Press Here

I went to visit John Easson in Coupar Angus last week. John runs a museum of printmaking, displaying presses, type, typecasting machines and many sundries that he has collected over a lifetime’s interest in printmaking and through a career that covered the transition from traditional letterpress through to desk top publishing and laser jets. He also published poetry books and pamphlets through his Quarto Press.

See www.coupar-angus.org/Groupshtm/presshere.htm

I’m planning to produce an edition of prints combining a poem with a linocut illustration and I wanted to talk to John about how to do it. I want the text to be printed ‘properly’ with type and through a press. John took me through his font book so I could choose the right font to suit my work. He has an impressive collection of fonts but you need a lot of type to set a page of text, not to mention all the spacers and packing that ensures the text sits in the right place on the page.

All those type trays take up space, if you can get them, which is not so easy nowadays. I guess there are still old printers with sheds full of type and type bits but there aren’t as many as there were. Ebay has done its bit to create a market but you can’t predict what’ll come up, or how much it’ll cost. Specialist makers of all the fiddly bits traditional typesetting needs are a rare breed now and there are so many bits that it’s probably impossible to get everything now. It’s sad to see such an important industry die so completely but, as John pointed out, it’s all those fiddly bits and specialised, often tedious, jobs that have helped kill it. John told me about someone he knew in Coupar Angus who’d spent a career setting up lines for accounts ledgers. There must be plenty of former printers who don’t have much nostalgia for jobs like that. Modern letterpress may be printed in the old way with inked blocks in a press but the blocks can be cast from computer generated designs. In that way the need for fiddling about with all those bits is much reduced. But some fiddly work is fine if you like that sort of thing. Thankfully for me, John is happy to typeset my fourteen lines of poetry, so I can go back to Coupar Angus and print my linocut, once I’ve cut it.