held stick, selecting type from a galley.   We had a variety of fonts, but I composed mainly in Plantin.  My interest in printing has stayed with me all my life.  

 

Many years ago Wolverhampton College of Art, then part of the Polytechnic and now part of the University, closed down its printing department, selling off all of its printing machines, and ancillary equipment.  I called in to see what they were selling but all had been purchased for next to nothing as the market for letterpress had by then virtually gone.  When I first worked in advertising and marketing in 1965 we were using offset litho almost exclusively - but when I joined Goodyear Tyres' UK headquarters in Wolverhampton as a senior staffman in 1969 I  was quite surprised to find that they still favoured letterpress for sales literature. That didn't last long - no subsequent employer ever insisted on letterpress..

 

I've recently retired and one of the ideas that I had as a project was to learn book-binding and book restoration - there's a steady demand from libraries for this type of work.  I've got an old Victorian family bible that needs some TLC. For many years I used to see advertisements in the Sunday newspapers placed by a firm called Adana that marketed a hand-operated small platen letter press for home use - you would have been able to print on paper up to 10x8 inches.  The market was mainly for people who wanted to produce bespoke headed note paper for themselves and others as a hobby business.  I never thought that these were very practical and they can be got fairly easily on the second-hand market.  Letterpress fonts, however, are a different matter.  I'm not sure if there are any type-founders in the UK still supporting this market.

 

Thanks for bringing back some memories for me - I'm sure that a similar trend may develop here (if it hasn't already done so).

 

Best wishes

 

Reg Vernon

 

——- Original Message ——
From: "DickWeltz-AT-aol.com" <DickWeltz-AT-aol.com>
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Sent: Sunday, 10 December, 2006 4:04:52 PM
Subject: Resurgence of Interest in Letterpress (x-posted)