What is letterpress?

Letterpress is one of the oldest forms of printing. It involves a raised image (in this case, a plate) to be inked and then pressed into paper. In the beginning, the real printing pros were searching for a “kiss impression”, meaning that the inked image touched the paper ever so lightly, in the sweet spot of producing a legible print, but not with so much force that it left an impression. These days, most printers (and letterpress enthusiasts, such as yourself) are actually after that deep, crisp impression into thick, pillowy (usually cotton) letterpress paper.

Historically, any text that was printed involved handset type, where a typesetter would painstakingly spell out the words of the text (backwards, mirrored) and punctuation from drawers of type. The large drawers with many little compartments would contain all the letters and punctuation from one size of one specific typeface. So if you wanted to have, say, 8 size options of Garamond, plus some bold and italic versions, well, suddenly you need cases and cases of type. Type was made out of lead, which is heavy and soft (and poisonous, but we can talk about that later). Capital letters were stored in the upper cases and the others were generally kept in the…lower cases. Hence how we still refer to upper and lower case type.

Images had to be carved or made out of molds. It wasn’t a quick and easy process.

While it still isn’t a quick and easy process, today we use photopolymer plates to create the text and images in letterpress designs. Basically, a digital file is imprinted on a special kind of polymer and with a photo emulsion process, the area with the design remains raised, while the other parts are washed away. You do this for each part of your design that will be printed in a different color or run through the press, carefully lining the plates up as you print.

It’s quite a process, but the results are well worth it!