Text 2 Letterpress

Letterpress is a 'relief process — that is, the printing surface holding the image to be printed is raised above the non-printing background. This raised surface is inked by rollers and then pressed against the paper to make the impression. Because the background is lower than the printing area, it comes into contact with neither the inking rollers nor the paper, and so does not print,

In traditional letterpress, all the text is printed from metal type and the pictures from letterpress blocks. These elements are assembled together (imposed) to create a 'forme' inside a rigid frame (chase), which is placed in the press. The printing surface therefore may be made up of hundreds or thousands of different pieces of type, blocks and spacing. A development of letterpress uses 'stereo' or 'electro' plates for each page or for the whole 'forme'

Letterpress characteristics Letterpress ink is dense and gives a strong black image. When type is printed on to a soft paper the 'squash' can be seen around each character, and this adds distinction to private-press work — when the right typeface is used: typefaces made up from fine lines print better on paper with a smooth surface using a lighter impression, as otherwise their fine detail is buried in the soft paper.

Letterpress blocks of photographs need a high-quality art paper to obtain the best results in either black-and-white or colour, and the blocks themselves are very expensive compared with the equivalents used in other processes. This is because the zinc or copper used is itself expensive, and because the etching process is slow, with corrections difficult to achieve.

Advantages and disadvantages Except in the specialized areas mentioned above, letterpress, the dominant printing process until the mid-1960s, has largely given way to offset lithography. The disadvantages of letterpress are the high cost of the metal type and blocks: the fact that more expensive papers are required to achieve the kind of quality offset can achieve using cheaper ones; the relatively slow speed of most letterpress machines; and the fact that modern methods of origination are mainly photographic and do not lend themselves to the creation of a raised surface.

The advantages of the process are the denseness of the ink (not diluted by water or spirit, as in offset or gravure) and the quality of the impression — excellent characteristics for high-quality private-press work. In the case of newspapers and paperbacks, letterpress survives where the origination process (for example, hot metal typesetting) lends itself to the production of a raised surface, Letterpress also wastes less paper than offset, as there are no problems of holding the balance between ink and water.

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