typos galore: printing class, part 2 of 3

When we last spoke, dear readers, I had set about half of my type. The following week, I set the rest, including the title which is massively annoying to set because it requires three hair-spaces (which are made of paper) between each letter--unless the letters are kind of big. And then maybe they only need two. Or maybe one. Did I mention they're made of paper?

But I finally got it done. Yesterday, therefore, our intructor Paul helped us lock the text into frames so that we could take proofs of our printed material. The above photo is a closeup of the bottom of my poem. You can see where it says "H. Corinne Smith" at the bottom, though it's backwards and upside down.

Then we inked it (with the aid of what essentially amounts to a fancy and extra-heavy rolling pin), put a page down on it, and closed 'er up. I got to crank the machine, which basically rolls the whole tray under heavy pressure so that (hopefully) it inks equally. Then we open it up and cut the paper into pieces, as by this point it  it just one large sheet with eight poems upon it.

Then comes the proofing. I thought I'd done well, but my proof was riddled with errors: sometimes letters are upside down, sometimes--probably because they were in the wrong spaces in the type-case--lowercase Us and Ns get swapped, and the same is true for Bs and Ds. In one case, my lead spacer was sticking up too far and received some ink, creating what looks like a stray mark. So I carefully proofed it three times over, checking every word: it's surprising how easily your eye can glide over an upside-down letter, your brain telling you nothing is wrong.

Jen and Brendan fixing errors in the press. My poem is next to where Brendan is working right now, which is probably why I'm taking photos instead of working. 

And then we go fix it in the press. Taking tweezers, we must very carefully pull out the offending letter, turning it over or replacing it. If the replacement creates spacing issues, we have to do the finding-the-perfect-spacing-combination thing again. When it's all done, we do another proof. And another, if necessary, and another. Fortunately, mine popped out all right the second time round. I've had to take out two stanzas so that my poem will fit on one page--alas! But that's all right. We haven't started printing yet, but we think we can get it all done next week. We'll make 100 copies: so we'll have to ink the type, put in a piece of paper, close the press, roll the tray, push the press, unroll the tray, open the press, and take out the paper one hundred times, which shouldn't take that long once we get into a rhythm of it. And that way we each get three copies of our finished product with a few left over.

In other news, it's fairly cold but refuses to snow. Sigh. But I'm going to a ball tonight, accompanied by the lovely Sophie and Rowena--I'll keep you posted.