Day 14

Checking registration before print run– a little off in this proof.

TODAY'S HAPPENINGS

• Printed Grand Ole Opry restrikes
• I've got Vandercook blisters on my fingers!
• Bryce from Isle of Printing stopped in to show some recent work. It was very interesting to see how he integrates new media (digital artwork via mag and polymer plates) with classic letterpress.  (Also very cool to see what a good relationship Hatch keeps with other printers in town.)

WHAT I LEARNED

• The press rollers should always be in motion– this prevents them from getting any flat spots.
• To check registration, you can fold your poster in half and align it with the previous color for reference.
• It pays to set a few multiple smaller pieces of furniture rather than only large ones– this makes it easier to shuffle them around when your registration is a pica or two off.

SOME VOCABULARY

• A workup is when a piece of furniture 'works' its way up to type high and begins to print.
• Impression is the emboss type makes when it is pressed with a lot of force into your paper. It's what many people crave in letterpress printmaking, but it's classically (and for the sake of your type) not desirable.

QUESTIONS TO ASK DURING PRINTING


Taming down all of variables I worry about while printing:

• Is everything registered properly?
• Is the color correct?
• Are there workups?
• Is the type inked evenly?
• Do I have too much ink?
• Do any of my characters/blocks need to be raised so they print better?
• Are any of my characters/blocks causing too much impression?
• Is dirt/dry ink/foreign matter getting onto (or crushing into!) my type?

This nonsense is above the handwashing sink (and spawned this show flyer today)

Day 13

All our fun typesetting the past few days is adding up...and up and up...

WHAT I DID

• Music City Roots poster– complete!
• Met with my client for the Carrie Underwood poster, got my first job approval (this means printing will ensue)
• Mixed the colors for the Underwood poster
• Got lots of reglet splinters– boo!

WHAT I LEARNED

• Before you print your job on the press, we hand-brayer the set type and pull a proof (rub tracing paper onto the inked letters with your hand and/or a wooden spoon)
• Coat proofs twice with corn starch, then brush it off to help keep ink from smudging
• Ink proofs diagonally, and pull the tracing paper off diagonally– it keeps the type from sticking and lifting up

Found this guy and had to photograph, as it coincides a bit with my personal work.

Day 12

650 AM, WSM (just sing the jingle in your head)

WHAT I DID

• Almost finished setting Music City Roots poster
• Petted Huey (photo coming later, everyone loves cat pictures, right?)

LESSONS FOR TODAY

• How to deal with large amounts of type
• What to do when not all of your type will fit in a line (pretty tricky when you're trying to justify type, or get it to line up flush from left to right perfectly)

1. Try a different and/or smaller font
2. Try using lowercase instead of uppercase
3. Utilize catchwords (fancy "and"s and "the"s styled into one block)
4. Try to shrink articles like of, for, at, etc., or set them in a different font
5. Switch "and" with "&"
6. Switch "at" with "@"

According to the Nashville tour guide lady that comes in every day, this poster has sold more than Elvis and Johnny Cash posters

Day 11

A rake block!

WHAT I DID

• Started setting my design for the fall Music City Roots poster.
• Called my client to check out the Carrie Underwood proof.
• Got a customer looking for a John Cage Poster– slightly out of the ordinary

LESSONS FOR TODAY

• To test out how large type needs to be for your poster, bring your composing stick to a type case and use a line of average-width letters to gauge how big words will be.
• Because proofs are a single, arbitrary color, indicate what the actual colors/separations/background blocks will be on the proof.

Our table saw for cutting down blocks.

Day 10

Collected intern sketches for Carrie Underwood poster (plus coffee.)

WHAT I DID

• Got our first design job (not to be confused with restriking old posters!)
• Sketched ideas for Carrie Underwood poster
• Set type for Carrie Underwood poster

LESSONS FOR TODAY

• Don't design something that will be extremely hard to restrike.
• Be aware of color separations and how they will affect the printing process.
• Reference your artist's website/latest merch/album covers, etc. so you can design appropriately.
• Keep in mind that your poster design should represent your artist and Hatch
• After creating a small sketch, recreate your sketch as actual size to reference when pulling type.

"They're getting a poster, not a root canal!" - Brad on client reception.

Johanna (with Adrianne) cutting linoleum for the 'O's in "Underwood"

Each intern gets an inbox– ours are now filled with jobs

Day 9

The controls for the Vandercook Universal III back press.

LESSONS FOR TODAY

• Intro to the back press– it's semi-automatic and a bit intimidating; while the front and mid press have only a couple switches, this one's got several.
• Mix your color correctly before you start your edition!
• Signs you might have too much ink:
  a) ink prints shinier (especially on a matte paper)
  b) ink has a bubbly texture
  c) finer areas fill in/bleed
  d) rollers "sizzle" too loudly
• Don't use lead furniture to fill in the press bed; it has no give and is hard on the roller
• How to clean the press rollers properly (take 2)

WHAT I DID

• Printed Grand Ole Opry restrikes
• Printed on the back press's tympan paper (cranked the wrong lever, too many options!)

Day 8

Jennifer requested a "spicy mustard" kind of yellow for this job...

WHAT I DID

• Mixed lots of ink.
• Helped print Libby Koch posters.
• Typeset some poster restrikes.

LESSONS FOR TODAY

• When typesetting, choose the simplest way of doing things (and one that is easy to modify on the press). Creating a puzzle out of type/furniture makes changing spacing hard.
• Still feeling out how much ink is ideal for the press roller. I've always thought that the sound of "bacon sizzle" was a pretty relative term, although that's often what we're told to listen for.
• Hatch is currently at its 7th location, all of them being in the downtown Nashville area.

Typeset jobs are stored on wooden boards and labelled with tape. We've accumulated lots of labels from past jobs, this is just a teeny section of them.

Day 7

At Hatch, the mid press is signed by all the celebrities that drift through the shop. Kelsey helped me find Shel Silverstein's signature (Martha Stewart just happened to get in the shot too.)

WHAT I LEARNED

• Let freshly printed posters dry for a day before stacking them.
• When posters are printed, dried, and stacked, you then bag the posters, label the brown paper bag with job name and quantity, then call the client for pickup.
• To count out large orders quickly, count a pile of 50 posters, then make more piles of the same thickness (you can feel them to see that they're level)
• Uneven inking can cause your poster to print incorrectly– it's not always uneven type.
• The press is usually equipped with a quoin key, tape, scrap paper (for leveling type), scissors, and tweezers– don't put any other junk in!

WHAT I DID

• Printed Historic Ryman Auditorium posters.

VOCABULARY FOR TODAY

• A common sense trim typically leaves 3 picas of margin around a trimmed poster.

Day 6

Brad using the massive Hatch paper cutter

LESSONS FOR TODAY

• How to print on the mid-press (Vandercook Universal-I)
• When mixing ink, be clean! Keep the lips of the jars wiped down and put your palette knife on a clean surface.
• Don't gouge the ink when scooping it out.
• The first time you print a poster, roll the cylinder slowly to see if any type causes pressure.
• When type needs to be raised, cut paper to the shape of the type and tape it to the back.
• Before adding lead to loose type on the press bed, check for sloppy typesetting first– it may be that something it just out of place.
• When figuring out what pressure to print at, start low and gradually raise the press bed.
• During early prints/the registration process, get rid of mis-registered prints! That way, you won't register later colors incorrectly.

Setting type/images on a diagonal = a hot mess!

Love this block!

Day 5

Inking up the front press

WHAT I LEARNED

• How to print a poster on the front press (Vandercook SP15)
• Watch for leads on the press bed– they match!
• In reference to the order of tightening the lockup bar and tightening quoins..."Shut the door (lockup bar) before you lock it (quoins)."
• Stack printed posters vertically so ink won't offset.
• and the kicker...Dorris Macon was Uncle Dave's son, not his daughter! I've heard of Dorris a few times, but I never realized this was a male name.

VOCABULARY FOR TODAY

• Tympan paper is the cushy wax coated paper that goes around the cylinder
• The frame user to hold all the type together is called the chase
• Type locked into the chase is called the form
• The lockup bar goes at the bottom of the form and secures it into the press
• A quoin is a mechanism, tightened by a quoin key, used to secure type from the side.
• The dead line is a line marked on the press bed after which nothing type high can be set (or it will be damaged by the cylinder.)
• Type high is literally the term for the universal height of letterpress type– .918", that is.

NEW TYPEFACES

• Airport (reminiscent of Futura)
• News Gothic

Quoins, quoin key, lockup bar, etc. on the front press

Day 4

Poster project No.1

Typeset my first poster today! Johanna and I were assigned a restrike, meaning we had to replicate an old job based on a poster we had on file already. Remaking posters and getting the type to lock up correctly is a lot like putting together a puzzle, and I like it.

WHAT I LEARNED

• Furniture is 4 picas tall exactly– don't sit it on its side by accident.
• Use tape to secure small, tricky units of type (e.g. a bar of 12pt stars)
• How to die cut on the Vandercook
• New wood blocks are presented to the client as a sketch in the proof– only after they're approved do they actually get cut (same goes for photo plates!)

NEW TYPE FRIENDS

• Empire
• Balderdash

Made with a real 45!

Day 3

Proofing a restrike of a Grand Ole Opry poster

WHAT I LEARNED

• How to pull a proof before running type through the press
• Spend more time pulling/setting type so that you will spend less time on the press.
• Visited upstairs photo plate archive/learned how it's organized.
• Hand carved pieces of type on cheaper wood soaks up more ink than factory endgrain pieces.
• Ink up type diagonally so that the ink doesn't pull up type.
• What a die looks like/how to die cut on the press.
• Type is traditionally set upside down and backwards, but for the large type in our posters, we set backwards and not upside down, so we can pay more attention to the aesthetics of the design.
• The moveable part of the composing stick is called the knee.

NEW TYPE FRIENDS

• Farmer Gothic (not to be mistaken for Franklin Gothic condensed)
• Tower
• Bank Gothic
• Mandy (real good lookin wood type!)

Mandy

Day 2

Today I spent a lot of time putting away type and furniture (of the letterpress variety.) It's interesting how quickly working with tangible pieces of type improves your understanding of the letterforms.

THINGS I LEARNED

• Don't mistake rules (which are type high) for reglets
• Don't mistake type (specifically, 'I', '1', and 'l') as reglets
• Avoid these mistakes (sometimes) by looking for the shinier face of the type/rule where it has been printed
• Differentiate varying sizes of lead type by lining up the notches on the back
• Tuesday is fish taco day @ Chile Burrito (also tried horchata for the first time!)

NEW TYPEFACE FRIENDS

• Stymie
• Latin Wide
• John Hancock
• Cheltenham Bold (which unfortunately, in the case of putting away type, looks quite like John Hancock)

Day 1

WHO I MET

• Nick, Johanna, Kelsey, and Adrianne - my fellow interns
• Brad, Kathy, Jennifer, Mary - the staff
• Jim - the boss man
• Huey and Maow - the cats
• Finnigan - the ferocious guard dog

THINGS I LEARNED

• There are 6 picas in an inch
• Fancy versions of "and" "the" "with", etc. are called catchwords
• "Pantograph" is the name of the contraption used to "trace" out wood type
• How to navigate (at least partly) through loads and loads of Hatch wood type
• Lots of talk about type! Here is a little bit of practice.

Snail Mail, Books & Driving Practice

The time is almost here for some Hatch Show printin! I was happy to receive some good old-fashioned snail mail last month briefing me on what to expect and what to prepare for during my time at Hatch. I was also really excited to check out some of the suggested reading for interns– the fact that Rob Roy Kelly's American Woodtype was on the list gave me more than enough reason to finally purchase it (luckily, it has just been reissued!) Also added to my pile of nightstand toppers is Cleeton/Pitkin/Cornwell's General Printing and Bill Moran's Hamilton Wood Type. While I enjoy books of the word variety, I really enjoy books with large, good-lookin letters in 'em.

It's about a week before my first day, and I am going to go ahead and predict that the toughest part of this whole internship may very well be the commute. Living in a 2-stoplight town has in no way prepared me for downtown Nashville cruisin, and I'm pretty sure that if I am in a parallel parking situation I will embarrass myself. With that said, I'm devoting this week to preventing that very situation!