First you make the wood type:

Then, of course, you need something to carry the wood type home in, you so you make a type box:

Another wonderful day in my “makeaction” here in Europe (see also the wood type I made earlier in the week and the Polaroids I took in Düsseldorf before that). Thanks to Jonas for facilitating today (he’s a patient educator) and to Elmine for getting the ball rolling.

My friend Elmine graciously took me on a visit to the Fablab in Enschede yesterday — my first visit to a bona fide Fablab — and, to my surprise and delight, she asked “so, shall we make something.” It’s nice to have maker friends. So this is what we made:

The process started in Adobe Illustrator where we (and when I say “we” here I mean “Elmine”) set up the job, a simple alphabet in Futura, reversing it because, well, it’s type:

We “printed” this to a virtual printer set up for the Trotec laser cutter. The job then appeared in the queue in the Trotec job management software, where we aligned it on the cutting surface, set the DPI (the cutter will do up to 1000dpi) and selected the material (we cut both 4mm and 6mm plywood).

Then it was a simple matter, after placing the plywood on the cutter bed and focusing the laser, of clicking “go” and the job started (note that the job in the video is the one where we forgot to reverse the type first, which is why it’s right-reading):

The job took about a minute, and was incredible to watch.  When it was all done the letters popped out, and what was left was this (this is the reverse side, so it reads properly):

My next step, when I get home, is to figure out a way of mounting the letters so that they’re “type high” (0.918 inches) so that they work properly when mounted on a letterpress. Then the challenge becomes seeing whether the material is strong enough to withstand the pressure of being printed with, and whether I need to shellac the material before I use it (I suspect yes). My inspiration in all of this is this project to make a font of Winchell by a chap in Buffalo, NY. Stay tuned.

I never imagined that I would be a “purist” in any discipline. But apparently, as regards letterpress printing, I am one. 

There are two schools of letterpress printing. In the “old school,” where I am firmly planted, one prints from metal or wood type and, if non-type elements are required, engraved metal plates. In the “new school,” digital designs are output to a polymer plate maker, and the resulting plates are mounted on a base on the press.

I can’t tell you why I’m a purist in this regard, but Michael J. Babcock, a printer in Massachusetts, comes pretty close to expressing one possible rationale in this answer to the FAQ “do you print from polymer plates” on his Interrobang Letterpress site:

What you’ll find, if it matters to you, is that the vast majority of “letterpress” printers out there do fake letterpress. What they do is plastic “platepress”, though they’ll proudly argue until they’re blue in the face telling you they’re letterpress printers. They don’t own any type, and they won’t acknowledge the difference between the genuine process and artifice they engage in.

It would be like someone telling you they baked your wedding cake from scratch, and then you found the empty cake mix box, and frosting tub behind the counter. The end product may taste nice, but it isn’t what you’re being told you’re getting. And you’re being charged for something that doesn’t require the same knowledge, skills, or scarce materials to create.

All day I sit in front of this screen working on my digital work, work that is open to an infinite array of choices and possibilities. The best and worst thing about the networked world is that infinity, and, partially as an antidote to it, I revel in the severe limitations of old school letterpress. There’s something cleansing about being forced to work within immovable limits. And so the notion of “File | Print”-style plate generating seems absurd to me, for it allows the infinite possibilities of the digital world to leak into this.

Even as I type this I realize that it sounds sort of jerky and dismissive and elitist — “I would never bake a cake from a mix!” — but that’s where I’ve ended up, so I might as well be militant about it.