▲ of the Mind [014]

I’ve often wondered how much of the experiences we have as children shape the person that we grow to be vs. how much of the things we’re drawn to doing as children is due to some character or genetic predisposition. I’m sure there’s a wealth of research in favor of one take or the other, or the combination of both.

The older I get, the more I lean into the belief that my early exposure to the world of hand-setting type and hot stamp foil award ribbon production is the reason I’ve had a life-long love of all things typography and letterpress. It goes far beyond a simple appreciation for the final product. It’s the deep understanding of just how many tiny things had to be dialed in and made just so in order for the output to look perfect.

Each slug had to be set in the hot stamp vice alongside the spacers and other hand-set letterforms to yield that first crucial test print. The test print would show you if your line heights were consistent, if the letter spacing on the hand-set items were accurate and if the ribbon and foil rolls were feeding through the machinery properly. If anything was off, it was time to lift the stamp casing and get to making more tiny adjustments. Shims here, spacers as thin as razor blades there. Millimeter adjustments to the ribbon feed guides. All of these things require constant analysis and monitoring that nothing has gotten out of wack. After hundreds or thousands of perfect ribbons get generated, there are usually adjustments that need to be made since the machine pounds the cutter with force to achieve the perfectly corrugated cuts at the top and bottom of each ribbon. All that friction and vibration and heat leads to things needing to be tightened, checked, tested and once again analyzed.

One of the biggest risks came when it was time to take out one slug and slot in another for things like event name changes between long runs where everything else on the print was the same. When you’re pulling a single slug out with tweezers and oven pads to have it carefully land as it falls out of the vice casing, it feels like you’re disarming an atomic bomb. If that slug hits the bottom of the casing or falls to the floor, the risk of one of the letterforms becoming dented or otherwise marred is huge. The next time that slug needs to be used, it won’t produce a consistent stamp. Often times, the slug could be beyond repair and if a backup of that same word isn’t available, you’re about to have to sit down and hand-set a replacement slug letter by letter, making sure to exactly match the damaged slug so that the ribbons from various runs are consistent.

If all of this sounds harrowing, it was! But it was so much fun. If it sounds like all of it might make a kid somewhat attuned to details, meticulousness and analytical processes, my take is that it probably did.

1️⃣ Something I saw…

Olivetti Lettera 10 Portable Typewriter

While my last letter was the one focused on typewriters, the correlation between my love of typewriters and my love of all things type is strong. This is an image of the Olivetti Lettera 10 that I saved to a bookmarking site years ago. I’d argue it’s one of the most beautiful typewriter designs ever. I’d love to own one someday. Even the case is sexy.

Olivetti Lettera 10

2️⃣ Something I found…

Hot Stamp Award Ribbon Machine

When writing the essay for this newsletter, several times I recognized that what I’m describing makes little to no sense to someone that’s never seen how an award ribbon is made. The machinery I describe above was from the late 1970s into the 1980s, so anything you see now likely looks very different. This video is as close to the type of machine I grew up learning to operate, though even it is more advanced electronically.

3️⃣ Something I’ve watched (countless times)…

Made by Hand - The Cigar Shop

The Made by Hand video series by Keef was covered in several publications in 2011. I waited anxiously for each of the few episodes they released, but my favorite (and the one that I’ve watched at least once per year since) is The Cigar Shop. Growing up in Miami, the smell of cigars was something I can vividly (and somewhat fondly) remember. While the smell can be overpowering, if it’s a quality cigar or pipe, the smell is unmistakeable. The cinematography and music that backs this piece is like a time portal for my senses.

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Angles Outside 180 ▲

This section is only for the folks that scroll to the bottom of a newsletter the way true fans sit to the end of the credits in a movie hoping for a little more…

I stumbled upon this video looking for another that I remember from around the same time as the Made by Hand series that focused on letterpress. I couldn’t find it, but this Ugmonk video is one that I’d never seen before. It was special because I actually own one of the 7th anniversary collector sets that the video shows being made. If you layer the fact that I own one of only 300 made and how I randomly landed on a video from 8 years ago, it feels ironic.
Another that I found was the Rise and Shine Letterpress video. In the opening scene you see a large “cabinet” of thin drawers. When one opens you see that it’s a tray of single letter lead slugs. Part of my experience growing up was maintaining these same trays with rows and rows of slugs and letters to hand-set words we didn’t have slugs for.
I would be remiss to not mention that I left out an important fact from my last letter focused on my lifelong love of typewrters. Another genetic connection is that my mom was a typing teacher. As she often says of many things, “I come by it honestly.”