The Motherlode

The gods of ebay-bargains have finally smiled upon us! We have taken delivery of a truckload full of random old type. Hurrrah!

Interestingly, these are not letters, numbers or punctuation, but the most startlingly varied selection of pictoral type, logos etc. It's a fascinating collection. Some of it I think we'll be hard pressed to find a use for, but the best part of it is just flippin' awesome.

I reckon there's a few hundred pieces in total. Most of it is packed in a box at the mo, in layers, so hard to show you the scale of it, but here's a taster, with close-ups of some of the coolest pieces:

First go on the proof press

Last night we had our first attempt at printing on the proof press. It went really well. Here it is, dominating our kitchen:

First things first... now we're ready to go:

The GTS (Great Type Shortage) continues, so we had a bit of thinking to do before we could come up with some content that actually seemed worthwhile printing, and we ended up with this:

Basil was on hand to help with the set-up:

Mixing inks is still the part I enjoy the most, we got to use our fancy pants Japanese brayer as well:

We tried a few variations of which elements were printed, or otherwise. The lead type for the 'something' is kinda too fine for the proof press, hence it looking mostly over-inked and messy:

We solved the 'grubby edges on the 3' problem by flipping the chase round so that that open side of the 3 wasn't the first thing hit by the force of the roller.

And here, the finished product! I'm really quite pleased with this, though if we do it again, I think the original orange is preferable to this rather 'primary' red...

I think the combo of the printed 30 and unprinted debossed 'something' really makes this come alive visually, and works better conceptually as well (if we do say so ourselves!).

Right, who's birthday is up next...

New typewriter!

I collect typewriters.

Well, that might be something of an exaggeration. As of this month, I have 2 typewriters, which I'm not sure counts as a collection, but I'm working on it. I'll rephrase:

I aspire to collect typewriters.

I acquired this beauty in a charity shop recently for a bargainous £5.50:

It's an Olivetti Lettera 22, which I believe dates it somewhere between 1950 and 1965. Clearly needs a bit of a clean-up, but seems to be in more than adequate working order. Lovely!

I'm afraid she is still somewhat overshadowed by her predecessor though, my 1922 Underwood:

My far-too-talented husband refurbished this puppy for my birthday a couple of years back and it's taken pride of place in my library (I mean, our 2nd bedroom) ever since. Aside from said husband and the cat, this typewriter is almost certainly the thing I'd run back into our burning house to rescue. Just look at it! It just breathes history, you can almost see the coded war correspondence!

I actually got a surprising amount of use out of my Underwood last year, mainly for our wedding. I decided it would be a good idea to hand type all of the seating cards, address labels etc. Having a DIY wedding seems like a really awesome idea until you start multiplying things by 100. Obviously, there's no delete key on a typewriter, so my wastage rate was extraordinary!

Totally worth it in the end of course, here it is making a stunning centrepiece to our seating plan:

Images from the wedding are by our dear friend Tori Hancock.

OK, I'll admit this is getting out of hand...

So we bought a proof press. I won't say how much we paid, but it's certainly put a serious hole in our honeymoon savings.

I haven't actually been home to see it yet, but I'm too excited not to post about it now. Here it is, it's a bit of a beast, but who actually needs floor space in their kitchen:

I'll admit this was something of a rash decision, but these are incredibly rare, and we just couldn't turn down the opportunity, who knows when we'll see another!

As you can see, Basil is judging us:

Printing experiment

So here it is, our first printing experiment. I'm really pleased with how it went, though it was rather a shock quite how much 'fiddling' is necessary before you can get anything like a decent print.

We have a very limited stock of type at the moment, basically some nice big Gill Sans numerical digits, and a random selection of other lead type, none of which forms a complete alphabet! The lead type came with the Adana press we bought, all jumbled up (or 'pied', to be technical) in a big crate, and we've not finished going through it yet.

So, with this rather sad selection of stock, the best we could come up with was this:

24 is our house number, and Basil is the name of our cat, so this sort of makes sense. Ish.

The platen needs to be 'packed' before printing, usually with newsprint and the exciting sounding 'tympan paper'. If you're total amateurs on a first run, this amounts to chopped up Evening Standard and sketch book paper. We'll do it properly eventually. Honest.

We decided to go with a nice classic black for our first printing, we don't really have a surface on which to mix inks yet, and even though our kitchen is still to be 'done', we don't want to actually trash it. Here are the rollers inking up... it's gorgeous stuff printing ink, really glossy and tacky and viscous. I kind of wanted to eat it. Probably not the best idea.

We managed to make a few rookie errors, including not moving the gripper bar (that's the crossbar bit) up high enough to be out of the way of the type, which is very naughty, we're lucky we didn't damage the type. I don't have a photo of that, too ashamed.

As you can see, we had to run through quite a lot of proofs before we finally got something that looked alright. Both of us were astounded by the extent to which the most infinitesimal adjustments to the position of the platen (it's controlled by 4 screws at the back) can affect the look of the print.

Here we are mid-process. Had to move to the floor as our dining table is too wobbly:

 Here's the finished product (not a masterpiece, but not bad for a trial run):

And here it is being modelled by our cat Basil. As you can see, he's really enthusiastic about the whole thing:

 Hopefully it won't be too long before we can lay our hands on some more type and start producing prints that actually have a reason to exist. Sadly, due to the fact that no-one's making it anymore, type is extortionately expensive, so we may have to be a patient!