Print Isn’t Dead; Forbes Magazine reports
With a title like, “Print Isn’t Dead” makes it hard not to click on, especially for people from the printing trade. Here we read in Forbes about how the ancient craft of letterpress printing is making a comeback:
“Letterpress is a method of printing text and images by laying paper onto a raised surface that has been inked and applying considerable pressure. Its roots go back to 2nd-century Chinese woodblock printing, through 15th-century movable type and on into the rotary presses of the mid-19th century.
A decade ago you could pick up a discarded press for a few hundred bucks. David Jury, a 60-year-old typography expert and author in Colchester, England, bought one in 1996 and began printing his own books and stationery, helping to kick off a minirevival of letterpress artifacts that now include embossed wedding invitations, calendars, limited-edition prints and one-of-a-kind objets. Take that, paperless society.”
Source: http://www.forbes.com/global/2009/0608/hatch-show-print-letterpress-revisted.html
The article highlights how having a small press and print-shop operation is making a come-back in NYC and across the States really. The quality and feel is better than commercial printing. And they continue with this little bit;
“While the process is still largely manual, it has evolved since the days of Johannes Gutenberg. You don’t need to start with a woodblock and cold type; a software program like Adobe Illustrator ( ADBE – stock symbol) can handle images and text. From there, if you’re adventuresome, you can create your own photopolymer plate–it involves printing the image on vellum paper, photocopying onto a transparency placed between two pieces of glass, along with thermal negative film, exposing that sandwich to ultraviolet light and rinsing away unexposed parts of the negative with water. Or you can send an Adobe or tif (tagged image file) to a manufacturer like Boxcar Press in Syracuse, New York, which typically charges $10 to $50 per plate, depending on size and intricacy (each color requires a different plate). You still pass the plate through a letterpress the old-fashioned way, pushing it onto the paper, forming its hallmark indentation.”
Source: http://www.forbes.com/global/2009/0608/hatch-show-print-letterpress-revisted.html
Make sure you read the full article; pretty interesting!
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