I therefore, like Johanna Drucker, Footnote 8 take as fundamental the idea that letterpress printing is a literary art and an art of textuality. In learning to set type and to print, I explored the malleable relationship between language, tactility, and time. I wanted to learn how to print in part because I thought it might help me think differently about how Woolf wrote but also about how I might write. As an apprentice at Massey, however, I had academic, creative, and historical intentions simultaneously. The purpose of trade printing was not the same as acts of printing undertaken by artists or by students. I recognize here that Woolf is a privileged exception in the world of printing, as I am: quite a lot of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century print history is predicated on the assumption that the writer and the printer would be separate individuals with separate jobs to do. Footnote 6 Following Woolf in the 1920s and 1930s, other modernist women writers also took up letterpress printing, notably Nancy Cunard and Laura Riding, Footnote 7 and in this Element I aim to enrich some of the context around and extend the narrative from Woolf: through the trade structures that excluded women writers to the other modernist women who also printed and then through to the present moment and to the afterlife of the modernist independent press in contemporary letterpress projects by women. My own interest in Hogarth Press stemmed initially from the hypothesis, also advanced by Hermione Lee, Alice Staveley, and others, that the rhythms and processes of letterpress printing were connected, for Woolf, to her writing. While I was never a part of the inner circle of ‘Quadrats’ at Massey, I accessed that space as a female student working on Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, open to learning and unaware at the time of the long history and bounded nature of print shops as gendered enclosures. Mostly, I made ephemeral prints such as bookmarks and event keepsakes and quartos for use in book history graduate seminars. Footnote 4 I spent nearly every Thursday afternoon during the five years of my PhD programme in an informal apprenticeship Footnote 5 learning how to set metal type, how to clean and preserve wood type, how to sort spacing by size, how to produce prints on a variety of different nineteenth-century cast-iron hand presses, and how to tell the stories of those presses for interested passers-by. Footnote 3 It was in this space, called The Bibliography Room, where I first learned how to print, in 2008, alongside other novice printers – mostly women. Footnote 1 He acquired printing presses for the college, with the intention that the students might use them to print their own writings, and so were born the ‘Quadrats’ Footnote 2 – a group of professional typographers, printers, and bibliophiles who built a small society and an impressive collection of printing materials, ephemera, and antique equipment. For the first nine years of his time as the Master of Massey College (1963–81), in fact, the institution only admitted men. A gruff old fellow with a formidable beard, he was a celebrated writer and by all accounts a hilarious storyteller – but he was no feminist. Robertson Davies was a Canadian novelist and the first Master of Massey College in Toronto, Canada. If you have a specific paper stock in mind, we can order it.This story begins in a rather unexpected place, with an unlikely figure for a study of women and the art of letterpress printing. We understand the importance of beautiful prints to reflect the special occasion - such as a wedding - and the choice of paper stock is an essential aesthetic component. Our select cotton-based papers such as Crane and Strathmore are a perfect match for letterpress printing. We have a wide selection of paper stocks ranging in thickness from 70 lb text up to 268 lb Cover. We use Toyo's eco-friendly, soy-based ink. The Plate is made of strong and durable polymer. Our letterpress machine is the classic Heide lberg Windmill. Below are more details on each component. The inked image impresses itself into the receiving paper stock through the strong clamping movement of both the metal block and the paper block. The ink ends up on two final rollers that transfer the ink onto a strong polymer plate, which adheres to a flat metal block. Ink is applied onto the machine and is picked up by the rollers, which slowly even out the ink's flow through adjustments in pressure and speed. Letterpress printing consists of four basic components: the Letterpress Machine, the Plate, the Ink, and the Paper Stock.
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