Sophie Cunningham
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Thursday 21 August, 2008

The final product

First proof

This was my first proof. It took about 5 hours to set and then, behold! I had a forme with perfect tension (tension is very important in letterpress printing. In fact there is so much talk about taut formes and tensions it's downright erotic sometimes. Or perhaps that's just me). Anyway, I had a perfect forme but there were, as you can see, typos. Quite a few of them. (Did you know the phrase mind your p's and q's came from letterpress?). So then I had to go back in and fix them and alas, my spacing slackened in some imperceptible way and when I tied everything back up it was either too tense because I overlocked, or not tense enough. This might be why I struggled to get the inking on the final product even enough. There was also a patch in the centre which was fainter - though we built that up with tissue. See below - the k's were a particular problem. It could have been fixed in the end but it was a workshop and we'd been working on it for 20 hours, so it was time to go home.

Cover page

Final

Views from the Floor

Mark says:

It's a lovely piece of work, Sophie. I admire you trying your hand at typesetting.

What typeface did you use? It's quite lovely. It seems to have a little something extra about it.

Were they old or new type? Wear could account for some of the issues with the type and evenness of printing. Ampersand Duck mentions the issues with using vintage type in that excellent post she did on typesetting...

Are you reading from the pages you printed at the Cathedral? Now that would make for a lovely post (also because I can't make it to that session and would love to hear about it!).

sophie says:

Yes, I do plan to read from these pages - though I'd meant to set 3 poems but ran out of time! So there will be a 3rd, less glamorous page, stuck in the middle. It's certainly the event at the MWF which I'm most pleased about being involved in.

It was new type so the vintage thing wasn't the issue. The face was called Van Dyke. It's not a face I'd heard of before but it is lovely, isn't it?

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