The Long Death of Letterpress

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If you’re at all interested in letterpress, the history of printing, or how nostalgia affects graphic design, you must head over to PrintMag.com and read Death of a Pressman by Fritz Swanson. It is first and foremost, a personal remembrance of a letterpress pressman named Tom Trumble. But the article encompasses more than a century of printing history, explores issues of nostalgia vs. authenticity, and shows how letterpress has been “dying” for well over a century.

Here’s the opening:

A letterpress pressman has died in America.

In 2010, there were more than 200,100 printing-machine operators working in the United States, a modest growth from the 140,000 pressmen and their assistants employed in 1975. The increase precisely mirrors the population growth over the same period. But absent in the numbers is the fact that over that time, letterpress printing has gone from being a declining but still important technology to a virtually extinct practice. Once, letterpress machines were at the center of the printing industry, their care and use taught in high schools across the country. Today, the majority of the pressmen who run monstrous web-fed offset presses would see a clacking Gordon-style jobber press as, at best, a quaint toy; at worst, an irritating and cumbersome relic.

And yet, according to Don Black, the owner of Don Black Linecasting, a major letterpress-equipment dealer based in Toronto, the value of a Vandercook press today is five times what it was just a decade ago. A generation has grown up in a world where Gutenberg’s metal type has been replaced by cascades of style sheets and the infinite white landscape of an InDesign work space. As commercial pressmen retire or die, tens of thousands of young designers, old tinkerers, and assorted enthusiasts step in as impromptu preservationists. While a vanishing few are old hands, most of these people have only a little letterpress experience. But they have wholly bought into the idea, the myth, of letterpress. I am one of these people, one of these “preservationists.” But what are we preserving?

Editor in Chief of CreativePro. Instructor at LinkedIn Learning with courses on InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, GIMP, Inkscape, and Affinity Publisher.
  • Arnold Dillon says:

    We have to remember the contribution of Tom Trumble in the area of printing.Letterpress machine proves very useful and important technology its only their hard work.Continuing their work letterpress machine has made more advanced.
    letterpress

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