Letterpress: Be Careful What You Wish For

September has been a busy month down at the St Botolph’s Letterpress. Not only did we have our regular Letterpress Takeover event, we also launched our monthly newsletters, signed up to the British Printing Society and the Oxford Guild of Printers, found time for a couple of Wednesday evening sorting sessions, took a trip to Cheltenham for the Whittington Press Open Day, and had a very successful visit to the John Jarrold Printing Museum (JJPM) in Norwich. Phew!

The big exciting news is the acquisition of some new essential pieces of kit, which have been given to us by the chaps at JJPM. We returned from Norwich with an Adana 8×5, a big box of inks, a rotary bowler plus various other useful bits and pieces. As well as that, we’re also finding space for a very large Soldan proofing press (with a print the same size as Typoretum’s biggest press) which should be coming down later this month or next. And to top it all off, JJPM are sorting through a recent donation of wood type, with the promise that we can take on whatever they don’t need. As the sheer size and variety of the JJPM collection had already floored us, all this news sent us straight to the nearest pub for a stabilising and celebratory pint!

We have a big photo album to put up from our trip, and it’ll probably warrant it’s own blog entry, but it just goes to show that hard work and a willingness to connect with the wider world of letterpress is already rewarding us more than we thought possible. We have a feeling this particular relationship will be a fruitful one.

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Getting out into the world of letterpress is also how we heard of and met Russell Frost of Hooksmith Press. We loved the pieces that he submitted to our IMPRESS 2014 show earlier in the year, and were thrilled when he agreed to come and talk to us about his adventures in print.

Having first got the letterpress bug when living over here with his English wife, a move back to his native New Zealand yielded an untapped market. Touring the country for old print studios he found plenty of presses, wood type, and (his personal passion) printing blocks. These etched and hand carved images have graced many of Russell’s prints, and help them stand out from the text based pieces that most people produce.

With his print workshop growing ever larger, the decision to return to the UK meant that all of that carefully sorted metal type had to be taken out of the typecases and made ready to ship across the world to his current base – a mid-terrace house in Leytonstone.

Unlike many of the new generation of letterpress printers, he has no formal design training beyond his qualification as a landscape garden designer, in fact compared to landscaping he finds letterpress a relatively quick discipline! His passion for hunting down type and it’s connection to the past really shone through, and we’re hoping he’ll send some more gems our way for IMPRESS 2015.

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Our final big event of September was this year’s Whittington Press Open Day, aka Presstival. Falling on Saturday the 6th, it seemed as good a time as any to make a pilgrimage out to one of the bastions of letterpress in the UK. Whittington specialise in fine press printing and artists’ books, and one of their regular works is Matrix, a high quality annual dedicated to fine printing from across the world.

Presstival is when they throw open their doors, letting people into the rabbit warren of machinery and workshops, whilst printers from across the country sell their wares outside. It’s a great opportunity to see what people are up to, catch up with various acquaintances from the thriving online letterpress community and – somewhat inevitably for visiting pressmen – grab some beers and swap some tales.

As with our John Jarrold trip, we’re hoping to put up a proper account of Presstival soon, but until then this account by the excellent The Counter Press (who also had work in IMPRESS 2014) should help give you an idea of what it’s like.

As our little letterpress project here in Colchester continues to snowball, we’re sure that the coming months will be just as exciting. There are a few ways to keep up-to-date with all that’s going on. Sign up to our mailing list for a monthly newsletter detailing our upcoming plans, give our Facebook page a like to follow our day-to-day happenings, events and photo albums, or regularly check our website and blog pages to find out more about the story of the St Botolph’s Letterpress project and how you can get involved.