How the work is made
01 / The forme
Every letter is a piece of metal.
Type is picked out of the case one sort at a time and stood in a composing stick, backwards and upside down. Spacing is settled at the bench with strips of lead, not nudged afterwards on a screen.
02 / The lock-up
Locked in iron, packed out with wood.
The set type goes into a chase, is packed with furniture and driven tight with tapered wedges. Done properly you can lift the whole page by one corner and nothing shifts.
03 / The impression
Then the platen closes.
Depth is set by the packing behind the platen and adjusted in fractions of a millimetre. Too little and the card reads flat. Too much and the counter of every letter punches through.
04 / The sheet
You can read it with your fingers.
Soft cotton takes the hit and closes around the letter. That dent was considered a fault for four centuries. It is now the reason anyone orders the work at all.
About the studio
Pressed, not printed.
We make one thing, and we make it the way it was made in 1455.
Metal type is set by hand, locked into a forme, inked, and driven into cotton paper under real pressure. The letter is not laid on the surface. It is pushed into it, and the paper closes around it.
Run a finger across the face of a finished card and you can feel every letter. There is no way to fake it and no way to photograph it. It only exists in the hand.
From the bench
Cards, and nothing but cards.
Six hundred years
The same idea, since 1377.
Korea cast metal type in 1377. Gutenberg put it under a screw press in Mainz. Offset made all of it obsolete, and then made it valuable again.
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