A trade that stayed behind in the villages

Every market town once had at least one. A printer working out of a converted dairy, a lean-to behind the chapel, or a shed at the end of a lane with a stove flue pushed through the wall. The work was rarely glamorous: cattle auction bills, parish magazines, seed merchants' catalogues, chapel hymn sheets, invoice books, and a modest run of wedding stationery for anyone who could stretch to it. Letterpress survived in these places long after the cities had moved across to litho, because the work was local, short-run, and often needed by Tuesday.

The economics were simple enough. One treadle platen and a few cases of type could carry a job that a larger firm would not take on. The printer took the order, set the type, printed it, and delivered it himself. Customers knew him by name, and he knew exactly how many copies the village hall wanted and whether the vicar preferred a heavier rule above the heading.

What was actually in the room

A working rural shop was a dense, ordered space, and the equipment changed very little between 1890 and 1960. Most of it is still what hobbyists hunt for today.

• A treadle or hand-fed platen with a bed around 8 by 5 inches, capable of taking a decent-sized poster in two pulls.
• An imposing stone — a slab of slate or marble on a stout frame, used for locking up formes and for planing them flat.
• Type cases, shallow wooden drawers divided into compartments: capitals in the upper case, small letters in the lower.
• Composing sticks and galleys — the stick holds a line or two, the galley holds the page.
• Furniture, reglets, leads and slugs — metal spacing in 6pt increments that fills out the chase around the type.
• Quoins and a key to expand and lock the forme tight before it goes on the press.
• Ink, a slab, and rollers — composition rollers that soften in summer heat, or rubber ones that harden over the years.
• Tympan paper and packing, which govern how deeply the type bites into the sheet.

The small tools mattered just as much: a bone folder, tweezers, gauge pins, a pica rule, a hand guillotine, and a tin of gritty hand cleaner by the sink.

The slow discipline of setting type

Setting type by hand is where most beginners discover the truth about letterpress: it is a slow craft that only looks fast when an expert does it. You hold the composing stick in your left hand, resting on the case, and pick letters with your right. Every piece of type has a nick on one side; the nick goes upwards and the foot of the letter faces you. Get it wrong and you will meet the mistake later, upside down, in the middle of a proof.

Words are spaced with thin spaces, then en and em quads. Lines are justified by swapping spaces until the measure sits tight but not straining. A setting of 10pt Caslon on 12pt leading is comfortable to read and forgiving to a beginner; anything below 8pt is a test of patience and eyesight. When the stick is full, the lines slide onto a galley, get tied up, and a proof is pulled. Corrections are made line by line. Only then is the forme locked into the chase with furniture and quoins, planed flat, and checked once more.

Then comes makeready: adjusting the packing behind the tympan sheet, checking the impression is even across the page, and resisting the urge to print deeper than the paper wants. The best letterpress leaves a crisp bite without bruising the stock. A weekend of practise will teach you more about spacing and pressure than any book.

Keeping iron and paper happy in a damp climate

Damp is the quiet enemy of a rural workshop. Cast iron rusts at the first hint of condensation, wood type swells and then shrinks out of square, and paper curls at the edges before you have inked a single sheet.

• Stack type cases with a board or cloth over them, and keep a couple of sachets of silica gel inside the case.
• Wipe the press down with an oily rag after use, and keep the bed and platen free of dried ink.
• Warm the room before you print. Cold metal and cold ink give a patchy, grey impression.
• Bring paper into the workshop the night before so it acclimatises. Dry heat from a stove will make sheets brittle and crack along the fold.
• Store rollers off the press, away from sunlight, and never leave them standing on their ends.

Rediscovering it now

The revival is real, and it is mostly happening in exactly the sort of places the trade never left: converted barns, old chapels, back rooms of village halls. Print fairs and type sales now draw crowds, and evening courses fill within days. If you are starting out, borrow a press before you buy one. Learn the feel of a clean impression on somebody else's equipment, then go shopping with a list.

Check for the things that are expensive to replace: rollers in good condition, an intact chase, sound bearings, and a platen that meets the bed evenly. Buy type before you buy a press if your budget is tight — a tabletop platen with no type is a very heavy doorstop. Expect to spend money on new rollers and a recovered ink drum, and remember that a second-hand press is a restoration project as much as a tool.

Printing that belongs to a place

What draws people back is not nostalgia so much as ownership. A village history society printing a numbered edition of a hundred pamphlets, a brewery producing pump clips for one pub, a seed merchant reviving his grandfather's packets, a couple ordering wedding invitations with the name of the parish church set in the corner — all of these carry a weight that a digital print simply does not.

It is also a generous craft. Set a child's name in 24pt, let them pull the bar, and they will keep that sheet for thirty years. Run a Saturday workshop in the village hall and you will find that the people who stay longest are the ones who thought they had no use for their hands. That is the quiet argument for letterpress: it is slow, it is deliberate, and it leaves a mark you can feel with your fingertips. In an age of disposable everything, that turns out to be worth quite a lot.