Printing – Page 3 – Green Chair Press Blog

Mezzotints

One of my pleasures at Codex last week was the table next to mine—Mission Gallery—print sellers in San Juan Bautista, California. One of their artists, Mikio Watanabe, is a Japanese man living in France, who designs and prints quite beautiful mezzotints. The gallery was at Codex because Wantanabe has made a book of his prints that include several haiku. The haiku were written in English (by Sheila Sondik), then translated into Japanese by Watanabe’s wife. The English and Japanese haikus are printed letterpress along with the mezzotints. Watanabe and his wife attended the book fair where he sat at the table and worked on a mezzotint plate for a demonstration later in the week. It was fascinating to watch. Here’s a page out of the book, you can see more here.

Flongs

Recently Lee Kirk announced that she had “Molds, Mats, Moulds, Flongs” for sale on Etsy. I didn’t know the word flong so I took a look. According to wikipedia

Flong is a term used in relief printing (also called a stereo mould), which refers to an intermediate step in making of a stereo plate typically used in a rotary press though not exclusively. The process was called Stereotyping.

Invented in Lyon in 1829 by the French printer Claude Genoux, a flong was a papier-mâché mould made with the aid of heat and pressure of a set forme of type. After placing it in a casting box, a thin replica of the original (metal) type (and illustrations) would be cast against it all in one piece. A limited number of duplicate casts could be made from one flong. The back shaved stereo plate would be attached to a press cylinder or honeycomb base and allow the original undamaged type to be distributed or recycled. The stereotypes could be stored for repeat editions in much less space than standing forms.

A further improvement to the technique was made in 1893, when the dry flong replaced the wet flong. More recently, flongs have been made of phenolic resin boards (perhaps also plastic and rubber) and are still used in places to cast rubber stamp sheets instead of type metal stereos, the last commercial use is certain types of rubber relief printing mats (sheets) for flexo printing. They remained widely in use until the invention of offset lithography in the late 19th century led to rotary presses being mostly replaced by the new technology.

The word is derived from the French flan; or the Latin word “flana”.

Here’s one of the flongs Lee is selling, from 1929.

Letterpress Menus

Patricia Curtan began hand printing menus for the restaurant Chez Panisse during its early years, using letterpress and linoleum-block prints. She’s collected forty years of these menus in a book called Menus for Chez Panisse. For each menu, she shares a bit about the printing process, and for some of them shows the linoleum blocks she made. For instance, for the one on the right, she says the wings are hand colored. It’s a lovely paean to hand printing. Curtan wrote a blog post with more pictures and a bit of the history of the menus here.

Book Papers

Recently, Barbara Hauser wrote on a letterpress list I read

Can anyone suggest a text- or book-weight cotton paper similar to Hahnemühle Bugra, which is a mould-made 130 gsm laid paper and comes in a creamy white color. I’m looking for something to be dampened and printed with multiple passes using a 10-point rather delicate typeface. I’ve ordered some of the Hahnemühle to experiment with, but I’d prefer cotton. The Somerset Text Laid seems to have been discontinued (why?), and the Zerkall Book Laid is not quite as heavy as I’d like and is not 100% cotton.

She also posted the question on Briar Press. She took the suggestions (there are quite a few on the Briar Press discussion) and summarized them in the following table (bigger version on her flickr page.) She mentions a really nice Paper Comparison Chart from Daniel Smith that lists all sorts of papers, not just printing paper. (You can see Barbara’s letterpress work on her flickr photostream.)

Printing Exhibit

There’s a really nice article about the current exhibit at the Grolier Club in NYC, “Printing for Kingdom, Empire & Republic: Treasures From the Archives of the Imprimerie Nationale.” Don’t miss the slide show of some great pictures of old type.

Iridescent Letterpress

Applying the powdered pigment

The finished calendar page

One of the haiku for my 2012 calendar starts “iridescent hummingbird” so I wanted the illustration that goes along with the poem to sparkle.

When I printed my book Winter, I had wanted to do the same thing to the stars on the cover. I tried using silver metallic oil-based ink, but the stars still looked pretty flat. Then Lisa Rappoport suggested I brush a powdered metallic pigment onto the ink before it dries to get the sparkle I was looking for. The method had worked then, so I gave it another try.

I printed the hummingbird illustration in batches of 15 or so, spread them out, and used a brush to paint on the pigment. It’s a very fine dust and painting inside the lines isn’t my forte but a squirt of compressed air to the paper got rid of the excess.

(In case you’re wondering why there are holes at the top of the sheets in the first picture, I use a pin registration system to hold the pages onto my press when printing, rather than the more traditional paper guides.)