Why would you go to the trouble of setting type letter by letter, line by line, page by page, as Dr John Holmes does, when you could print it almost instantly by computer? Charmian Smith talks to the 2012 printer-in-residence at the university library.
If you are going to the trouble of printing something by hand on a letterpress, make sure it's worth printing, Dr John Holmes says. It's advice he was given as a student, when he was taking up what has proved to be a lifelong hobby.
You don't want to spend all that time and effort printing something ephemeral like tickets for whist drives, he says although he admits he has printed tickets for his children's school plays.
The Dunedin craft printer, who in his day job is Otago Southland medical officer of health, is this year's printer-in-residence in the Otakou Press Room at the University of Otago Library. He is printing Distractions, a booklet of poems by Dunedin poet Kevin Cunningham, a tribute publication to mark the 10th anniversary of his death. His widow, Prof Charlotte Paul, commissioned his friend and fellow poet Bill Manhire to select them and write the introduction. The book will include a keepsake, a separate page with poems about Cunningham by Bill Manhire and Alan Roddick, says Dr Donald Kerr, special collections librarian at the University of Otago.
Growing up in the United Kingdom, Dr Holmes became fascinated by printing as a boy when he inherited a small press from his uncle.
"I'd been taken to printing works and done school trips to see the newspaper, but in fact the letterpress printing was more interesting - the pe-dom, pe-dom of the letterpress rather than the circular press spinning of a newspaper," he says.
Although improvements have been made to letterpresses through the centuries, the design dates back to Gutenberg in the 15th century. It uses moveable type, which is hand-set letter by letter, locked into the bed of the press, inked, and paper is pressed against it to form an impression.
"[Printing] just takes you away. As a doctor you do different sorts of things, and I find it's a time when I can get away and think about things, but you can't think deeply because you have to concentrate on what you are setting - look at the text and set it and you are working upside down and back to front. You have to get the lines so they are the right length and the letters don't drop out when you pick them up. Then the challenge is to get it nicely printed, evenly inked and printed - you have to make sure it's lined up with the printing on the other side. Then you clean it all up and put it away, all the type in the right boxes so it's ready for the next page," he says.
"What I like about it is that the end result is a page or booklet which is a nice object in itself, and it's all your own. There's always the satisfaction when you put in the sheet of blank paper and out come the words at the other end. It's always a thrill."
The young Dr Holmes taught himself to print from John Ryder's Printing for Pleasure, one of the Teach Yourself books, and gradually acquired other presses, setting up his own imprint, Frayed Frisket Press (a frisket is frame that holds a cover to protect the printing paper from ink on surfaces around the type).
He took his press with him on his travels round the world, first to Hamilton, then to the Chatham Islands where he was the local doctor.
"I was the first person, I think probably the only person, to have a letterpress printing press on the Chatham Islands. Then we went back to Britain and took the press with us, then to East Africa and took the press there."
He used to buy type, which is made of lead, when he returned to the UK and he and his family would carry it back in their bags.
"The small one [child] was about two and a-half or something, and a stewardess said her bag looked very heavy and lifted it up, and realised it was filled with lead! I remember trying to persuade the people in Singapore it was not dangerous and they couldn't understand all these little letters. People just don't know about letterpresses and type. Younger people have never seen it."
Type is bought in fonts, quantities based on the number of small "a"s and proportional quantities of other letters.
There are more "e"s than "a"s, then "r"s, "s"s and "t"s are the most frequently used, then they peter off until you get to the "k"s and "z"s, he says.
One project a few years ago included text with a lot of two- or three-word lines, most of which finished in "-ing", and he almost ran out of "g"s, he says with a laugh.
Setting verse, which has a lot of white space around the text, needs many spacers and he had to search through the typecases in the print room to find enough, he says.
But verse is easier to set than justified text which has to be spaced so it lines up at both the right and left sides of the page, something a computer can do automatically.
The computer can also spell-check the text, but with hand printing the proofs have to be read carefully, as it is easy to make mistakes when picking up the letters.
Dr Holmes admits he often prints out a mock-up on the computer to see what it's going to look like and checks the length of the lines to see if he will be able to fit the longest on to the page.
"Most people would be happy with [the computer-printed version] but I like the crispness and the solidness and the way the printing is pushed into the paper rather than just laid on top - that bite into the paper is sensuous. And you use nice paper as well. I'm printing this on Zerkall, a German paper. It's the meticulousness and the fact it's keeping alive an old skill - that's what I particularly like about it, but most people wouldn't notice the difference."
His children are not interested in craft printing, but he hopes to encourage his grandchildren's interest.
Get it
100 copies of Distractions, printed by John Holmes in the Otakou Press Room at the University of Otago Library will be available for sale. For more information visit www.otago.ac.nz/books/about
