About

Valentine's Day AIGA / Philadelphia creative letterpress workshop

AIGA / Philadelphia sponsored a Lead Graffiti creative workshop and offered it to their membership. With a limit at six, we have plenty of hands on time with each participant.

As the first workshop was held on Valentine's Day, we thought it would be appropriate to incorporate love, typography and books into the project.

We produced about a dozen copperplates of some particularly romantic Vs ahead of time so each person could pick one to compliment their text.

Each person was asked to bring a quote that would marry with the style of the letterform they picked. In the middle of all of our equipment, some of which dates from the middle of the 19th Century, were these two pulling their quotes off their iPhones. Hmmm.

Ray, acting as tour guide, shows the range of equipment we have in our Lead Graffiti studio. This view is looking through our 1869 Washington iron handpress.

To start, everyone got the lecture on how to handset metal type using a composing stick, spacing material and leading to fill the quote out to form a tight, solid rectangle.

The book form we were using is a broadside (a sheet printed only one side) which is folded and cut in a particular arrangement to create an accordion-fold book. We had previously produced pastepaper to create a cover that could be used to bind the book without using glue or any sewing. Everyone had a chance to handcrank a few covers on our Vandercook SP-15.

Below we can see Brad, who brought along his own very nice apron, registering a sheet to begin printing the second color on the broadside.

Below is Brad hanging up one of his posters to dry showing a bit of the layout of the 16 pages. The red Vs end up being the lefthand side of each spread.

Below is the form that has been locked up so as to print the eight righthand 4" x 5" pages. It shows the quotes each of our new type composers had handset.

Our group gathered around our Vandercook Universal III during the printing of the second color (black).

When we were setting up the colophon for the project, we let everyone cast their name on our Intertype C4 linecaster. It is always an amazing thing to type at the keyboard, push one lever, and listen as 4,000 parts start to spin and whir, ending in a single line of warm type metal sliding out the bottom.

Here is the finished book, along with examples of the various pieces and the different stages of the project.