Rose volunteers in the letterpress print gallery at Bradford industrial Museum. Read her blog about new skills learnt and volunteering in a heritage setting.
Hi folks, I’m a volunteer printer at Bradford Industrial Museum, part of the team who use and demonstrate the museum’s letterpress printing equipment to the public. Although I had done printing as part of my art education, letterpress was new just a few months ago and I’ve found it happily involving trying all the processes. It’s such a rare chance to be able to learn from the retired printers among the volunteers, they’ve spent their working lives in the print business and are keen to pass on the skills. Often my role is a compositor, which involves setting text; individual letters are composed back to front and upside down so they read the right way when printed. Each space is also a piece of metal and must fit perfectly together so the whole lot doesn’t fall into a machine when printing!
I like to share my new skills with the public and schoolchildren, introducing the concept of letterpress printing, which is so different from the computer based products in our homes. The last commercial mechanical printing was phased out in the 1970s so everything here pre-dates that.
We’ve cases full of individual metal letters, starting at 6 point which is so small we can hardly see them! There’s many different typefaces to choose from and also large hand-made wooden type, which can be up to 200 years old.
On a daily basis we use antique equipment such as a cast iron printing press from the early 1800’s and an automatic press from the 1920’s that still whizzes round faster than my eye can follow. Images of trolley buses in service or trademarks of long closed companies are found in the archive and we discuss how to print and use them today, so they can be seen by the public again.
Figuring out as a team how to make the projects requested by the museum, such as bookmarks for events and signs for special occasions is fun and has really improved my communication skills.
I’m also helping design and print small products to be sold in Bradford Museums and Galleries shops, so it’s nice to know my artistic skills can be useful too. I’m dyslexic so uncertain with spelling words but in using real blocks with letters on them, I feel I’ve made a new connection to the hieroglyphs of our language.
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