Friday. Well, actually I am glad it’s Friday, but too bad that I won’t be into Hatch until Monday. What the hell am I supposed to do all weekend long? OK, there is plenty to do–tomorrow I am going down to the Country Music Hall of Fame (which owns Hatch Show Print) with a friend. I suppose later we will have cheap beers and dance. That’s the name of the game ’round ‘ere.

My last blog post was a little strange, I apologize. I threw out all sorts of jargon that don’t make no sense to all y’all. It’s just that tha’s what I’m livin’ ya know. Let me recap:

Hatch Show Print kicks ass. It is my dream job (that was easy to find…). I am in love with the big ol’ wood letters. The 130-year-old type and cabinets. The thick dust that is probably lining my lungs by now. The weird smell of ink and mineral spirits. The hunt for the correct case of type. The bad ass posters that cover the walls, that are being pumped out fresh everyday. The staff is great–cool people and fantastic designers. Brad Vetter is the guy training us, and he is a lot of fun. He drives me home sometimes. Jim Sherridan is the man who runs the place–what a gentleman. If there ever was a southern man I could aspire to be, it is him. He is all business, and he is all about the people. And he actually cares about this silly tradition we call letterpress printing. Man, did I say that these posters are bad ass? Honestly, I had no idea just how bad ass they were when all I saw were reproductions in books or on the internet. Ain’t nothing. You have to see the real thing–the glossy ink on the thick, smooth paper. The crisp photo plates and the beat-up wood letterforms. I didn’t know letterpress could look so good! The stuff I had done at school was great, but it never had the definition or sheen of Hatch. Well, of course.

This cafe with free wireless internet is closing. Kicking me out. More to come soon.

This here is tiny lead type, placed one bit after another in a particular order so that it makes sense, in English. 10 pt. Modern No. 8. Each letter perfectly manufactured to have its printing surface 0.9186 inches high (type high). Each space between words must have its 3 em block, and each line must be filled to the edge to create an even, tight block of text. All the while, the text is composed upside down and inverse, but still going from left to right. Good luck figuring out the q from the p from the b from the d. The letters are not stored alphabetically either. But once it all comes together, it goes to the press where it gets locked up and inked up. Then we roll along and out comes the printed page with the fine smell of rubber-based ink fumes.

The image above is of the first lines of a poem I printed and bound into a small book for a recent commission. It takes a lot of patience to do this–everything must be read and re-read over to make sure there are no mistakes. This poem would not be very difficult to fix any typos, but if it had been a paragraph of justified lines, a missing or misspelled word might require the whole rest of the paragraph to be realigned (this has happened to me before).

So why do I love this archaic method of printing? Many reasons. I enjoy the slow process. I love the tactility of each stage of setting and printing. It is an old-fashioned and time-tested craft. And the results are unequaled by other forms of printing–the words on the page can be felt due to the impression left on the paper, and each letter and each print has a unique character so that it is always a beautiful surprise to see the final result. Plus, it feels good to take a break from the computer’s instant quasi-perfection and do something completely opposite.

See video below for details on typesetting:

Learning to Set Type (1959)