London Living

More GCT process. This week we spent most days in the letterpress room. It is certainly a lengthy process to typeset a rather small amount of text. We have an introduction in our "Wish project" catalogue (the project is to create a fake exhibition, the catalogue goes along with the exhibition). There was lots of idle time whilst we waited for Nick, the letterpress technician to help us. I had my camera so we could finish distributing 1,000 cranes (which we did, hoooray!) so these are some images from our time doing letterpress.

Above: the many drawers of various (sized) typefaces.

Our drawer (we used Walbaum) so for those less familiar with the letterpress process, we had to pick out each individual letter and space block dealio, then set it in a ruler type device then wedge in space blocks in each line until our paragraph was a nice uniform block (see below).

Above: One of our paragraph blocks.

The trusty letterpress.

The letterpress doing it's magic. Step one: paper on the machine.

Step two: paper goes against the text/press bit.

Step three: It gets pressed, and then presto! our type appears on the paper.


Above: Our pages post-press.
The images below are the handiworks of others..



We finished and printed out our exhibition poster, see below.


Currently we have finished the layout and are in the midst of printing the pages. Then it's only binding the giant book, getting the cover embossed with a plate we had specially made (£40 later) and having the title letterpressed! So close to completing something that seems to have no end. As much as I love this project, I can't wait for it to be over. I will post the finished product after Monday.