Aaron Bell

I have always felt the physicality of the metal letters, laying out text on the press-bed, printing and finally holding the final piece in hand to be something truly special. Furthermore, as it is the origin of typography, I felt it important to study and understand its usage.

When I discovered that the Emily Carr University ran a short continuing studies course in letterpress over the summer, I was excited to finally gain experience setting type and try my hand at printing. In the first day, we were introduced to a number of printing tools including hand-presses, Vandercooks, foil stamping and linocut, but the main focus of the class was centered on a final project, of which we were free to choose.

My original thought was to create a linocut and set a broadside with text, but I wanted to focus on using type alone and instead decided to layout a section of Twelfth Night, my favourite of Shakespeare’s plays. Unfortunately, there were two issues that I overlooked. The first became obvious almost immediately; time. As a beginner, setting metal type by hand takes a significant amount of time and as we only had three classes to set, print and diss the final project, I found myself forced to re-evaluate the length of the passage I intended to complete. The second issue was to make sure before starting that I had enough letters in the drawer to complete the entire broadside. Thankfully my teacher had the same typeface and point size available in her private press and offered to bring hers in for me to use. Besides those two issues, I rather enjoyed arranging the type itself.

Knowing that I had a long section of type to set, I chose the text typeface that Emily Carr had the most of, Perpetua 12pt. Interestingly, the version of Twelfth Night that I worked from decided to differentiate between the prose of the upper class and the standard language of the lower class via ragged-right and justified text, respectively. Naïvely, I replicated this design decision. What I did not realize was that in order to set justified text, small coppers and brasses must be added between each word in order to normalize the line lengths. Without normalization, the lines cannot be locked up during printing. While there was not that much justified text, there was enough of it to slow my progress significantly.

All together, the text for the page took about 18 hours to set. Then there were test prints, copy review and dissing the type, bringing the full time for the project to 24 hours.

I am rather proud of the printed results of this project—especially as a first attempt at setting a large block of text on letterpress. There are a few issues I wish I could resolve, like damaged letters as well as the lack of proper em-dashes, but when working with a physical medium such as letterpress, sometimes one has to work with what is available and make due.