Zen and the Art of Letterpress Type Setting

The first time I had an induction to the letterpress I not only felt daunted by the vast amount of intricate type and all of the finicky processes, but was told I needed to be tested for dyslexia by my tutor!

Anyone familiar with letterpress setting knows that each letter, cast in metal or wood, is reversed so when you print they read the right way, kind of like when you hold a page of text up to a mirror... This dumfounded me and I found it completely impossible to grasp, I just couldn’t decipher the letters, n’s were u’s, and b, p, d and q were all the same. To top it off, I kept laying out my text left to right, making it doubly backwards. I should note that there is a little map that goes with the type cases that is printed the RIGHT way around so you can easily find the letters, but this was of no use to me.

One of our tutors asked if I was dyslexic, or maybe he just pointed it out, “you’re dyslexic.” In any rate, I thought about it for a second, how sometimes I read things the wrong way, can never make sense of left or right, and at times write numbers back to front... shit, I thought everyone had that!!


The technician at the Camberwell press is an absolute angel , only for his patience and his perfection did my work come out exactly the way I envisaged. Ian’s been at the college for years, and everyone loves him. He has an open ear to designers’ wishes and the foresight and experience to offer suggestion. But on the printing press is where his genius comes out, he sets everything he works on to absolute little, tiny, minute, detailed precision. Any indent or space too wide he gets... For me, any letter or word backwards. He is good!
He’s quick to point out the facilities are not what they used to be though, but who can blame him, at one point the college boasted one of the best collections of letterpress type in Europe. That changed a while ago when the college, for whatever reason, got rid of half of the equipment and type.

Well, I decided to approach letterpress again after the first term of graphic’s “dyslexia point out” and redo the sentence I was trying to illustrate for my typography elective. Spot varnishing was suggested, so I wanted to give that a go and explore the idea of invisible text. I liked the result this produced so I thought I’d carry on with the rest of the series, laying out a paragraph and page of text, in this way.

It wasn't until I was setting the page of text, that something clicked with me with type setting... there’s no rushing it. I know that is obvious, but how I mean it is, at the beginning it REALLY frustrated me, but after awhile I just learned to appreciate it for what it was... s l o w... and that’s ok . It’s the only thing I’ve ever done that forces me to be in the present moment. I’m not sure if it’s because of my personal struggle with the process, but when I’m setting type I’m fully focused on only that.

Of course the quality the letterpress presents over digital, laser, or whatever high-tech printer, is unmatched, and I hope that’s not just in the eye of the one who sets it. I think over the last seven weeks I’ve set nearly a thousand words, the last 600 took me around thirteen hours to put together only to have ONE print.

Now what I have yet to do, but hope comes to me as peacefully, is zen and the art of putting letterpress type away....