 Little Big Magazine has a post about ABC posters, including mine. The one to the right is Gwenola Carrere’s ABCD Metiers (ABC of Jobs), from L’Affiche Moderne. They are all a fun eyeful to start a lazy Sunday morning. You can see all their picks here.
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I always ask customers where they found my website or Etsy shop. Some answer, some don’t. And occasionally I get a nice surprise, as I did this week. Karla told me she saw my letterpress wood type collages in the June 2009 Better Homes & Gardens magazine. And not just one, but 3 designs and a coaster! [Sadly, they don’t mention my press name, but tell readers to “search etsy for ‘letters and numbers'”.]
 My post earlier this week on an article about letterpress in Forbes and Kate’s comments got me to thinking about my own taste in letterpress posters. The main inspiration for my own wood type collage prints was a lecture I attended where Alastaire Johnston talked about the work of H N Werkman (I have a post about his calendars here). Werkman’s broadsides seem so spontaneous — he printed with anything he could find in his studio, including furniture. But it is definitively sloppy and probably over-inked printing. Without getting too deep so early in the morning, I wanted to share this poster I found on flickr. It’s a 5-color letterpress print for a show at the Beachland Ballroom in Cleveland, OH created entirely from antique wood type and ornaments by Mikey Burton. You can see his full flickr stream here.
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Anton Marc’s “The Thread of Meaning.” An accordion fold book that is 3.75” x 5” when closed and extends to 12 feet when open. The colored photo reproductions of chairs are linked by hand-sewn black thread.
 My blog posts often serve as reminders of things I want to return to, and this is one of those… I’ve made lots of single sheet books, and even sell a kit of various designs that fit on 8-1/2×11 paper. But I was reminded the other day of the simplest single sheet book — the french fold. According to the description for a class given by Robert Walp later this month at Great River Arts Insitute in Vermont,
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Forbes.com recently had an article about the revival of letterpress printing. They mention Hatch Show Print, a print shop in Nashville that’s been making entertainment posters (“show posters”) since 1979 (that’s one of their prints to the left, you can see more here).
It’s a breezy short article. And amusing in that it ends with a discussion of the debate on whether using photopolymer plates to print is really letterpress. Several of the commenters to the article say it isn’t letterpress unless the printer uses hand-set metal type. The Beast Pieces blog has a good counter-argument here.
At SFCB, our beginning letterpress courses all teach hand type setting — but that’s because, in a studio already stocked full of metal type, it’s the easiest, cheapest way to start learning. But anyone who continues usually wants to design pieces that can be difficult, time consuming and costly to print hand-set, so my recommendation for a follow-on class is always the Printing from Photopolymer Plates class.