 I first became aware of the letterpress revival back in 1981, long before it became a full-time type designer. I used to design and art direct magazines and other publications. Back then I was working for Minnesota Monthly, a regional magazine that was published by Minnesota Public Radio. In addition to the classical music schedule and things like that, they printed articles about culture and the arts. One time they did an article about a guy named Gerald Lang. Some of you here may have heard of Jerry or maybe even know him. Back then he had a small letterpress shop called the Beeler Press. It was on the sixth floor of the old Rossmore building in downtown St. Paul at the time. I went there one day with a photographer to take pictures for the article and it was immediately blown away by a studio. Along with all the tools of fine letterpress printing and like a Bandicoot proofing press, one or two platen presses, shelves full of inks and solvents, cases of old foundry type and freshly cast bamboo and polyphilis type that he got from somebody who had a monotype caster or something like that. I think he told me. He had a huge library of books all about printing and type and printing. It was the first time I'd seen a lot of them, including the old American type founders catalogs and linotype catalogs. Jerry's work was amazing. I was really impressed by the craft and the attention to detail. He invited me to come by anytime I wanted. So I ended up spending my lunch breaks over the next few weeks hanging out in Jerry's shop, talking with him about presses, paper, printing and especially about type. He was a big proponent of the classic old style faces like bamboo and garmin and didn't think much of modern typography or type design. It started having a funny effect on my design work at the magazine. Right around that time we were doing a redesign and naively I thought I could emulate some of the aesthetic of Jerry's letterpress typography. So I ordered some garmin fonts for our copy graphic type setting machine and bought some sheets of garmin old style rub down type. After a little while though I realized that I wasn't really getting quite the same effect. Photo type set garmin on offset printing on thin bright white glossy paper doesn't look or feel anything like metal foundry type printed on a Vander Cook on handmade paper. It was a different medium with a different visual vocabulary. Things that work with one didn't necessarily work for the other. The type looked anemic and fussy instead of rich and warm which was what I was after. I eventually abandoned that idea and embraced a more appropriate aesthetic. I was thinking about all this recently about the renaissance of letterpress and why in spite of my early exposure to the beautiful work Jerry was doing at the Bieler Press I've never fully embraced letterpress as a hobby or an aesthetic or anything like that like many of my friends and colleagues have done. I truly admire what people are doing with it and I think it's great that so many people are into it right now but it's just never really been my thing and I realize why. Basically that offset lithography has its own aesthetic and I've always felt at home with it that it's basically my native medium and I don't really mean the traditional lithography like with a stone like shown here although the basic principle is the same. Now with letterpress you want the image you want to print is formed on a raised surface such as metal type or wood cut. The ink is applied to the raised surface and transferred to the paper on the press. With stone lithography you print from a big flat polished stone slab and the image you want to print is formed with a grease pencil or brushed on with tush. The stone is wedded, the ink sticks to the greasy parts and that's what you print from. Lithographic prints compared to letterpress prints are flat and uniform. They don't have the same kind of texture but are capable of richer detail and more subtle of variation. Historically lithography was used for printing things like certificates, color illustrations in books, posters, art prints, things that letterpress were less well suited for. But what I'm really talking about here is offset lithography. It works on the same principle as stone lithography but instead of using a big heavy stone it uses thin aluminum plates wrapped around cylinders. The ink is transferred, that is offset hence the name, to a rubber roller and then onto the paper. It was faster and cheaper than stone lithography but had most of the same advantages in terms of image reproduction. The other big difference is that the image on the plate is transformed photographically. Artwork shot is shot with high contrast film creating a negative which is then used to burn a positive image onto a plate with an intensely bright carbon arc lamp. The photographic aspect is one of the key differences between offset and letterpress. Although you can create relief plates photographically the results tend to be a bit more crude especially for things like photos. Another key difference is that type is no different than any other image that you might want to print. The adoption of offset actually is what made possible phototype, strike-on type, rub-down type, and ultimately digital type. When I was a kid back in the 60s I went on a grade school field trip one time to a newspaper publisher in Milwaukee. I vividly recall seeing these giant cylindrical presses and watching plates being made with paper stereotypes and an operator at a line of type machine banging out slugs of type. As a souvenir I got these little miniature copies of the newspapers that they published there. The local newspaper in my hometown of Boyd, Wisconsin, also used letterpress. This is actually a photo of me that appeared in the paper when I was 10 years old. You can see how crude the reproduction was but back then poor photo reproduction was just normal you know it was like black and white tv, mineral sound, and rotary dials on phones. We didn't know any better that was just the way things were but I do remember when they made the switch to offset printing in the late 60s I didn't really know what offset meant but it was hailed as an improvement and the big selling point was better photo reproduction and it really was noticeably better. I didn't know much about any of this stuff back then I was just a little kid but my impression was that letterpress was old and lousy and obsolete and that offset was new and better the way of the future. I had my first first hand taste of the wonders of offset printing when I was in eighth grade. I designed and illustrated the cover of the yearbook that year. I drew a picture, did some lettering, and laid out the design. I was a bit annoyed that the printer replaced some of my lettering with a typeface and the illustration was actually supposed to bleed off the bottom and side but it was really exciting to see hundreds of pristine copies of something I designed. Still the whole production process was kind of a mystery. I had only the vaguest idea of how they went from my construction paper layout to the finished printed piece. A few years later I was a junior in high school. The school newspaper called The Trojan had a problem. It was in the middle of the school year and the staff had basically quit. Nobody was really interested in doing it anymore. This gave me an idea. I talked to the newspaper advisor and asked him if I could be the editor of the paper. Now The Trojan was your typical high school newspaper stories about student council, sports teams, opinion pieces about dress code and vending machines, things like that. I had no interest in any of that. I wanted to do something a little different with the help of some of my friends. Now back then I'd been reading Mad Magazine since I was 10 years old and had recently discovered the National Lampoon. I loved that funny smartass stuff and wanted to try to do something like that myself. So my idea was to transform The Trojan into a humor paper. Amazingly the advisor agreed to let me do it at least for an issue. I also had a was becoming aware of type and graphic design at the time. I had an uncle, my uncle Knute, who was a young graphic designer in Chicago. He worked at Container Corporation for a while and then at a small studio called Dickinson Design. While he was there, he worked on the design of the original Tab soft drink can and some of the early Kebler cookie packages. I was an artistic kid. I drew all the time and he even took oil painting classes for a few years and I knew I wanted to go into some kind of art career when I grew up and graphic design seemed like a good possibility. As far as getting something out like a newspaper printed, I knew that you had to do a paste up first. I had no idea, I mean I had no graphic arts training at that point but it didn't seem that different than the collages I had done back in third grade. It was a lot of fun combining photos and images in crazy and surprising ways and paste up seemed like a pretty similar process. So I started out with a blank layout sheet pre-ruled with light blue guidelines. I knew the basic rules. You only could use black and white and black, greepiness is black and also so did red so you could use red if you needed to cover large area or something like that. And then light blue was the same as white. It didn't print so you could make notes of the blue pencil and draw guidelines on your paste up. I realized that anything, it kind of dawned on me that anything I could put down on paper could be printed as long as it followed these simple rules. My mind reeled with possibilities. So I went home and sat down in the living room after school one night and started building it up little by little writing as I went. I clipped things out of magazines and newspapers, did some lettering, drew some stuff, clipped stuff out of phone books and calendars, set type with this weird cardboard headline setting system that they had at the publication office. I'll talk a little more about this later. Used a typewriter to set the body type and little by little over the next several days I'd written and designed the entire first page. After a week or so, I had four pages ready to print which was how long the paper was. I dropped it off at a job printer located in a small, low commercial building along a stretch of dry cleaning shops, auto parts stores and beauty parlors. The place was filled with the chunka chunka sounds of small offset presses working away. A few days later I went back to the print shop and stacked on a table was the first run of my new paper. It smelled of fresh ink and was cool to the touch from evaporating alcohol. Every little detail was perfectly reproduced with no evidence of my messy past. It felt like magic. This was the moment that I fell in love with offset. I loaded the stack in my car and headed back to school. I had no idea what the other students would make of it. Only a few of them knew about it. I worried that it would be seen as a big waste of school resources or that nobody would get the jokes. But somehow it worked and people liked it and amazingly I was allowed to keep doing it. I continued to experiment as we did a couple more issues that year. It all felt like a big adventure trying different ideas, seeing work and what didn't and all the while entertaining ourselves and we hoped our fellow students. I happened to be editor of the year book that year as well although it took that little bit more seriously. A lot of the same kids who helped me with the paper also worked on that. We were routinely able to get passes out of study hall to spend time working on the paper in the year book. Publication office became kind of a hangout for me and my friends. We covered the place with signs and random pages cut out of magazines for some reason. These photos on the left for instance were altered so that the eyes followed you down the hall as you walked past. As Bob hoped again. Looking at the place you think that we spent all our time making silly decorations which wasn't totally untrue. But you know how people like to practice their free throw shot with the trash can? We took that a step further. You might be surprised that we actually got any work done there at all but we did. The second issue of the Trojan was promoted as lemon scented. It was printed on yellow paper and each issue included a stick of lemon flavored gum. For those too young to remember every brand of floor wax back then or dishwashing detergent or furniture polish was being advertised as lemon scented so why not hop onto the bandwagon? Doing this newspaper was my first real experience with working with type and design. The year book didn't really count because you only got you didn't get to do actual paste-ups and production and stuff like that. I learned to like use a proportion wheel and a cropping tool but no paste-up or anything. I had no formal training yet and I was just figuring out things that went along using whatever I had on hand to make it work. I was really interested in the content hoping to make it funny but as a visually oriented person I was just as interested in trying to make it look funny too. First I decided that the name of the paper would never be spelled correctly or consistently. Why? I don't know it just seemed funny that way. It became almost like a nonsense word. I spent a lot of time figuring out different ways to spell it. Second I claimed that each issue was five pages long. This is a physical impossibility I'm sure you all realize who have like press experience. I got around that by accidentally skipping a page so the pages would be numbered one three four five or one two four five. Just to keep confused things more I sometimes put page one on the back cover but the content was completely made up. Student council reports, letters to the editor, sports articles and ads, lots of ads. It was really fun one time when I did some comics and I basically clipped bits and pieces of the comics from the Boyd Daily News and reassembled them into complete nonsense. It was probably totally legal but I think this is what they call nowadays remixing so maybe it's okay. I was also excited to discover several big clip art books at the publication office. Nowadays clip art is all digital but back then it came in oversized books like this tall and you actually clip the art from the books with scissors or an X-Acto knife. Clip art would become a rich source of inspiration and mischief. It's okay if you can't read this tiny type there. The kids back then couldn't either. The publication office also had on hand something called phototype spelled with an F which was a kind of paper based headline setting system. It worked a lot like metal foundry type except it was made of cardboard. It even used a composing stick. The way it worked is you would tear off the letters you wanted from little pre-printed pads and then you assemble them in a composing stick letter by letter just like metal type and you notice they have the letters printed on the back and on repo blue. That's kind of a tongue twister. So you can see what you're doing. When you are done, when the line was finished you put a piece of tape across the back and it was ready for paste up. The selection of phototype fonts that they had was pretty limited. Just a few styles and sizes of Futura and alternate Gothic. So I ordered some new stuff including the universe which I thought was more modern and attractive. It was the closest thing to Helvetica that they had. Now you might wonder I'm 17 years old and I'm already worrying about using Helvetica but I had this uncle who was a graphic designer. So of course I knew about Helvetica. But as you can see I still had some things to learn about setting type not to mention using a straight edge or T-square. I also discovered press type sheets at the local stationery store probably the cheapest rub-down type ever made and started setting display type with Caslon and Old English and Futura. You might also wonder why everything is set so god damn tight. It's not just touching it's actually overlapping. This is because of my uncle the graphic designer again. That's how he said everything and I picked up on that and copied him because obviously that's the way the pros were doing it and plus I thought it looked cool. Later I went to a big art supply store south of the border in Rockford Illinois and got some better quality rub-down type. A letter set was the deluxe brand and there was also the somewhat cheaper chart pack velvet touch lettering. Eventually I had sheets of big 96 point Helvetica medium, some Bookman swash, Windsor Times-Vold and the amazing Avant-Garde Gothic with alternate characters. For body type my choices are more limited. I didn't have access to anything like a real type setting machine for that so I had to make do with typewriters. At first I used my mom's portable typewriter at home. It worked okay but it had a cloth ribbon so it didn't really reproduce very well. Luckily they had an IBM Selectric in the publication office. The Selectric was an electromechanical marvel. I don't know if you've ever seen one operating but it had a little type ball in the middle that would pound out letters lightning fast onto the page and the keys were like on hair triggers and the machine would just kind of hum with anticipation when it was on. I also had a special carbon film ribbon so the letters were super sharp. We just loved it. In fact one of my friends and I invented a stupid little game on it that was a bit like Pong except that Pong hadn't been invented yet so I guess it was actually more like tennis but player one hit the tab key sending the type ball flying to the right and player two hit the return key sending the type ball flying to the left. The idea was to try to get the type ball to the opposite end of the typewriter and not let the type ball get to your end of the typewriter. It was fun until somebody figured out that holding down the tab key prevented the ball from traveling to the left at all which was about five minutes after we invented the game. Photos were a little tricky. You had to leave red paper holes on the paste up and calculate the percent reduction and enlargement of the photo. The printer would somehow apply a dot screen to the photo when it was printed. How this was done was kind of a mystery to me at the time but I discovered that if something already had a screen like a photo from a magazine or a book I could just paste it up and it would print. It was a little dark but it worked. The school year ended and over the summer I did a special issue most of it on my own. This is the summer of the Watergate hearings which seemed to dominate the media seven days a week hence the headline here. I didn't have access to the selectric so and I'd already decided that my mom's typewriter wasn't good enough so I decided to letter the whole issue by hand. I did the lettering on graph paper and then cut it up and pasted the pieces into place on the layout. I also hand lettered the headlines instead of using the phototype or rub down type. When it was done I had a six page issue sorry seven page issue to hand out to my fellow students that fall. Unfortunately I was informed by the newspaper advisor that guy that some of the students and parents felt that the school paper should be a proper school paper but rather than pull the plug on my little enterprise the paper was split into two parts. The first part was the straight issue staffed by students who wanted to do a normal school paper with basketball and football scores, student council reports, debates over vending machines and dress codes and this would be printed on the first two pages. My only involvement in this was designing the logo there's that helvetica again and doing an occasional illustration. The other two pages would be done by me and my friends with our usual nonsense. Of course I managed to get five pages out of it by turning it sideways and using smaller pages and with a little creative misnumbering. I changed the design when we went to this new format and settled on a consistent logo in a single wrong way to spell Trojan. You just get tired of trying to come up with new ways after a while. You can see a bit of a national ampoune influence here if any of you remember that magazine with the issue themes like scary issue, apathy issue and so on. I also did some comics usually featuring teachers as heroes in absurd storylines that seem to go nowhere and this one here the this teacher who we called Smokey the Pole. He only does his walk down the hall and walk into a respawn and then he never returns you know and that big 1974 on the right was actually I actually lettered that I got some smaller rub size rub down type set it on a piece of clear plastic and then put it in a photo in larger and traced it with markers. I didn't have a stat camera or anything like that so it was all very direct. For the last issue I completely changed the format again returning to full tablight size pages only two pages this time numbered one through five. As you can see I made heavy use of avant garde rub down letters for this issue. I used every possible ligature. The graphic in the middle is a reference to the last Whole Earth catalog which had just been published and as we we also included a stick of gum with this issue again orange to go with the photo in the middle. Now all of this served me well when as I went on to study graphic design in college I even did some actual offset printing in a printer making class starting from a paste up I learned to make and strip photos or strip negatives learned to make plates with a carbon arc lamp and backing frame and to do multicolored printing on an on the small ab deck press similar to the one in this photo. Everybody loved to do split fountains. After college one of my first jobs was as production manager at a weekly newspaper in Minneapolis called Metropolis. The budget was very small but we had an actual type setting machine and someone to operate who was actually the only one who went home at five o'clock because he was over 30. In a lot of ways I felt like I was working on my high school newspaper again especially in terms of figuring out how to take an idea and turn it into something that could be printed. The art director was again named Patrick J.B. Flynn who later on was art director of the Progressive Magazine for many years. Although I was technically the production manager we both worked on the design and the typography. We had three colors to work with black and black and two pandone colors and we'd try to come up with interesting combinations and see how they would mix on the press. It was often hard to predict. Now all this was done all these fancy color effects you see here were done on the paste up with overlays. Even the duotones. After Metropolis folded I worked on a small paper called Machete which was formed by a few of the same people who were at Metropolis. It was basically a large format broadside just one sheet with two pages you know two sides. Again looking back on it it had a lot in common with the paper I did in high school. The same non-existent budget the same do-it-yourself whatever works production methods except now I had access to better ways of setting type and had a bit more training and experience. But this is kind of what I mean by offset being my native medium. I always loved the freeform aspect of it the way you could print anything you wanted as long as you could as you could figure out a way to get it onto the paste up. Letterpress always seemed kind of rigid and straight-jacketed by comparison so I never really took to it. Of course nowadays you've got people making stuff on computers and printing with polymer plates on Vander Cook's completely side-stepping these limitations. Anyway whenever I think back on those pre-digital production methods and about how Letterpress has enjoyed such a glorious revival I wonder if the same thing couldn't happen with old school offset printing techniques and production techniques. I picture young people acquiring old A.B. Dick presses orthographic film stripping materials like red blockout tape and no paking brushes and golden rods dripping paper or maybe some carbon arc lamps in a vacuum frame for making plates or maybe get an old type phototype setting machine like a copy graphic editor or very type or comp set and a few fonts to match. It couldn't be that hard to get something like that up and running right I mean people are still running vintage apple twos I just saw a Commodore 64 out in the lobby why not old type setting machines lots of other stuff isn't that hard to find even in 2014 rubber cement exacto knives with p-squares I've seen them done at Dick Blick but can't you picture it though young hipsters doing the whole thing 70s style from paste ups to freshly printed printed pages you know running stacked cameras and rubbing down type I don't know maybe it's not really possible anymore where would they get the rolls of S paper or RC paper to use with the phototype setting machines and the chemicals I doubt that stuff is even made anymore even if you could somehow find a cache of it or a vintage vintage supplies they'd be decades past the use by date on the other hand it might work with some something like the old IBM compositor or berry type or machine these were the low-end strike on typesetters worked a lot like type readers but they had proportional fonts things like the whole earth catalog and hundreds of small newspaper publishers and and printers use these back in the 70s as a cheap alternative to full you know phototype setting machine you didn't need any chemicals or photo paper for it but you'd still need to source the rip ink ribbon cartridges somehow do they still exist maybe I don't know now rubdown sheets and rubdown type still kind of exists it's used for scrapbooking and other hobby type things the styles are a bit more limited than they used to be but there must be caches of vintage rubdown type in the hands of collectors and pack rats I know I've got a bunch of it it's part of my collection here you can easily revive it with a bit of alcohol I'm told or maybe that was with a a bit of alcohol you can easily imagine that you could revive it or what about photo stack cameras for those of you who don't know these were large format cameras for reducing and enlarging line art I imagine they must still exist somewhere maybe in a forgotten storage locker somewhere in the back of somebody's garage but like the phototype setting machines consumables might be a problem and yet in many ways modern print production is a direct descendant of all these methods instead of stat cameras we've got scanners instead of typesetting machines we've got in design instead of letraset we've got digital fonts and we never ever run out of the letter E so all of it goes and all of this goes direct to plate so you don't need stripping or arc lamps or any of that stuff an offset still is the king of printing methods even with the widespread adoption of digital printing so what have we lost in terms of reproduction quality it's never been better and going from an idea to a finished printed piece has never been easier or faster or cheaper what I miss sometimes is the physical directness of it all sticking bits of paper and type down on a drawing board and drawing ink ink lines with ink and laying down rule tapes it was all kind of tedious and imperfect but it was magical in a way there's really no reason though that you couldn't use some of these old methods now using scanners instead of stat cameras for example in fact some people have been doing this sort of thing for a while doing stuff on paper with traditional tools and media and then using computers as little more than glorified copy machine or stat cameras and this is going back you know to like the 90s with the grunge era and you know a lot of people I know who would do comics you just that's how they they just do everything the old school way and then then you know put it get it in the computer somehow but the default path the you know the easy path is to create as much as possible directly on the computer never taking your eyes off the screen as you type and point and click creating artwork that's ultimately nothing more than a state of an array of flip-flops on a silicon chip completely inaccessible and invisible without a some sort of computer to read it I certainly don't fault anyone for doing this it's the way I work most of the time myself it only makes sense but it's good to remember that you don't have to use the computer for everything it can be very satisfying to make something physical with your own hands something you'll be able to hold in your hands and show people 40 years later maybe at a type conference people who have embraced letterpress old obsolete letterpress know this to be true and it's certainly not the most efficient means of reproducing something but the lure of letterpress and other older technologies is at least about the journey is it is at least as much about the journey as it is about the destination but we didn't go directly from letterpress to desktop publishing there were pre-digital analog production methods we could still use today if we wanted to I don't know to be honest I really don't expect anyone to revive this stuff although to be pretty cool if it happened most of what I wanted to do is to take you on a little trip through my formative experiences as a young graphic designer back in the days after letterpress but before computers took over everything in the graphic arts so maybe get your nose out of the computer once in a while try making something with your hands it's really fun you never know where it might lead thank you