Anyone Printing Letterpress Books?

[Dave Hughes]

Dr Leland Whitson, who has just finished printing "The Surgeon Factory" would like to pose the following question:

Elsewhere on this site you can see the story of our Linotype set and letterpress printed (V-50) book, The Surgeon Factory.  It is a 262 page book.
Does anyone know of others, in this day and age, amateur or professional, printing a book this size, Linotype/letterpress?

In case you've missed it, here's the story of this book on Metal Type:

How the book was produced, including video of the press in action

A video review of the book

[J Stafford-Baker]

Hi Dr. Whitson,

Indeed I do print books letterpress, with illustrations in colour., tho the paginations are modest    I inherited a publishing programme from the late Roy Lewis' 'Keepsake Press', by far the most hard working of those few private presses of the 1950s. With the press and the type came to me Editorial Advisers and a collection of poets and artists.  This led to a continuation of Roy's work,  in two series,  'The New Garlands',  usually about 24pp in a standard series format, with illustrations in colour by various methods. Hand set, treadle printed, thread sewn, and hand bound.  Numbered and usually about 110 copies of each number, now in hand is No. 15,  poems by Kevin Crossley-Holland, illus.  in colour by Polly Warren, .
The other series is poetry in translation,  larger format,  last title was in modern Turkish with English trs. Next years titles will probably be the last, (knees giving up at age 76)  Sad that, but I have had a press since 1947, so maybe thats enough.
letterpress for ever!!!

regards from The Happy Dragons Press

Stafford
   

[jhenry]

I, too, produce books via letterpress. Since 1970, I have been producing small books with handset type and all bound by hand. I have done a few miniature books as well, using linecasters and ludlow composition as well as photopolymer.

However, the largest project I have produced is a book of around 180 pages, so you may have the recent record for number of pages in a single volume, Leland.

If you do a little checking around, I htink you will find a very active widespread community of letterpress shops and studios producing books of various types and sizes, primarily for a limited market in editions of 50-500 copies.

John Henry

[Mike Coughlin]

Saw your fine story about your letterpress book. There are some of us who are still printing books via letterpress.  My latest is titled A Matter of No Curiosity,  which is a collection of essays, lectures and magazine articles by Albert Jay Nock.  It comes with an introduction by Michael Coughlin and an afterword by  Charles H. Hamilton.  I set the type on my Model 31 Linotype and printed it on my Kluge.  I hand bound it in my shop.  A fun project, but one that demanded a great deal of time for this one-person operation.

[Dave Hughes]

Thanks for your replies.

I'm going to send Leland a reminder, to see if he's read them