Let­ter­press print­ers have always need­ed a relief sur­face from which to print. This would have ini­tial­ly been carved wood­en blocks, then lead type. The prin­ci­ples behind pho­topoly­mer are still designed to give us that relief sur­face but use a com­bi­na­tion of light and spe­cial mate­ri­als to cre­ate the print­ing sur­face.

The process takes a pre­vi­ous­ly sol­u­ble sur­face and makes this hard and insol­u­ble through the action of light. Essen­tial­ly, where UV light is cast on the plate, this firms up, and the remain­der can be washed off.

The idea of light react­ing with a sur­face has been around a long time. The key dif­fi­cul­ty in pho­topoly­mer print­ing is to make sure that the print­ing sur­face and with­stand the pres­sures that come with let­ter­press print­ing.

Background

1955 seems to the point at which the process was first demon­strat­ed in the UK. The British Print­er reports that the Col­lobloc process had been demon­strat­ed at IPEX by Pho­togravure & Allied Hold­ings Ltd Group, and had been cov­ered in the 1955 Pen­rose Annu­al.

The orig­i­nal process involved a lam­i­nat­ed foil, with the pho­topoly­mer mate­r­i­al. This had to be sen­si­tised before being exposed to a cam­era. After expo­sure this mate­r­i­al had to be put through a man­gle to join anoth­er mate­r­i­al before cur­ing. The process, it was claimed, could be mas­tered with just ​‘two to three months’ of basic train­ing. Inter­est­ing­ly a ​‘screen’ was used between cam­era and plate and this itself, along with the mix of poly­mer, were patent­ed.

You can view the orig­i­nal 1953 patent online.

‘Photopolymer’

By 1958 there were three new pro­pos­als to use a sim­i­lar tech­nique: the Time-Life nylon plate; the Fogra nylon-plate; and the Du Pont plate. These togeth­er were called pho­topoly­mer.

Each of these used slight­ly dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tions of mate­ri­als but the over­all approach was the same — using light to hard­en part of the sur­face and wash­ing the remain­der away.

Con­cerns at the time includ­ed the abil­i­ty to cor­rect or adjust the plates once made, the dura­bil­i­ty of the mate­r­i­al, and whether colour plates — nor­mal­ly requir­ing immense pre­ci­sion — could be made. In fact the Col­lobloc plates had been used to show what their poly­mer plates with no hand-cor­rec­tion were capa­ble of.

The British Print­er end­ed their 1958 arti­cle with –

Only the future will show whether or not there is room for both met­al and poly­mers in let­ter-press print­ing.

British Print­er, 1958

Photopolymer Today

Just as the pos­si­bil­i­ties of using pho­topoly­mer were in the ascen­dan­cy, the use of let­ter­press over­all was giv­ing way to litho print­ing. Pho­topoly­mer car­ried on, even Lud­low made their own set-up to cre­ate pho­topoly­mer plates.

In the ear­ly 2000s, with an influx of new print­ers, keen to see a let­ter­press effect (typ­i­cal­ly debossed), and with a press but not always the type, atten­tion turned to using pho­topoly­mer plates as a way of pre­serv­ing the craft while open­ing up new lay­outs and not need­ing the same lev­el of skill to start.

Today’s bible for using pho­topoly­mer in the let­ter­press process is Print­ing Dig­i­tal Type on the Hand-Oper­at­ed Flatbed Cylin­der Press by Ger­ald Lange; and there’s an amaz­ing Let­ter­press Com­mons guide to the process.

The debate con­tin­ues to rage about the role of this type of print­ing ver­sus the tra­di­tion­al let­ter­press approach. In fair­ness there’s prob­a­bly a place for pho­topoly­mer in let­ter­press, per­haps where hand-set­ting is impos­si­ble, or the desired effect would lead to dam­ag­ing lead types.

Polymer Set Ups

To take advan­tage of this renewed inter­est, firms began to offer the com­po­nents of pho­topoly­mer as com­po­nents that would work togeth­er — typ­i­cal­ly a met­al, mag­net­ic base on to which would be applied a met­al-backed poly­mer plate. This means you can email a design, and take deliv­ery of the slim plate only — posi­tion­ing and apply­ing on to the base you re-use. In the US, Box­car is the most pop­u­lar of these. Here in the UK, friends at Lyme Bay Press offer a sim­i­lar ser­vice.

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Location

Paten­tee’s Address: Cologne, Ger­many

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“EggHeads Print1” flickr pho­to by _ Space­Frog _ https://flickr.com/photos/37117402@N03/3418829053 shared under a Cre­ative Com­mons (BY-NC) license