Letterpress Prints

What is letterpress?

Letterpress is the act of pressing letters into paper with ink in between. Usually there's old printing presses also incorporated in the process. I love the physical, hands on process letterpress printing takes.

Some context...

I started letterpress printing in the spring of 2024 at the Indiana University Type Shop. There I had access to four working Vandercook Printing presses; three 1961 SP15s, and one 1959 Universal III. I also had access to one of the largest, nicest university collections of antique wood and metal type.

Hand carving my linoleum blocks and then printing from them on an antique printing press means that I get almost full control over every single aspect of the image I’m making. Emphasis on almost full control. Sometimes my carving tools slip, and I accidently take a chunk out of something I most certainly did not intend to. That includes my own hands sometimes; ouch. Other times, the press I am using will leave mystery ink smudges on the edges of my paper that I really do not want there, and no matter how much I clean the press, it still happens. Things like this are annoying to me most times, but I also realize that these are the prices I pay for making hand-made art.

You might wonder why I choose this “outdated’ form of printing when we have an abundance of very high-quality printers on campus and really could just use my computer to make the same designs. Well, my answer would be this: it’s just not the same. And honestly its far more interesting to use old presses that were used to print who-knows-what 50 years ago.