John Easson at Work

John Easson's printing works, open to visitors.  I can personally vouch for an excellent welcome!  Well worth a visit.

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Oxford Guild of Printers Wayzgoose Keepsake (from: http://allaroundus.blogspot.com/)

Printers tend to be sociable fellows, and it’s always nice to meet like-minded people. Happily the UK has online and real-life groups that can support you in your letterpress journey.

British Printing Society

The British Printing Society has a purpose to create ‘friendly association’ between printers of all types. (This unfortunately includes litho printers!) There are local branches in many parts of the UK; a regular magazine and an annual convention.

http://www.bpsnet.org.uk/

Oxford Guild of Printers

The Oxford Guild of Printers is a more book– and letterpress-focussed group than the BPS and happily has members across the UK. While most events – like the monthly meetings and the Wayzgoose – are in Oxfordshire or surrounding areas, the Guild is very friendly. Worth joining even if you’re miles away from Oxford!

http://www.oxfordguildofprinters.com/

Printing Historical Society

Devoted to the recording and exploration of printing history, the PHS has done wonderful work and produces the excellent Journal of the Printing Historical Society as well as Printing History News with the Friends of St. Bride.

http://www.printinghistoricalsociety.org.uk/

Online: Briar Press

The rightful parent to all other letterpress websites, Briar Press has been running for just over fifteen years. While started as a US-focussed site its reach has now spread over the world. Briar Press has the best online discussion forums; and also the best place to buy and sell letterpress equipment outside of the UK.

http://www.briarpress.org/

Online: Metal Type

Dave Hughes’ vibrant site is a mecca for those that case type in the UK whether Ludlow, linecaster or Monotype. The site also includes plenty of stories and personal histories of typecasting and newspapers especially.

http://metaltype.co.uk/

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St Bride’s Institute, London

St Bride Library has launched a new workshop with a range of short courses that teach basic skills and give familiarity with some of the terminology, equipment and activities essential to letterpress work.

Full details of the workshop are at http://printworkshop.stbride.org/

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Hot Bed Press, Salford

Hot Bed Press has expanded it’s letterpress facility. We now run rudimentary and advanced typesetting courses in our dedicated letterpress area. Taught by Graham Moss of Incline Press the courses are very popular and we expect to run them throughout the year. Each course is limited to 6 people. Anyone wishing to take the experience further into practice can access the facilities for just £2.00 per hour.

See our website for more details: www.hotbedpress.org.

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Composing Room (from Kirklees Images)

There are familiar themes running through the British Printer and other contemporary magazines from the last hundred or so years of letterpress. There are two that intrigue me: precision and efficiency. This article looks at efficiency.

Background

It’s easy to dismiss the large-scale efficiency drives that the industry employed: the Letterpress Productivity Team Report from an American study trip in the late 1940s advocates better use of line-casting machinery; better industrial relations; and specialising in a few small areas rather than be spread too thinly as a firm.

Well before this, the British Printer ran an article in 1901 called How to Keep an Ideal Printing Office that covered the use of accounting systems and some general business advice: again stressing the need to do fewer things better. This was easier said than done for the small-town jobbing office that might print everything from the smallest gents business card to the local newspaper and posters.

As modern letterpress printers we can only marvel at the efforts that went in to ‘lining-up tables’ that were used to position formes to print tens of pages; or the work involved in eliminating static so that paper would feed better in to presses. These all seem to be on an industrial scale while we work on a craft scale.

I also wondered about what a brand-new letterpress-only printing works would look like: would we take the equipment and methods from the past or do more modern techniques like lean production have a role to play? I hope to show the larger principles at play and the specifics that we smaller printers can use.

I should add that efficiency is typically a driver to earn more money. For those of us printing for pleasure, efficiency is no less important. My time is limited and I value every moment I spend printing, so time wasted is no less important to me than the ‘Master Printer’ overseeing a large firm.

Identify What Your Customers Want

It’s east to say that people come to us for printed articles: it’s more difficult to say what makes customers come to you for them. Using a PC or a web publishing house to produce a document is within almost everyone’s reach. What are the specifics of my work that are unusual? My basic statement is this

My customers want jobbing work using imaginative, unique typography, reproduced in small runs using a traditional process.

The implications are clear, but not obvious: I don’t like producing books or multi-paged works; I like to use metal types; and I like a free rein in terms of design. I should concern myself with this purpose. Your purpose might be different: you might enjoy working with just a couple of faces; or miniature books; or railway printing.

This echoes the Productivity Team Report that recommended that UK printers should specialise in smaller areas – their experience of US printers was that a narrow field of work led to efficiency gains.

It follows from this that anything that does not work towards this purpose is waste, and the name of the game is to reduce and eliminate waste.

Waste

Waste comes in many forms, and the clever people behind lean production have identified a number of types of waste to help us look at this. Some are more crucial than others in our letterpress world, so I will cover those where we can get most benefit.

Note: Lean Production is a development of the Toyota Production System that allowed Toyota to become the world’s largest car manufacturer while constrained by resources. It’s been adopted by many industries and is applied in many fields outside manufacturing.

Our usual view of waste is a broad and amorphous idea, but to illustrate the degree of examination we should go to, Shigeo Shingo pointed out that only the last turn of a bolt tightens it: the other effort is simply movement. We need to focus on our purpose and look carefully at each operation to see where we can eliminate waste.

Planning

The Lean people call this Muri: the re-work and problems that come from poor planning in the set-up of your printing operation. Our best example is the capability of our equipment. Adana were keen to advertise that their presses (especially the QH) were capable of printing everything from a ‘chemists’s label’ to a poster or magazine. In reality these machines are best suited to work of one sheet around 8” x 5” and in small runs. Every printer has an example of taking on work that’s just outside the capability of the shop whether that’s in terms of skill, size or volume.

The advice from 1901 remains:

“...if you can do the business of your locality in a creditable and satisfactory manner , … you have reached the little ideal.”

Think carefully about making some personal standards to make work more efficient. In larger firms it’s possible to document detailed process flows and work instructions so that everyone works in the best way possible. For the one-man printer, standardisation might come in different guises. Recognising that letterpress printing is almost wholly non-standard means that these would be guides rather than prescriptions.

Scheduling

This is about the pipeline of work or ‘flow’. Considering most printers work on many jobs at once, it’s difficult to imagine a world where each job is completed before the next is started, but consider the advantages –

• The whole capability of the works is available to every job: type is not tied up in standing formes; a press is not left with half the run complete, blocking other work; you can concentrate on just one thing
• You’ll know when something goes wrong: let’s say we leave four jobs stacked up for corner rounding – then we find the blade needs sharpening. With those jobs stacked up we are delaying four jobs; with a single stream of work on we are delaying one and we know about the problem immediately.
• Less space and money for stock it tied up in jobs that have started but are not yet with the customer.
• You can give the customer your full attention at an agreed point in the future: no more discussions about being too busy – you can say they will have your complete focus from next Wednesday and they can expect the completed job two days later.
• You can look at your order book to see to the day when you need more work or when you are tied up: no overlapping of tens of jobs

Naturally, there will always be some delay in a single stream of letterpress work. Customers will want to see proofs of finished articles before a run. Perhaps you could operate a single flow of work with a single item out for approval. In terms of waste, our customer wants to see the proof so this is not wasted effort.

Eliminating Waste: Transport

While completed jobs are in the office, they run the risk of being damaged and it delays the customer getting what they want. Establish a routine for despatching finished jobs

Eliminating Waste: Inventory

Keeping hold of stock is a waste because it ties up space but also money in something the customer has not yet paid for. The ideal is to order stock to meet demand, but no more than that. While it might be realistic for the large printer with paper merchant’s accounts and daily deliveries, the reality for smaller printers means we have to find a happy medium.

Take an inventory of what you have on hand and see whether that can be used for upcoming jobs. Run your stocks down to a limited level (say to cover the next four jobs) and order as little as possible. Maintain low stock levels by keeping a record of what has been used; and what will be used for future jobs.

It’s true that ordering in bulk will offer discounts, but this has to be balanced against the cost of storage, risk of damage and the money tied up in larger stocks.

Eliminating Waste: Waiting

Waiting is one of the major areas for a small printer to attack. Running multiple jobs at once means jobs often competing to use a machine that’s already tied up, or has to battle for space. Concentrating on one job at a time will cut waiting dramatically. I’ve mentioned elsewhere approaches to get customer sign-off on proofs in a reasonable time.

Eliminating Waste: Over-Processing

I spend a great deal of time adjusting my formes once they are on the press. It’s disappointing because this is the worst time to make adjustments! I have been experimenting with more precise approaches to avoid having to tinker at the latest stage of the process. Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

• Using setting rules and special galleys to ensure lines are a consistent length dramatically reduces problems in lock-up. At the very least you should set the measure in the stick and not adjust it while assembling the job
• Setting the whole job at once allows me to see that I have enough type and also to send a full proof to the customer. This does need more type, though, than setting a page at a time
• Using duplicate chases and furniture I’ve been able to set the press once to print on an A5 sheet and then used the same set-up in the duplicate chase to avoid having to re-adjust the press

Eliminating Waste: Over-Production

Printers’ terms were typically geared to a tolerance of 10% in quantity, and guidance was that around 20% run-on should be added to jobs for the first colour in a two colour run for smaller runs. Think about where you might over produce, and how this can be limited. Do you always use that margin when printing? If you do, what other steps can you take (see above) to get it right first time?

Eliminating Waste: Defects

Finally, we might produce work that our customers simply do not want! How often have you presented a job to the customer to find they are unhappy with the colour, types used or approach to the work? Defects like these cause us to repeat ourselves and that is simply waste. Find ways of eliminating defects at each stage of the process: can you send computer proofs of work to them for early approval; refer to colour charts or proper proofs before committing to the final job?

Alternatively we cause defects ourselves when we don’t care for our machines: we might over or under-ink because of bad setting; use poor rollers; set the impression incorrectly. It’s possible to reduce these by having some standards, or rules of thumb, to work to.

The Work Environment

Hand Composition (from Edinburgh City of Print)

Quite aside from the wastes above, the small printers’ work environment is perhaps the biggest area for improvement. I’ve seen printers operate in the most oppressive of conditions, in one Yorkshire print works I saw the roof open to the elements (and birds) with some equipment covered in plastic, no lights in the upper storeys as the wiring had failed, little or no working space, and having to use an outside toilet. (This, by the way was in 2006, so certainly something of a current phenomena.)

Lean gives us the 5S’s as a way of tackling workplace organisation, and since it’s such a big area I’ll tackle each one in turn. The crucial thing here is that it must be ongoing:

Possessing an ideal [printing] office is one thing, and keeping it so is another and far more difficult.

Sort

Without exception, each printing office I have seen includes something that is broken or otherwise unusable. It’s easy for onlookers to suggest everything connected with letterpress is obsolete or has no place; but even as experts we still have to look critically at what we have in our printing works.

Using again our purpose, we have to ask whether the things we have directly contribute to producing what our customers want. My list here is of obvious and less obvious things to look at in your office:

• Broken equipment
  There are some things we keep so we have spares that are otherwise unobtainable. Keep these if you must but try to do this in an organised way. There’s little point in keeping a full machine, but can you remove and store spares in a tidy and clean way?
• Unsuited equipment
  Considering the planning of the operation, does all your equipment flow? Can your stitcher accommodate the maximum paper size of your press? Can your guillotine accommodate the sheet size for the press? Think carefully about which bits of equipment are needed to produce the work you want: is a corner-rounding machine useful if you only produce books?
• Incomplete Founts
  In my ‘sorting’, I found that some of the cases of type I had treasured and used were worryingly short of some characters (lower case ‘p’, curiously). Knowing I could not use or salvage them, I had to melt them down. Have a check of the founts you have and see that they are useful. This will avoid saying yes to a customer on looking at the case front; but finding no way to set the type!

Straighten

This is about getting everything in the right order to help with the movement of work in your printing office. We think about grouping (all paper cutting/warehousing etc. together), but looking at the flow, we usually need to cut paper at the start of the process and wrap the finished article at the end. Ideally, these two activities should be at opposite ends of the works!

Sweep and Shine

The old maxim of “a place for everything and everything in it’s place” is something that eludes most printers. I’ve seen seemingly-productive workshops in a state of near-chaos but can’t help but think that people would more enjoy working in tidy conditions. The best workshops I’ve seen have adopted this principle, and I can summarise the approach:

• All furniture either treated (with oil and white spirit) or painted (black). It might sound oppressive, but there’s little worse than the horrible olive green/battleship grey combinations of most metal cabinets
• White or light walls and good lighting
• Wall boards with nails, so that quoin keys, rulers, rollers etc. can all be stored at eye level on the wall
• Open spaces (like stones and cabinet tops) kept clear

It’s hard to get to this point, and a lot will depend on having the space to keep the things you need. Remember that this is achievable for most people but that the difficulty is in keeping this standard up. Make tidying and cleaning a regular part of your routine.

Standardise

In some respects, printers have always adopted and use standards, like the height-to-paper of 0.918”. In others, they have allowed multiple variants to grow, like case sizes or layout, and storage. These are possible areas for standardisation:

• Storage
  Consider adopting just one or two ways of storing type and spacing, perhaps one large and one small. Don’t use home-made cases. Use a single size and style of galley
• Case Lays
  The sheer number of ways of laying type in the case is staggering. Think about adopting one lay; and work your way slowly through your existing cases. This will save time and confusion when you come to hand-set
• Paper Size, Position in the Press
  As mentioned above, perhaps use a standard paper size and have the press set up so you can work from a known point in the chase and in the press
• Processes
  It’s overkill for us to document our processes in detail, but why not have a list of the sequence of operations you’ll use. This will help you keep working on one thing at once; and any improvements you make will be recorded

Sustain

This is about keeping on top of the other four Ss. It’s not a matter of a ‘spring clean’ to do this: it needs to be continual.

Summary

I’ve tried here to summarise the 1900s advice; the 1950s research and modern-day manufacturing practice to help the modern, small, letterpress printer. The theory of one piece flow, or the 5Ss seems esoteric; but I hope I have suggested actions that will help improve your efficiency as a printer, and bring you more pleasure from the process.

The advice here differs from the earlier views of the industry: we haven’t spoken about machine utilisation, for example.

I’d like to say that my printing works is a model made in the mould of efficiency. It isn’t. But I am working at this, and will update this article as I learn more. The small steps on the 5Ss, for example, have given me new pride in the space.

I hope you can apply some of these things in your letterpress enterprise.

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Rollers on a Model Platen (from Alan Brignull)

Since the general purpose of a press is to ink a printing surface and impress paper against it, roller height has a big part to play in quality printing. For the smallest printers there are the “small printer” approaches of setting large capital letters in the chase; inking those letters and then inspecting to see whether the face is inked, and whether ink has been transferred to the beard of the type. The ideal is to have fully inked the surface with a minimum of ink being applied to the beard of the type.

The next stage is to use a roller setting gauge. These come in various shapes and sizes. We’ll look here are the basic type that most small commercial printers would have. Flat gauges are typically a block of metal machined to 0.918” high with a long handle: and have the advantage that they tend not to tilt and so skew the results. The aim here is to see a thin film of ink over the surface. No ink indicates rollers are too high; and ink that has been smeared or left on the sides indicates rollers are too low.

Cylindrical gauges are more common but can tilt when used. The aim here is to see a thin strip of around ⅛th of an inch of ink on the top of the cylinder.

A further step to precision was to use a spring-loaded setting gauge that included a dial or marker to show how low the rollers were on the machine. I am yet to see one in use!

The Netherlands Graphic Arts Research Institute worked on establishing realistic tolerances for letterpress materials. They suggested that type would still print perfectly if it was within 0.0008” of 0.918”, and so any efforts to be more precise than that would be a waste.

F C Walter, writing in Print in Britain repeated that he had heard a lecturer stressing the need to be within an overall limit of 0.0015”, and commented that it would work “precision and the printer to death”. He foresaw that a “...printer, who has toppled, drunk with fascination into precision-land where everything is beautiful but useless.” He proposed an overall limit of 0.0030”. The reasoning was that 0.0015” could be so easily disrupted by standard printing processes (like planing) that it could not be achieved. In context 0.0015” is around ¾ of the thickness of a cigarette paper.

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Battery of Vertical Presses (from Kirklees Images)

The key points in maintaining all printing equipment are to keep it well-lubricated and to keep your equipment clean.  As Jack Deller notes: the cleanliness of the overall printing works and machinery is seen as a good indication of efficiency.

Ensure that your presses and other machines are well-lubricated regularly and that the right points are greased.  Remember that there may be some oiling points beyond eye level or towards the bottom of the machine.

Your presses should be periodically cleaned with an oily rag.  Where corrosion is found on the bed of the press it can be removed with fine carbonium paper soaked in paraffin.

In terms of moving, servicing and cleaning machines thoroughly here are some hints —

• Cast iron is brittle: treat it as if it were glass and use either non-metal hammers (like rubber, plastic or wood) or one of these materials between the cast iron and the hammer
• When removing parts, replace nuts and bolts in their vacant holes.  Where this is not possible, keep a small tin for these
• For complex machinery consider using steel punches with letters to show which parts go where; or where gears should meet each other.  Record the position of the machine when you begin to take it apart
• Avoid crossing threads when undoing bolts, don’t use too much force
• Remember that tommy pins and keys can be stuck on dirt, so clean first before trying to force them out

In terms of equipment, a recommendation is that ‘an old suitcase’ or other bag be found to contain the following items to help with low-level printers’ engineering

• Deep tray to soak parts in paraffin to clean them
• Pipe cleaners to clear out oiling holes
• Emery paper to remove dried ink
• Paint brush to clean gears
• Small tin to hold duct keys and other small parts
• Insulating tape to shore up air tubes
• Tweezers to remove oiling wicks
• Torch
• Brass, Rubber or Hide hammer
• Screwdrivers
• Spanners
• Oiling can
• Tommy bar
• Rags
• Centre punch
• Small chisel
• Oil and grease
• Rags

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Adana Platen Grid (from Bob Richardson)

“Precision begins in the composing room” was the standard cry from the makers of composing room equipment. They claimed that without this foundation other work on precision would be wasted. A speaker at a BPMF conference – Mr. Philip J Wright of Bristol – expressed a slightly different view and I’ll summarise it here.

We do need to be precise in the composing room; but this will come to nothing if our letterpress machines are poorly-kept. It takes a lot of repeated effort to get each forme accurate for printing; but less time to get a press really accurate. Mr Wright suggested starting with the presses – and not the composing room – to get immediate results. The test was to take an expertly precise forme from another printer and use your own machine: any benefits from this effort will be lost with a poorly maintained machine, regardless of the effort invested in the forme.

So, get your machine ship-shape first.

Turning then to the composing room, we need to take a systematic approach to precision – again to secure the greatest immediate benefit.

• Height of Materials
  While ‘type high’ means 0.918”, different elements of a forme will have slightly different heights: type in cases; type cast in-house; blocks; mountings etc. The first step here is to be able to accurately measure the heights of these things and work out the tolerances that you can work with. This might need a combination of different approaches to makeready
• Horizontal Relationships between Materials
  This is about getting everything in the right place across the forme. Jack Deller noted that wooden reglet in a 3” square might change shape by anything up to 6pts under pressure. Lining up tables or drawing boards can be used to assure accurate positioning; but more simple approaches can give benefits: using metal or formica furniture in places of wood, for example.

Overall the approach needs to be defined by the type of work. For those using plates a great deal, better bases might be a quick and effective improvement. For those doing multi-colour work, lining up would be critical.

The overall scheme, though, must be get immediate improvements of one sort or another and use multiple, small steps to get better results.

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The Studio at New North PressThe Studio at New North Press

For details about Graham Bignell & New North Press visit www.new-north-press.co.uk. Or emailgraham.bignell@talk21.com for bookings.

The Crafts Council’s Crafts Magazine has recently published an article on New North Press titled Pressing Matters.

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Full Colour Letterpress Example (from Fritz, Flickr)

While most small jobbing printers worked in single– or two-colour work, the public was keen to see full colour. And although letterpress was not the only process that could deliver high-quality colour work, it was within the reach of the medium– and larger-scale printers. The process is the same as modern-day colour printing: the original is divided in to a number of colours and each colour is printed with a different ink. Just as your modern desktop computer printer uses cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CKMY) to create any given colour; the printer had to use this approach to get full-colour letterpress work. It’s the practicalities of doing this, though, which makes full-colour letterpress a difficult undertaking: everything must be precise and of the best quality, for a single error in one colour can spoil the whole set of printed sheets. The advice below is summarised from The Art of Letterpress Machining by Jack Deller and gives a picture of the state of the art in the late 1950s.

Colour Blocks – the Engraver's Art

The full colour original must be made in to a series of blocks to print each colour sequentially. This was a task delegated to the colour engraver, a very specialist trade supplying the printing industry. The original would be photographed through a series of coloured filters on to a sensitised surface and this would be used as the basis for producing a plate with the relevant high and low surfaces for letterpress printing. The screen would define the ‘resolution’ of the finished image and was originally just that: a screen through which the image would be photographed. The finest letterpress screens had something like 175 lines to the inch, but this challenged even the best printers. Fine work was typically run on specialist paper at 150 lines to the inch. Each colour plate was produced using a screen at a different angle so that the dot of ink sat next to each other rather than on top of one another. The engraver would supply the blocks along with progressive proofs, showing how the colour image would be built up colour by colour. The colour of each block was typically marked on the flange of the metal plate. If you have full colour blocks to print but no markings then these tips might help: yellow will be the densest of the blocks; black will be the lightest; blue will look like the nearly finished image and redwill be the remaining block.

Preparation: Makeready and Printing Sequence

Makeready is the process of eliminating inequalities in the forme: this is important so that the whole forme prints with even pressure and so produces the best result. It’s an important step in all letterpress printing, but becomes crucial when using halftones and even more so when working in colour. As a general principle the least possible impression should be used and the thinnest film of ink delivered to the plate for printing. To achieve this you should use an interlay— a series of thin paper sheets between the plate itself and the mounting. Use interlay for heavy areas but make sure that this does not bring any light areas so high that they will print. To avoid the plate moving around during printing it should be tacked in place with the pins facing towards the centre of the plate. Looking at the lockup, avoid using wooden furniture (which can warp and bend) and lock the block using two quoins on each side (eight in total). This will allow for minute adjustments to be made to the position of the block without unlocking the whole forme.

Materials

The very best papers and ink should be used. Paper should be kept in the press room for a period before printing so that the paper is unlikely to stretch during the printing process which would distort the subsequent colours. Paper should be trimmed on two edges to the finished size so that register is accurate for each sheet. On inks, it is wise to take the manufacturer’s advice based on the paper and screen used. No driers should be used because this would reduce the ability of subsequent layers of ink to ‘stick’ to lower layers. The machine and inks should be fairly warm (closer to the room temperature) so that it does not cause pick— the tack of the ink pulling the surface of the paper away.

Printing

The traditional sequence for printing in colour was: yellow, red, blue and black. Experiments were conducted in the 1950s to work on a better sequence and it was found that the best approach was: black, red, blue and yellow. The reasons were: (i) the first colour is darker and so can show that the position of the block is correct, (ii) red shows better that the film of ink is of the correct thickness, and (iii) the key colours are printed earlier. Progressive proofs should be examined under daylight, rather than fluorescent or other artificial light. Rollers need to be of the best quality. Finally the different colours should be printed in quick succession so that subsequent colours can ‘take’ on top of the colours underneath. A gap of three hours is probably a good guide. Longer gaps may lead to crystallisation where the vehicle or varnish of the ink is absorbed to the paper, but the pigment remains on the surface of the paper and can be rubbed off.

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