Deep in the dark of Adana

I’ve just made my first attempt at letterpress printing. I wanted to make a Christmas card that combined words and wood engraving so I wrote a short poem, engraved a block to illustrate it and then wondered how I was going to print it. I thought, briefly, about using a computer, scanning the image and placing the text around it but I was dubious how the wood engraving might scan, my printer is unpredictable and I struggled to use a page setup programme that would place the text exactly where I wanted it. So I decided to send a winter card instead and waited until after Christmas when I could visit a friend who has an Adana press and lots of type and had a go at printing it by hand.

The Adana press is a small, portable press that could quickly and relatively easily be used to print flyers and cards. I like to imagine it was a gift to radical groups in the 1960s and 1970s who wanted a cheap way of printing revolutionary text without having to go to professional printers, though it was probably used more by the professionals for printing business cards for the bourgeoisie. Sadly it’s no longer in production, though there’s a good market for them on eBay and you can buy them reconditioned (www.caslon.co.uk).

It was a fiddly, time consuming, but deeply satisfying in-

a-way-computers-never-can

-be, process to print. I suspect it was a bit ambitious to make a first attempt combining letters with a wood block, especially since it was quite a big block, but I was reasonably happy with the result. We tried printing just the block first and managed to get a print that showed all the detail of the engraving but when I added the type the first print was just text and no image. That was because the wood block was lower than the type and it took several hours of absorbing work to get the type and the block to the same height and absolutely level. I didn’t get it perfect but it was good enough. I ended up with too much ink so the fine detail of the wood engraving got lost and the letters were a bit blurry, but not bad for a first attempt.

The words on the print came from the first line of my winter poem:

Deep in the dark of the wood

When ice crystals starred the night

A spruce in her skirts stood

Tall as if reaching full height

And way in the north Aurora

Soared to the zenith above

And a fox and a hare

Caught the light as if it were love.

Happy New Year