When I have a question about my press or how it’s not printing as I would like, I look on Briar Press’s bulletin board or through the PP Letterpress archive. But sometimes I’d really rather look through a book, especially at my studio where there isn’t an internet connection.
Too bad there aren’t many modern letterpress books, and even the old ones don’t have much information on fixing smaller tabletop presses, like C&P Pilots, and nothing on using photopolymer plates. Boxcar has digitized a Kelsey manual with information on oiling, press set up, makeready and printing on envelopes. A friend gave me Letterpress: New applications for traditional skills by David Jury — the title sounded promising but it’s just a coffee table book with lots of pictures and nothing really practical about printing. Paul Moxon has written an appreciation of John Ryder’s 1955 book Printing for Pleasure (available from NA Graphics).
Here’s what’s on the shelf at my studio:
- Platen Press Operation by George J. Mills (from 1953, reprints are available from NA Graphics). General Printing: An Illustrated Guide to Letterpress Printing (also from 1953, and recently reissued and available from Amazon). The latter has a nice section on the history of printing, and both have good information on setting type, lockup and makeready.
- The only book I’ve found with information on photopolymer plates and letterpress is Gerald Lange’s Printing Digital Type on the Hand-Operated Flatbed Cylinder Press. It doesn’t discuss platen press printing per se, but the sections on troubleshooting and the platemaking process apply to any press.
- A new acquisition is Barbara Tetenbaum’s A Guide to Experimental Letterpress Techniques. She discusses how to do pressure printing (putting string or a stencil behind the printing sheet) and other techniques using found objects. She’s bound examples of each technique into the spine. Her instructions are for cylinder presses, but I’m thinking I can modify many of them for my platen press (a project for next year!) (Available from Another Room Book Arts Bookstore.)
- My favorite book by far is Clifford Burke’s Printing Poetry: A workbook in typographic reification. It’s long out of print (but you can get used ones from Amazon) and my copy was a special Christmas present from my Mom when I got my first press. It’s mostly concerned with typography and poetry, quirky and opinionated, and has a section called “of Money, Time and Rust,” the bugbears of those of us with the letterpress printing bug.