Member Profile

About Letterpress

 Stephen and Gayle Quick founded the private press Weathervane Press in November 2007. From their home in Orléans, they use a Vandercook SP-15 flatbed proof press, an Atlantic KAS22 flatbed proof press and a Craftsman Pilot table-top platen press to produce stationary, broadsides, prints, fine edition handmade books, and collectable ephemera by means of a time-honoured craft known as letterpress printing.

Letterpress or relief printing began in Europe in the fourteenth century as an alternative to laborious calligraphy. Johannes Gutenberg in about 1450 invented movable type, hand cast from an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony, the same components that are in use today. Metal type piece were more durable and the lettering was more uniform, leading to typography and fonts. Practically all movable type printing derives from Gutenberg’s movable type printing, a development that is regarded as the most important invention of the second millennium.

Letterpress begins with typesetting. The operator hand sets individually cast, reusable characters, upside down and backwards, into a composing stick forming lines made up of words, punctuation, and spacing. Lines are moved from the composing stick to the press to creation a page. Artwork can be added by using lead “ornaments” or wood or linoleum carved blocks. The area that is to be printed is raised up higher than other areas of the page and ink is applied by rollers onto the raised surfaces. The operator feeds paper into the press one sheet at a time by hand, and activates the press so that the raised surfaces are pressed onto the paper and the ink, from the raised areas, leaves an impression on the paper. This action is repeated with additional sheets of paper until sufficient repeats are made. If a document has more than one page, each one must be typeset, loaded into the press, and printed as previously described.

Letterpress work is crisp because its impression into the paper gives greater visual definition to the type and artwork. Letterpress offers a tactile quality and nostalgic feel that can’t be achieved with any other technique.

In addition to letterpress printing, Weathervane Press produces handmade paper, posters, one-of-a-kind handmade books, hand-bound and re-purposed books.