Last month, I finished letterpress printing a book entitled, A Curmudgeon. It was printed on Rives BFK paper on my Vandercook Universal III in the Portola Valley studio. There will be 25 copies of this limited edition. Below are pictures of the process of printing and folding the signatures.
I’ve moved on to the bindery to sew the text blocks by hand and then to work on the rest of the binding. I am experimenting with two different style endsheets to see which I prefer for this project. I’ve also been playing with the cover design. I wanted to work with cloth again, partly because it’s what I first learned to use to bind books, but mostly because a leather bound book would not have fit well with the content of the book. The story and hand drawn illustrations are simple in message and design.
I have never printed on bookcloth before so I have also been experimenting with printing on my C&P on the cloth. I will probably produce the labels by printing rather than hot stamping. This is a design decision to go with the content of the book.
I loved printing this book. I learned so much from the mistakes that I made along the way and had to go back and correct. It will make my next project that much better.
Printing
Of Paper and Ink 