Training Daze

Late last year I was lucky enough to spend a day at Wai-te-ata, up at Victoria University here in Wellington. Myself and a dozen or so other impression hungry geeks, gave up a holiday weekend to ogle and play with the press' amazing collection of type and equipment under the sterling tutelage of Dr Sydney Shep.

It was a great beginners course over two long days where we basically played setting the type and running some prints on an Asbern cylinder press (pretty similar to the Van der Cooks everyone has in the States).

Day one we just played with type, grabbing what we liked, composing it and then cranking a few prints. I’d seen a quote similar to this, and played with it.

I never realised I grabbed a 1 instead of a cap I at first ... but it works I reckon.

Day two could set with more wooden type, and I took in my own wooden alphabet I bought in London. It is a cool deco style font, a Delittle set, that always makes me think of Belgian beer for some reason. It is missing the P and Q - but I solved that.

This is the DeLittle face I got in the UK.

Later on we worked together to print a small book of quotes. Sydney had asked us to find quotes we liked related to reading, prose or printing. For some unknown reason, I remembered this recent interview with Scottish author Irvine Welsh, so I used that ... but as it was short I twisted it’s spelling into the good old gutteral Scottish vernacular he is so fond of writing in. It makes it more fun to read out that way. We then took all the pages and hand stitched the book together as a keepsake - it was cool to have two individual pieces, but also this combined effort.

My page in the book - I went low brow.

Must get back up to Wai-te-ata at some stage - its brilliant. Just need a suitable project worthy of their kit. I should put up some pics of the press’ amazing equipment and type selection.