More Letterpress Mania

I finally thought I ought to upload the prints I pulled from my letterpress adventures. Above is some text locked up in the press. Continue for pictures of the final prints I pulled.

Name printed in obligatory blackletter. 

This is the card that I set and printed to send to my brother and his girlfriend in Cali. It's silly of me to have set type to essentially pull one print but I wanted experience setting more than a couple lines of type.

The inside of the printed card

As I mentioned earlier, after setting and pulling these prints I realized that all of my spacing for the text was improperly set. After thumbing through The Elements of Typographic Style, I learned that properly justified text only varies the space between separate words, not letters, and not by much at that. I also had too much leading especially in this case with such little text.

After messing up the spacing last time, I wanted to retry to get it right. This time I lessened the leading and justified it properly (although how hard is it when each line has exactly the same letters?).

I wanted to play with the embossment on these prints so I left some text un-inked to only leave its impression on the paper. Normally I would have printed two runs, one with the inked type and one with the un-inked type, but I was too lazy this time and just masked off what I didn't want to have ink on it. I was lucky enough to find someone's old screen print in the waste bin so I tore it up and used it myself.