They said letterpress was dead.
Well, it was. Technically speaking, the trade died, and although there are a few letterpress tradesmen still hanging around telling stories, for the most part it is a thing of the past. High-speed offset litho whirred in, and printers retrained or got out of the industry entirely.
But then the strange gentrified world of darlinghurst and surry hills produced this thing we call "hipsters" ... or was it the other way around? Bit of a chicken & egg scenario there ... but essentially ... everything low-fi, old tech, steam punk and retro has had an incredible resurgence amongst the inner city trendoids. I'm not telling you anything new here.
And look, I know I'm not immune to the fashionable allure of retro heath robinson typeathings, so I can't really separate myself from this, critically. But I'm also a historian who spends a lot of time researching the printing industry. So you can imagine how weird it was to find myself inside an honest-to-goodness - functional letterpress business. Boom!
It's a gorgeous place - attractively laid out, but presented in a way that you can see the presses at work. The men and women that run these machines are not tradespersons, they're just artistically minded people who were lucky enough to get jobs running letterpress and embossing machines. They do a good job, too.
The Distillery still use old Heidelberg Cylinder presses, and they have an old Ludlow machine. (That's a typesetting machine used for large-type ... like for posters or headers.)
Unlike letterpress techniques in the past - at the Distillery, the raised plates are often made of plastic, not metal, and the system for producing the plates is more-or-less computerised. I don't fully understand that side of things. But the actual printing method is proper letterpress, using thick cotton stock, and indenting the paper in that satisfying way that old-school letterpress printers would never dare do.
You can get expensive luxury printing done here: wedding invitations, business cards, stationery, poster prints, and so forth.... It's not cheap, but what the hell, it's letterpress. And it's beautiful. read more
