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About Letterpress
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Letterpress differs from offset printing in that the plate has raised areas which receive the ink and transfer it to the paper. Think of a rubber stamp, the image is raised and that's what gets inked when you push it onto the stamp pad. Letterpress printing presses use rollers to ink the image plate, or hand or machine set type, then a sheet of paper is pressed against the inked surface. Letterpress is capable of depositing a heavier film of ink than offset, so solid colors can appear stronger. The impression of the raised surface also leaves a small impression in the paper, giving it a slight three dimensional feel. This is often overdone, however. A recent development is the polymer plate. This is a nylon material which can be contact exposed through a negative, developed and printed on letterpresses. The result is that anything which can be made into a negative, eg. ink drawings, halftones, laser printer output from page layout programs such as Quark, can be turned into a letterpress printing plate. We have our own polymer platemaker and graphic arts camera for producing negatives.
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The polymer platemaker, and a plate
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The Miehle V50X cylinder letterpress
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Cases of metal type. We set some type by hand, some from polymer.
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