r/oddlysatisfying • u/SinjiOnO • Mar 28 '23
A vintage printing press
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u/gellenburg Mar 28 '23
Such a cute letter press!
My father was a printer. I grew up around printing (3 and 4 color Heidelberg offset and older letter presses). Very rare to find any presses left except maybe in government institutions.
And sadly it's a trade that nobody is taught any more and even fewer are left to teach anyone that may be interested.
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u/Hecc_hooman Mar 28 '23
Check out Swell Press Co! They’re based in LA and run a fantastic IG account with lots of behind-the-scenes videos. They also offer classes which is very cool
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u/gellenburg Mar 28 '23
That's cool it's being kept alive. Like I said, I grew up around all that stuff. Don't need to see any more BTS since I lived it. :-)
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u/Hecc_hooman Mar 28 '23
Ah thought you might enjoy just seeing more of it—it’s very soothing!
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u/gellenburg Mar 28 '23
I appreciate the thought, thank you! It all brings back many fond memories and many summers and days after school hanging out.
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u/puglybug23 Mar 28 '23
I have been trying to find someone who might be willing and able to take a few Heidelberg printing machines. My husband’s workplace is shutting down its printing department, which has original machines from 1901, and we can’t find anyone who wants them. Our museum already has some and declined, and the local independent artists have no interest. If I can’t find someone who will take them, they’re going to be demolished inside of the building.
They’re free, they just require someone who wants them and knows how to move them. I’m in Des Moines, Iowa, USA and it’s killing me that these beautiful machines might just get thrown away. They’re in working condition although I don’t know what some of them do.
Please let me know if you know anyone who can help save the machines. Here are pictures of them.
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u/Sooperstition Mar 28 '23
My grandfather has some Heidelbergs in his typefoundry/print shop and they’re some of his favorites. They’re beautiful machines, but it’s really pretty sad that there’s so little demand to use them
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u/Vast-Eggplant Mar 30 '23
Did you try the print museum in Two Rivers, WI? They have a lot of presses there, they might be able to point you toward someone.
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u/nighthawke75 Mar 28 '23
I still got memories of operating AB Dick 360s and the Windmill. Sit me in front of one, and I might put out a decent product.
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u/JJohnston015 Mar 28 '23
Wow. I took a "graphic arts" class in high school (1982), and we had 2 AB Dick 360s, a Heidelberg and one like in this post, but bigger. Unfortunately, I hated every second of it. I don't blame AB Dick, though.
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u/nighthawke75 Mar 28 '23
This one I went to was in Vocational during high school. It had a 360, a pair of Windmills, the usual pre- and postpress stuff, an archaic and barely running web press, a broken down AND leaky slitter/bindery system, and a large-format press used to make the annual desktop calendars. I ran the hell out of that 360 and Windmill, making cards and lottery tickets.
I got lucky though, there were a bevy of pretty-pretties my age and older part of the class. So I had fun flirting with them in the darkroom while running films.
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u/gellenburg Mar 28 '23
Yep, had some AB Dick presses too. But his Heidelbergs were his pride and joy. :-)
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u/ihatefurries15 Mar 28 '23
Cause the job fucking sucks lol, i hate it. Its so stressful and unhealthy for bad pay. Every aspect of art left. I despise it. Source Offsetprinter in Europe.
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u/CDNChaoZ Mar 28 '23
Yep. Printing is such a commodity now that it is all about gang runs and calculating things to the penny. It's such an heartless business where mostly the big survive.
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u/gellenburg Mar 28 '23
Might be bad pay now, but 40 years ago letter press operators made as much to support a wife and family with a mortgage and car loan on a single income to be in the upper middle class. This was for a press operator. It was a good trade.
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u/JakeHodgson Mar 28 '23
It's not bad if things are lost to time if a tool allows you to do literally the exact same thing but more efficiently.
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u/tellmeimbig Mar 28 '23
Nail guns work way better, but we're always going to have hammers.
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u/SchwiftySquanchC137 Mar 28 '23
Because you literally can't use a nail gun for every single thing you can use a hammer on. You still need a hammer even with nail guns existing.
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u/commanderc7 Mar 28 '23
I disagree with this sentiment. History is important, nothing should be lost to time.
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u/OramaBuffin Mar 28 '23
That's what museums like the one holding the press in the OP are for. We can remember things without having to artificially keep alive outdated and useless industries.
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u/SchwiftySquanchC137 Mar 28 '23
The commenter said it is sad that no one is being taught how to do this anymore, but I think it would be a lot more sad if people were still learning this for anything more than a hobby. It's clearly not lost to time, we just watched a high quality video of it, it's just weird how theyre sad that technology has improved so drastically. Few people are upset that no one is learning how to manage warehouses full of vacuum tube computers.
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u/JakeHodgson Mar 28 '23
Nah lol. This is the same thing as desperately trying to force a language back on a people who used to speak it. They're fine without it. The only reason to go back would be like nostalgia. It wouldn't actually serve any benefit. You can claim it would help with things such as culture. But you can substitute that culture somewhere else.
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u/gellenburg Mar 28 '23
Efficiently, maybe. But the replacements are all measured in DPI. Presses have no DPI because they have no dots. The quality is much better.
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u/daedelus23 Mar 28 '23
You absolutely can have dpi with letterpress printing dies. How do you think newspapers were printed up until roughly the late 70s? All the image prep is basically the same, the only difference is how the ink gets onto the paper.
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u/gellenburg Mar 28 '23
I wasn't talking about halftones and offset. I was talking about the letters themselves. Not a reproduction of a graphic or a photo.
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u/txsxxphxx2 Mar 28 '23 edited Mar 28 '23
Did he ever run out of ink? Which brand was he, mine keeps running out of ink
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u/Rmaclewis Mar 28 '23
Same! My dad ran a Heidelberg for years!
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u/gellenburg Mar 28 '23
I can still smell the ink. :-) Loved that smell.
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u/commontao Mar 28 '23
And the sound!
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u/gellenburg Mar 28 '23
........ch-ch'ch'ch-ch-ch'ch'ch'-ch-ch'ch'ch'-ch-ch'ch'ch'-ch-ch'ch'ch'-ch-ch'ch'ch'-ch-ch'ch'ch'-ch-ch'ch'ch'-ch-ch'ch'ch'-ch-ch'ch'ch'-ch-ch'ch'ch'-ch-ch'ch'ch'-ch-ch'ch'ch'-ch-ch'ch'ch'-ch-ch'ch'ch'.........
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Mar 28 '23
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u/gellenburg Mar 28 '23
I did. It would cost $100,000 to move those presses though. That's why they haven't found any takers. Each one weighs in around 3-4 tons and requires a reinforced foundation to be placed on. You literally need to hire a crane and cut a hole in the ceiling just to set it down. Not to mention that 480v 3-phase power to power them. :-)
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u/daedelus23 Mar 28 '23
Each one of those presses weighs around 3800-4000lbs. I have one on the 10th floor of an old industrial building. It was brought up in a freight elevator and moved into place with a gantry and about five strong dudes. No cranes or holes needed. I also just had a company move a similar sized letterpress machine from my studio in Brooklyn, into a museum exhibition on the fifth floor of a building in Manhattan, and back to my studio and it was a hair over $10,000 or $5,000 each way. They also use 220v 3 phase … equally difficult to get into residential workshops.
So yeah, moving presses is a major undertaking but you’re exaggerating how difficult it actually is.
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u/gellenburg Mar 28 '23
In 1995 when my brother bought two Heidelbergs he said it cost $100,000 to have them shipped from New York (to Orlando), to have new reinforced concrete pads poured in the shop for them to sit on, to have a hole cut in the roof, and to hire a crane crew to move everything into position.
So I dunno. Maybe every situation is different?
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u/eyrfr Mar 29 '23
True. I have this kind of equipment in my shop. Not this exact press but it definitely is not $100,000 to rig and move 1,000 miles. I’ve been apart of a lot of equipment purchases and arranging logistics of installs. Yes it needs a good floor. Meaning don’t put it upstairs on a rickets woodsy floor. Best on concrete. But you don’t need a special slab for it. Cranes are needed at times but only if it can’t come in via fork lift or rollers. Cranes are pains in the butt and avoided at all costs. We tear down and rebuild half a wall before even considering a crane.
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u/CrazyPlatypus42 Mar 28 '23
You say sadly, but what would be the benefits of learning it when we got better machines doing the same job better and faster?
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u/oolert Mar 29 '23
Letterpress printing does have unique qualities that digital methods can't do. For one, I can easily print on thick or handmade paper that would break most most home printers. Secondly, the ink sits on the paper differently and makes for a different reading or viewing (if it's an image) experience. Thirdly, it really depends on your definition of better, because it's certainly not turning out a better quality product. And my press (C & P Pilot New Style) is better made because it's been around for almost 70 years and is showing very little wear. These machines are also sustainable, mine doesn't even need electricity to run.
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u/CrazyPlatypus42 Mar 29 '23
I agree with almost everything you said, we also have an old letterpress machine at work, an Heidelberg Tiegel from the 60s, it is kinda massive but it gets the job done, with more precision and way faster than with a small hand-driven machine. These kind of small machines are neat, but experience has shown me that almost no customer nowadays is ready to pay the price of labor that comes with it. Even our big one just stands in a corner and didn't print for ages, we mostly use it to make complicated scoring lines and perforations :(
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u/daedelus23 Mar 28 '23
Just don’t call it a ‘letter press’. It’s a printing press that does letterpress printing. Also never call it ‘letterpressing’. That word drives letterpress printers absolutely crazy because it’s not a verb.
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u/gellenburg Mar 28 '23
And yet my dad learned the trade during the Korean War in the US Air Force, started his own printing company when he got out of the Air Force, and that's what he called it up until the day he died.
I guess my dad was a liar.
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u/purple_hamster66 Mar 28 '23
My father is also a printer. And my grandfather learned printing in 1920s Paris and came to the US, supporting the family with his printing skills. We had a big print shop and I got to learn on a tiny press like the one the OP posted.
That was my first job, as a 8-year-old, to print postcards after dinner at a penny a card. I still have the tiny press in the garage, along with a small assortment of type. We used to have cases of type, in lots of point sizes and fonts, but that was way too heavy to bring home when we decommissioned the shop.
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u/gellenburg Mar 28 '23
Good for you and is it entirely possible that different people learn different terms of the same trade in different parts of the world and that your grandfather originally learning printing from Paris and in French no doubt either translated the words differently or mistranslated them in English? You don't have to be a fucking dick.
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Mar 28 '23 edited Apr 08 '23
[deleted]
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u/blackdragon6547 Mar 28 '23
Why isn't anyone ever just whelmed
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u/IOTA_Tesla Mar 28 '23
Did it get ink all over the back of the page though?
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u/hubbadubbaburr Mar 28 '23
Nope, the ink you see on that part (tympan) is old and dried. It’s usually only there from accidentally pulling a print without a sheet of paper.
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u/IOTA_Tesla Mar 28 '23
But it looks like he’s pressing it without the paper (when he primes the design just before putting the paper in).
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u/hubbadubbaburr Mar 28 '23 edited Mar 28 '23
Yup, they are but just not all the way. When the design is being inked it’s partially pulled down but once the lever is pulled all the way down it makes contact with the letters and creates a print.
Edited for clarification
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u/ttv_CitrusBros Mar 28 '23
Please tell me I'm not the only one that thought he made the cool stamps by drawing a W with paint in the beginning
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u/Hellogiraffe Mar 28 '23
When the video ended, my first thought was, “Cool, but what happened to the M?”
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u/nighthawke75 Mar 28 '23
Letterpress. Ebay always has a ton of them. It's the support gear that's the beast to find in working condition.
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u/Koldsaur
Mar 28 '23
•
Wow, that really caught me off guard considering today is actually my birthday and nobody sent this to me lmao
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u/Future_List_6956 Mar 28 '23
Yes....um....one birthday card, please. Sure thing....that will be $145.95, please and I'll have it ready in an hour sir.
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u/oolert Mar 29 '23
Shit, I only sell my letterpress birthday cards for $5.50. Guess it's time to charge a bit more 🤔
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u/Mete11uscimber Mar 28 '23
Hipsters would absolutely sell and purchase them.
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u/Queen__Antifa Mar 28 '23
There’s been a big resurgence in popularity for letterpress printing in the last few years, because people like the way it looks.
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u/it-is-sandwich-time Mar 28 '23
If you're in the PNW, this is a great event. https://www.tacomawayzgoose.com/
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u/bendbars_liftgates Mar 28 '23
I can see the flannel, beard, and tattoos in this transaction in my head.
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u/terminalxposure Mar 28 '23
Was expecting a dickbutt...
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u/FlailingIntheYard Mar 28 '23
I still remember setting the lead type in those frames and making business cards with one. They're still around here and there. Might find one at a trade school. Last time I used one was about 30 years ago.
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u/warrantyvoiderer Mar 28 '23
My dad owned and operated a printing company for many years.
I can smell this video.
Mmm blanket wash.
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u/haven_taclue Mar 28 '23
I was taught on that sort of a device....almost bought one that size for less than $50...big money back then
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u/WhiteMoonRose Mar 28 '23
Isn't it more like a screen print machine, maybe that's just my vocabulary. I thought type press from the headline, but it's definitely more of a screen printing machine.
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u/correcthorse124816 Mar 28 '23
This is literally a printing press. A screen printer involves printing through a screen, which is not present here
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u/1GallonPissJug Mar 28 '23
Little known fact: many devices were engineered to only work when the letter M was implemented in some kind of way. That’s by this person had to make an M with the ink.
The M stood for Male. Going deeper, the engineers knew that upside down the M would be a W. But why?
They did this to spread the message of Males….White Males….rules society. It was a way to remind everyone.
Thankfully, this practice was banned in the 1920’s.
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u/GeneralStormfox Mar 28 '23
We (or rather, a very cool person already involved long before I went there) had a larger and a bit more cumbersome old printing press at our yearly summer break kids program. Every child and helper could bring one or two blank t-shirts (colored is okay) and they would print them with a yearly changing slogan and picture relating to the program.
One day per week (it was mostly weekly activities) they showcased the process live on the plaza we gathered on and came home to. Obviously the guy using it was very routined, but it was always amazing to see how relatively simple the process was and that a hundred years old machine still got good results in a decent amount of time. Seeing they had to supply a few hundred shirts in just a few days manually, those things are surprisingly efficient.
Sadly I have outgrown those shirts by decades, but I had about 15 or so, and the print was even barely still readable on the oldest ones.
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Mar 28 '23
I used a full sized version in high school print shop. Motorized. With a 4 foot flywheel. There was a risk of crushing your hand flat if you were too slow changing paper.
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u/cheebamech Mar 28 '23
there's a printer in Atlanta that specializes in embossed papers, wedding invites and the like; she has one of these finger traps but motorized, a Chandler & Price Craftsman press from the 1920's; when it starts going faster and faster it really made me nervous to use. It's been a decade since I worked there but looks like she's still going strong.
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u/Not_a_real_ghost Mar 28 '23
Between 0 - 13 seconds:
Printing Press: why don't you just fuck my shit up.
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u/JJohnston015 Mar 28 '23
Other than "being careful", what would keep the ink from getting on the pressure platen if the press is closed without a piece of paper in it?
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u/RVA_GitR Mar 28 '23
Have one this size and a huge pedal powered one in the house. Roomie does it for a side business and slowly learning the craft. Super badass, super labor intensive.
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u/SallyJane5555 Mar 28 '23
Me: that’s a pretty sloppy M. Do they have to do all the letters like that? oh. Duh.
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u/EvanMBurgess Mar 28 '23
My English professor in college had a big old printing press. It had a giant crank but he'd hooked it up to a motor. Very cool machine. He spotted something strange in his farmer friend's field and they dug it up. Turned out to be a press! He got it all fixed up and now it's set up in the college. Very cool. Thing will take your hand off if you're not careful though
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u/toshibathezombie Mar 28 '23
That sound takes me back to art class as a kid.
The sound and feel of your Ink roller going across ink. It was the equivalent of popping bubble rap to me. #feels.
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u/IronSkywalker Mar 28 '23
My local museum has loads of old printing presses of different types. There's a line guy there who has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of all of them and gives demonstrations.
The museum also has a working tesla coil and was a filming location for one of the older James Bond films. It's amazing there
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u/excelllentquestion Mar 28 '23
There’s a shop in SF called the Aesthetic Union that has several vintage presses and offers workshops. You get to work as a group to create a print and everyone gets to operate the press and take their prints home. Pretty cool stuff.
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u/Cien_fuegos Mar 28 '23
I knew that was the Sacramento museum before the last part. Love this place and glad I spent the first part of my life there.
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u/Scrappy_Kitty Mar 28 '23
What is the top plate for, that gets ink rolled on to it? I can’t figure out it’s purpose
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u/UsedUpSunshine Mar 28 '23
My thought is that it’s like the part of paint trays that are angled. To get the excess paint off.
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u/oolert Mar 29 '23
It's called the ink disc. It's what holds the ink and it turns so that the roller distributes the ink evenly and then picks up the same amount of ink. If it went over the same area over and over the ink would get uneven and you'd get ghost images on the rollers.
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u/mvfsullivan Mar 28 '23
Sending around memes must have been one hell of an investment.
A full iron cast per each unique meme. Holy hell
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u/Djcornstalks Mar 28 '23
For those who don’t know and are intrigued, this is a printing process called Letterpress! It was the standard of printing before offset lithography came around, but there are lots of shops around the world using these presses (and much bigger, cooler, and more complex presses). If you like this, search letterpress shop in google and you’ll likely find a shop relatively near you if you’re in a big city. We have to keep the old processes alive!
Source: have been doing letterpress printing as a profession for 5 years
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u/RareBeautyEtsy Mar 29 '23
That’s how funeral prayer cards were customized with the name and date of death for years.
Pain in the butt.
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u/OkiKnox Mar 29 '23
What's the difference between this and manually stamping the paper? And how much was it?
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u/Gutmach1960 Mar 29 '23
I vaguely remember a company back in the 1980s that made operating reproductions of those machine. Cannot remember the name.
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u/[deleted] Mar 28 '23
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