Assembling our Arab Crown Folio Press

I was hoping to come up with some witty title for this post, riffing on Avengers Assemble, but... I got nuthin'. So you'll have to make do with the Ronseal approach instead.

Don't want to run the risk of boring the pants off everyone, so this post will be mostly image-based.

To give a brief bit of background... we were lucky enough to acquire this press through a friend of ours at The Waiting Room. It's a rather convoluted story, but the short version is that we were given the press in exchange for a donation to the excellent Emery Walker Trust. I covered the moving of the press in a previous post, here.

The press most certainly has a fascinating history, if only it could talk. We know it lived at Kelmscott House at some point. It may be bit of a stretch to connect it to William Morris himself, though we can dream!

Some shots of the components before we got started:

(Apologies for the deceased arachnid in this one, at least he's out of focus)

I'm afraid I personally can't take much credit for the actual assembly work, I left that to Sam Boy, my Dad, and our mate Alex.

It was very much a 'boys in the workshop' day. They loved it. Here they are exhibiting some excellent teamwork skills:

One of the hardest things to contend with (other than only having an instruction manual from about 150 years ago), is the weight of the thing. Some components need 2 people to even lift them, and once the press starts taking shape, moving the frame of it becomes nigh on impossible without equipment (or putting your back out).

Some more work-in-progress photos:

(Rope is always handy)

Here you can see it really coming together:

Impromptu (grubby) photography studio:

Me pretending I know how to operate the thing::

Photos like this show quite how much work we've still got to do (of the cleaning and painting kind):

But we're still feeling pretty pleased with ourselves:

So long ways to go yet precious (that's a LOTR quote by the way), but progress made nonetheless. I really need to work on my treadle technique though:

Day 2 of the rebuilt... and it works! Well apart from the lack of a chase. Anyone know where we can get an Arab Crown Folio chase? #letterpress

A video posted by Grey Letter Press (@grey_letter_press) on Sep 12, 2015 at 11:34am PDT

A bit of manual labour

After much searching and some lost opportunities, we've been lucky enough to lay our hands on an Arab Crown Folio platen press. Woohoo!

For those whom that conjures no immediate mental image, it should something like this (this pic from letterpresser.co.uk):

Here's an 1890 advert for it, a beauty I think you'll agree:

Here's what ours looks like:

So, bit of work to be done! Well, I tell a lie. The above is what it looked like a few weeks before we went to collect it. Since then, a lovely fellow called Christopher (in who's barn it was being stored), was kind enough to give most of the components a paraffin bath and now they're looking considerably less greasy. Still plenty to be done, but a bucket load of progress made, certainly.

Phase one of our work with the Arab involved moving it from Christopher's barn, north of Colchester, to my parent's garage, south of Colchester. A surprisingly smooth process, involving 5 people, 3 cars (van plans fell through), tarps, blankets, gardening gloves, and a good bit of elbow grease. In good news, neither the press nor any personnel were injured.

Here are some of the components during the move, I cannot WAIT to get this baby up and running.

And here it is, all neatly stacked up and covered with sheets like a spooky ghost, in its temporary home:

Phase 2 will be rather protracted, as it involves clearing the greenhouse and gigantic hedges from our garden, pouring a concrete base, and building a shed studio to house the press. I'm medium-confident of achieving this over the summer. If anyone has a burning desire to come and help out...?

More posts to follow on our progress. Or lack of, as the case may be.

Read All About It

It's letterpress, but not as we know it.

We came across a fascinating video this week, showing the process of printing newspapers "pre-computers".

The film was made in around 1950 and it's a great snapshot of printing history. You can see linotype and teletype machines in action, proofing, plate-making, photographs being developed and some bone fide 1950s scouts. It has everything. It certainly filled a few gaps in my knowledge. Hope you enjoy this as much as we did...

Off with their heads!

S'alright, we're not really decapitating anyone, just bought us a guillotine and I can't think about the word guillotine without that coming to mind. We'll only be trimming board with it, promise.

So here he is, lovely no? Please ignore our hideous kitchen, we can't afford to do it up because we keep buying letterpress gear.

We had no idea that Adana made guillotines as well as presses. I'm so pleased he's as handsome as our little 8x5!

We bought this on ebay a couple of weeks ago, collection only. The seller turned out to be a charming bloke called Glenn, from Inky Beard Press.

He's based in Whitstable, so we managed another trip to the seaside this month in order to collect. It was absolutely pissing it down, but I'm always happy to see the sea, whatever the weather.

We enjoyed an interesting chat with Glenn, he showed us around his little workshop. He has a marvellous collection of type, and this hunking beauty of a press, a Crown Folio Arab. We are very jealous:

Here's some of his lovely work. I love the 'public hanging' poster:

We can't wait to get cracking with the guillotine and are anticipating it will save us a shed load of time. We've been trimming by hand (it seems we do everything by hand!) with a scalpel up to this point, so hopefully this will give us a few days of our lives back.

Gold! And a lucky find.

Let me clarify. We have not found any treasure, gold is just an ink colour, and the lucky find was a type tray. Ok, expectation management out of the way, just a quick catch-up today...

I've recently gone down to a 4-day week in my day job, allowing me the brilliant expanse of all-the-Wednesdays to focus on our little letterpress company, Grey Letter Press.

I'll admit the first week didn't go that well, I ended up spending more time cooking and cleaning, as it was such a novelty to be home and have time to do these things. Of course, at the end of the day I felt frustrated and cross with myself. I didn't lose a fifth of my salary to be a bloody housewife!

So, since then I've been much more focused and spent lots of time reprinting cards, look here I am, printing...

Cards what I printed (innit):

In big news, we're trading at our first craft market soon (woohoo!), so we need plenty of stock. I will be posting again about this nearer the time of course, but we'll be at the Crafty Fox Market the Dogstar in Brixton on Saturday 25th April. Do swing by if you fancy it (and buy loads of cards please).

We thought some of our cards could do with a little revamp, so I've been trying out printing some existing designs in gold. Gooooolllld! Whaddaya reckon? This one we've decided is definitely a goer:

Not so sure about this one, I think maybe the original black is better? What say you?

In other news, we've had a weekend away in the delightful seaside town of Aldeburgh, Suffolk. Apparently, it's pronounced "All-brough", which is confusing. Not much to do if you've got kids or are easily bored, but if you just like sea-views, walking, eating and drinking like we do, I'd certainly recommend it.

We took a very windy stroll up the coast to the neighbouring village of Thorpeness, where we found a lovely sort of vintage market, called the Thorpeness Emporium. All sorts of delightful bits in there, including a gorgeous 1960s John Lewis sofa that totally stole our hearts. Head's won out on that one (can't afford it, don't need one), but we did allow ourselves to be tempted by this very unusual looking type tray:

That's me, nearly getting blown away on the walk back. I'm not wearing a tiny hat, btw, that's the handle of the tray.

We believe the tray is for storing leading, or furniture. Well, that's what we're using it for anyway. Lovely stuff.

Sausages!

We've been given a rather unusual commission by a friend of mine...

She and her husband make their own sausages at home, mainly for friends, but they're thinking about potentially selling on a small scale sometime soon. In an interesting twist of fate, she also owns this gorgeous old piggy print block that she bought in an antiques shop many moons ago:

Can you guess where this is going? Oh yes, it's time for some letterpress pig labels : )

We proofed it up on the 330gsm stock we use for greetings cards. As you can see, he's in really good nick, with fantastic fine detail, and he's a handsome old devil to boot:

We're still not 100% certain how we want the packaging to work, so we've not actually gone ahead with the final printing for this as yet, but current favourite idea is a belly-band type number, like this:

Or possibly in this lovely gun metal blue:

We also had a go at masking off the text, for any non-pork products, but this needs some work, as you see we're losing some of the line detail from his back:

Will post an update once the final product is printed.

Excuse the unattractive sausages won't you, they were fresh out of the freezer and purely for demonstrative purposes. Not that there's such a thing as attractive sausages anyway, I suppose...