Sunday, April 3, 2011

Artistic Printing

Wow. It's been a while since I last posted. Sorry.
I have a lot of catching up to do!

In March my family took a two week vacation in Florida. Good weather, nice beaches and some downtime. While we were there we met up with Don and Ruth Black for an afternoon and dinner. Don showed us a bunch of new books on letterpress type that he had acquired. For me it was like looking at a book with pictures of all kinds of delicious tempting candy. Beautiful wood type and metal type fonts page after page! I had also brought a book called "The Handy Book of Artistic Printing" to show Don. He had never seen it. It's a paperback whose pages are filled with images of beautiful, densely printed ephemera letterpress done in the late 1800's in a style that was called Artistic Printing. Here is a peek.

The artistically printed style cover.

I'd love to see and try out one of these curving machines for rules!
They created all sorts of images by custom bending rules for clients. Plants, swirls even portraits!!

Look at all the individual pieces used to create this one corner of the image!!!