What are the criteria for excellent letterpress printing?

Perhaps this is a dumb question, I'm not sure. I've been collecting fine press books for a few years now and I have found that the printing (or 'presswork' if that is the correct term) varies tremendously amongst the established fine presses past and present, and there can even be considerable variation between books from the same press.

The things I have tended to notice most of all are:

1) The consistency of the printing (i.e. are some words, sections, or pages printed more lightly or more heavily inked?)

2) The crispness of the printing (i.e. are the edges of the characters mostly sharp or slightly uneven?)

3) Depth of impression or 'bite'

I imagine all these are very much interconnected. Are there other criteria I can be looking out for?

I guess the difficulty comes when we are dealing with so many different methods of letterpress printing. Should I hope for ultimate consistency and crispness whatever the method? Or, do expectations need to be adjusted according to the printing method (e.g. a Heidelberg vs a hand press, metal vs polymer) and the type of paper that is being used?

I understand and agree - to some extent - with the view that the imperfections and inconsistencies can be what makes letterpress printing charming and demonstrates that it is handcraft. On the other hand, when I look at the presswork of John Henry Nash, for example, it seems so beautifully crisp and consistent to my eyes, and I find that it's very satisfying to read because of that.

I welcome everyone's views or advice. I'm interested to hear what you all look for.

The factors you list are indeed important, and interrelated as you surmise. One that I would add as crucial is design.

At first blush this might seem like less of a factor, since every letterpress printer is ostensibly doing the same thing (arranging metal type or polymer plate on a bed). But once you begin to appreciate the (often subtle) genius of good book design, it quickly becomes an obvious demarcator between adequate press work and great press work.

Now naturally design is an important part of every book, but outside of letterpress you can do a lot of digital jiggery-pokery. Letterpress, by its more constrained format, requires a special talent in order to manifest brilliance. Typeface and ink choices, page arrangement, margins, and the like take on greater import in letterpress because they are the key methods of expression.

There are some active presses (No Reply, Nomad, Factotum Pers to name a few) whose book designs are so superb that they are a pleasure to simply look upon. Though of course they are also a delight to read. Anyway, this is something I consider a signal trait of great letterpress.

I would also add general quality control. The focus on making everything conform to a vision, the willingness to redo or replace errors even at cost. The care to make sure page alignment is correct after gathering. Etc. It's not exactly quality of press work, but stands alongside evenness of inking, control of impression, and other qualities of printing that are easier to isolate, and seems closer to press work than any other clearly distinguished domain of book making. GAF is king.

I think this is one of the major aspects that makes the excellence of books from presses like the Officina Bodoni stand out.

I do think the choice of which point on any dimension one prefers is relatively arbitrary (printer kiss versus deep impression, for example, or choice of smoother versus rougher paper). But once a lane is chosen, consistency and excellence of follow through is what distinguishes the merely competent from the top class. For example, my Bodoni Etna is highly refined printers kiss technique while my Taller Martin Pescador Green Knight is thick thick handmade paper with deep impression. Both are in my top ten favorites from my collection.

Another dimension to add might be integration of illustrations, not in a layout design sense but in an execution sense. Effectiveness of using multiple passes to integrate wood engravings (or similar relief methods) or multiple colors.

>2 Shadekeep: Excellent points. In a sense, I am trying to isolate the printing itself, but that may be a fool's errand as I imagine it's a holistic process for the printer. Appreciating all the subtle magic of letterpress design and typography must take a lot of experience, and I feel like there's plenty that goes over my head at this stage. Perhaps it's understood on some level when I see a page that looks 'right' or harmonious, and eventually I will be better able to appreciate or articulate why (I hope)! I think there's something partly instinctive about noticing when spacing and proportion are a bit off.

>3 abysswalker: Well said. The willingness to redo and replace must be a huge and very testing part of the printing process, especially when you are dealing with labour intensive methods and expensive materials. So, would you say you are more forgiving of imperfections or inconsistency based on the printing method e.g. if a book is printed on a hand-press or proof-press rather than a Heidelberg? Or, to borrow your metaphor, once a lane is chosen do you expect excellence (and pay accordingly)?

>4 GardenOfForkingPaths: I think you covered a lot of what is crucial regarding the actual printing in your first post. I would still weigh typeface selection and point size into that mix, as those can have an impact on related factors like bite strength.

Also, in addition to ink choices, I really would count paper selection as a major contributing factor. It has a huge influence on the overall effect, and can further guide decisions going into the physical printing. An impression style that works wonderfully on one paper may not be at all suited to another. A great printer knows how to adapt to each paper for best effect.

>4 GardenOfForkingPaths: I wouldn't say I'm more forgiving exactly, but I do expect different kinds of products. A book printed on thick handmade paper has some qualities that can serve a particular book well or poorly. It's going to be thicker (most of the time) and have greater rigidity, making it well suited for larger page sizes and not too many pages per volume. It's also probably going to be a bit more irregular if the natural deckle is maintained. If someone tries to print a 500 page doorstop novel on such a paper expecting it to be a single volume, it's not going to come out well, no matter the "luxury" of the materials. It's like someone that tries to put caviar and truffle on everything just because it is fancy. Doesn't result in good food.

Same with higher end offset work printed on a precision fabricated machine made paper.

There are probably some parts of the craft that will just about always be "better" when using labor intensive manual methods and luxury materials (hand sewn head and tail bands, for example) but generally speaking I'd rest on the principle of the best tool or material for the job. If I'm mixing an old fashioned, it's going to be a waste of the finest aged whiskey (for example). If you're printing a long book on a thin wove paper, using a hand press is probably a recipe for heartache, as both artisan and customer, even though it's probably the most prestigious method.

(The worst offender in the "caviar and truffle on everything" school of design is probably leather bindings. I love fine leather bindings, but leather in generally is probably overused. I'd take simple cloth or buckram bindings over mid grade or lower leather with uninspired design any day.)

>7 abysswalker: Agreed, and I generally prefer cloth to leather most of the time. Also, not an especial fan of gilt, but I do like decorated edges on the right book (particularly marbled edges). Not an option for deckled paper, obviously!

>1 GardenOfForkingPaths: For me, the goal is always to try to print the letter as the punch cutter carved it, adjusting the press, the inking rollers, the make ready, and dampness of the paper to avoid ink on the shoulders or salty color. Thereafter, since letterpress is by definition an impression in the paper, we can expect some depth to the impression, but punch through to verso should always be fought against. Not many know that some amount of punch through can be addressed after the fact, but mainly must be done on the press, whatever the brand or style of press one uses. And it doesn't always work, some days the demons battle hard and win.

I could have printed several more books for all the folios I decided to reprint due to consistency issues or typos. And, en route to 'fixing' things, made more mistakes. Why bother doing it if you do not choose perfection as your impossible foil? It's a maddening enterprise.

My teacher always famously said: 'Imperfection is incidental to the hand process." That is not to say that imperfections add to the charm of an object by revealing that it is handmade. That is not a thing.

Luckily, there are more ways than just printing quality to judge a book!

Interesting question and one I’ve been wondering about myself, having recently acquired my first couple of letterpress editions (from pretty well regarded presses).

Having little personal experience to go on, how acceptable do people find occasional page ‘smudges’? Not in the type itself, which is all fine from what I can see, but in terms of what might be described as dirty marks on the pages.

Is this just part of buying letterpress or should we expect pristine printing?

>10 cyber_naut: Try using a gum eraser gently on the smudges. If you bought direct, some presses might offer a replacement if the smudges are too troublesome.

Great conversation. Thanks for posting this, Mr. Garden! I think excellence in printing is an enormously complex, three-dimensional thing. I don't know any excellent printer who doesn't hate everything they've ever printed. (Well that's an exaggeration, but not by much!)

Chad's like a 9 with aspirations to be a 10. (Nobody has ever been a 10. Chad is as good as they get.)

I'm like a 5 with aspirations to be a 9. (I wanna be YOU when I grow up, Chado!)

This is a topic on which somebody should write a book, or, maybe, an essay for a forthcoming book...

P. S. I think I've only ever held one book where I would describe the printing as "Flawless". Chad, I wonder how many truly flawless books you've come across?

>12 grifgon: "Nobody has ever been a 10."

How about McGrath, Mardersteig, Newdigate at their very best? Just curious about your opinion, not challenging you to defend it. :)

>14 PatsChoice: A rating of '10' implies perfection, and no one is perfect. You might get to 9.9, though.

>14 PatsChoice: To be totally honest, my guess is that if I were to be handed one of their very best books at random, I (and probably you!) would be able to find a couple of real flaws at least. (And that's just real flaws – not considering difference of opinion over excellence at all.)

Calling somebody a perfect printer is like calling somebody a perfect basketball player. What does that even mean, really?

I think that printing is a bit like shooting free throws. Each one is pretty easy, but nobody shoots 100 in a row. The very best hit like 90 percent.

Not sure about McGrath or Newdigate – haven't seen enough of their work – but in my (very) humble opinion, Chad is a better printer than Mardersteig. (And they're both using hand-set and hand-press so maybe it's a fair comparison, too.)

Edit: Of course Chad and Mardersteig were trying to accomplish very different things and working at a very different scale, so maybe the comparison isn't fair...

>16 grifgon: Perfect printing is neither very definable, nor attainable. You find yourself in the pursuit, however.

Mike Peich was always a very, very clean printer, especially important for the austerity of Van Krimpen's types.

I also see no flaws in the very expert printing in 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich' recently from No Reply, so I don't know where 5 out of 10 as a rating comes from. It is near perfect and wonderfully consistent!

>5 Shadekeep: That makes sense. Assuming I like the work that's being produced, and I know the printing will be good, paper choice is probably the most important factor for me in being attracted to a fine press edition. More important than the binding and illustrations, certainly.

>6 abysswalker: Thank you. Best tools and materials for the job is a great principle, I think. At the lower end, a well designed trade book can still be very satisfying if all the elements are working in harmony.

>9 SuttonHooPress: Wonderful insights, thank you. I love what you said about trying to produce what the punch cutter intended. Your pursuit of perfection definitely shows in your books, as it does with grifgon's. I'm interested to know how you can address the punch through to verso after printing? (I'll understand if it's a trade secret though!).

I also agree there are many other ways to judge a book than the printing. I have a few Tern Press books and notice that the printing is not always the best, but the books are still lovely in their way. On the other hand, I find John Henry Nash's presswork to be very good, but I do not always love all the design elements he used.

>12 grifgon: Is printing on a hand-press or proofing press much more difficult than using a Heidelberg or does it just take longer to print and allow for more exotic papers?

If someone with no experience or training bought a Vandercook, how long would it take them to learn how to fairly consistently produce sheets of text printed to a high standard (months, years?)? Are these things almost always done through transmission of skills and knowledge from one person to another, or can someone work it out for themselves without going insane with frustration?

>20 GardenOfForkingPaths: I sometimes "dampen" punch-through by applying pressure to the paper with felt under a screw press. But I also like bite, so I don't do it often. Curious how Chad does it.

Is printing on a hand-press or proofing press much more difficult than using a Heidelberg or does it just take longer to print and allow for more exotic papers?

Difficulty among presses, hmm. I guess it depends on what you find difficult. They're all very different. I'm not sure any of them are particularly difficult to operate, at base. I think anybody can achieve a great print right away with a little guidance. The know-how comes in diagnosing and addressing issues as they arise. Let's say you're on a proofing press, and the form rollers begin to rattle as they pass over the bed. What's the cause?? What do you do?? Also, the stamina and patience to keep operating at a high level. The issue with Heidelberg printing is that it's so easy to just let the press run and stack up mediocre prints by the inch. With a hand-press, you're putting in a lot of work to get a mediocre print, so you might as well take care and get a good one.

Maybe the sign of a quality printer is in achieving the result you want, not just the result you can manage to get. There's a lot of letterpress where you think, "I don't personally like this, but this was obviously the intention." You also see a lot of letterpress out there where you think, "They couldn't have possibly intended this – they just got what they could get."

If someone with no experience or training bought a Vandercook, how long would it take them to learn how to fairly consistently produce sheets of text printed to a high standard (months, years?)? Are these things almost always done through transmission of skills and knowledge from one person to another, or can someone work it out for themselves without going insane with frustration?"

I think the problem with starting out with zero experience is that you don't know what you don't know. Like, this person might buy their Vandercook, memorize the manual, set everything perfectly, and get great prints on their first day! But then if there's nobody looking over their shoulder asking, "So what deglazer are you going to use?" their printing might not look as good in a month. (And, worse, they have no idea why. Or, even worse, they misdiagnose the problem and cause more problems.)

I'm entirely self-taught, insofar as I've never had another printer in a room with me showing me how this or that works, and I wish I had had a yearlong apprenticeship or something. Imagine learning how to drive on an 80-year-old car while simultaneously learning to be a mechanic for that car. While sometimes gratifying to "learn the hard way," it can also just be pointlessly stressful.

I find this a very interesting discussion, and it brings to light a lot of questions on production of Fine Press books.
I consider myself a Private Hand-Press printer, who is self-taught. Hand-press printing is far more complicated than using a proof-press for example (in my opinion), inking is probably one of the most difficult things to master, it takes time to check each pull to see if more ink is needed, as too much ink is as bad as not enough! This is why some pages look slightly different to others and if I laid out 10 copies of the same page, one could tell from each page where more ink was added. Handmade paper is also difficult, too wet, too dry. I spray my sheets then I have some special absorbent sheets that interleaf each of the sprayed sheets, by doing this one can dampen the sheet again at a later date, the thing with dipping the sheets is they loose a little amount of the external size, meaning if they were dipped again the sheet would start loosing is crispness. Just a couple of things that need to be mastered, along with makeready and registration, etc. etc...
Hugh

>21 grifgon: Brilliant explanation. I think the combination of the different skills - mechanical, technical, creative - is what makes it such an impressive craft, at least to someone looking in from the outside. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and insight!

>22 TudorBlackPress: Thanks for giving a little glimpse into the trials and tribulations of the hand-press printer. I have two of your books and find the printing to be excellent and impressively consistent.

>20 GardenOfForkingPaths: If you bought a Vandercook in decent nick, and consulted with another printer who does what you want to do, you'd be printing well in no time. There is no reason to work it out by yourself unless that is the challenge you want. Where do you live? (I'm no good and matching LT handles with people I may know elsewise!) You could do it yourself, but you'd be re-inventing a lot of wheels.

Talent is a product of desire.

I have a Vandercook 4 with a compromised rail that I've worked around for decades. I don't think I've ever seen a Vandercook manual in my life. Are they still around?

If we kept trade secrets, we'd never improve. I want to know everybody's tricks!

I had a desperate problem with punch through when I printed 'a Brief History of Punctuation,' a book with Large sumi ink images. They needed to be very very black, and so pressure was one way to accomplish this rather than sopping on a bunch of squeezy ink. The problem was that the reverse of the paper had to carry the poems, and the punch through was a garish distraction to reading. putting the images on their own page without text on the other side would have made the book gratuitously thick and clunky. I printed the text first, so they would not create negatives in the large images behind them, I kissed the text on as much as I could, then I backed up the images to text. After many experiments, the one that worked best was to print (I always print on dampened paper), dry the sheets between blotters until they were really dry, then I passed them through the water again, this time really soaking them since I did not have to worry about printing them again. That brought the knap back up and swelled some of the punch out of the page. A lot of libraries have that book, so depending where you live you could visit it and see how it worked. I was pretty happy wth the result.

There are times when I get punch through, getting something to print correctly, on little sections of the page for some reason, sometimes about the size of a quarter. I don't know why they happen, and I try everything to get them to go away. In the end I depend on the redampening technique to try to mitigate the problem. One can only spend so much time getting precious about getting the damn thing to print before one must just get on with it and print! This was the case in the last book I printed, the Daubeny from The Last Press. Anyone who can find the page and bring it to my attention can get a $100 credit toward the next purchase.

I've never printed on a Heidelberg, or on a C&P. Can the rollers and make-ready not be adjusted on these machines? I know on a hand press, one of the elements of the process, the dwell, where you hold the platen down for a second during the impression, seems like it is without cognate with the other machines, but there have been times on the Vandercook where I have found a solution by radically slowing down the pass of the cylinder over the form, allowing me to use less ink and get the sharper impression.

Talent is nothing more than supreme desire.

>24 SuttonHooPress: On my last project I had one problematic lock-up (difficult to describe the problem in words) but the solution was to change the speed of the pass midway. But the variability in my experience is nothing like what's achieved through dwell on a hand-press. (Or a manual tabletop platen press – which I have much more experience with than hand-presses.)

>23 GardenOfForkingPaths: Thank you. If you or anyone else is interested in makeready, there is a new book out from the Florin press, Make-ready by Graham Williams, designed by Mark Askam. https://florinpress.com/books/

>26 TudorBlackPress: Ooo thanks for this, Hugh! I didn't know this was forthcoming. A must-have.

>25 grifgon: The thing that works is usually the thing that works, no matter the machine. . . . sometimes a different music.

>24 SuttonHooPress: I'm in the UK. Perhaps like other people here, I have occasionally had the dream of investing in a Vandercook and printing my own books...Who knows, maybe one day, but mostly I'm just interested to understand what goes on behind the scenes of all these lovely books I have started collecting. Thanks for explaining your techniques for punch-through. The whole printing damp thing still surprises me. It seems so counter-intuitive to be getting paper wet. The results speak for themselves though!

>26 TudorBlackPress: That looks interesting. Having seen some of Mark's other work and his Gruffyground bibliography, I'm sure it will be beautifully designed and laid out.

>29 GardenOfForkingPaths: Indeed, paper is born from water. . . .

>26 TudorBlackPress: Fab, thanks for the heads-up Hugh! And is that a (wayz)goose I see on the cover?

The posts from all the professional printers have been very interesting. Thank you for taking the time to post here.

>31 Shadekeep: It is. And there’s more of it inside!

>29 GardenOfForkingPaths: Thank you for the last comment. That’s very kind!