In the past few years there has been something of a renaissance for letterpress printing amongst boutique wedding stationers. Interestingly many of them describe this as traditional letterpress printing, which isn't quite as accurate a description as it would first appear. As much as we love this new wave of letterpress printing there are many differences between it and traditional letterpress.

Tony, here at Meridian Press trained as an apprentice letterpress compositor back in the 1960s and pointed out to me one of the biggest differences. If you've had any experience with modern letterpress the first thing that you would notice which is also the key feature that distinguishes it from digital printing is the debossed lettering. For a traditional letterpress printer making such a heavy impression into the stock and producing any indentation at all into the paper would have resulted in the print run being rejected. Part of the skill of a letterpress printer would have been to get the machine pressures just right so that the type just kissed the paper transferring the minimum amount of ink to create the crispest print with no indentation. This was actually quite important as when the print exited the machine and was stacked having too much wet ink and an indentation would have increased the risk of set off (ink passing from the front of one sheet onto the back of the next sheet on the stack).

The next big difference is type, or the lack of it. You see, most letterpress printers these days use metal blocks or polymer plates to print and no longer use moveable type. The kind of quirky designs that are associated with letterpress printing nowadays would have been impossible to produce using traditional moveable type.

As you can see letterpress printing as seen today isn't quite as traditional as you would have thought. It is in fact more of a reinterpretation or maybe a homage to traditional letterpress. That's not to say it isn't interesting, and in many cases quite beautiful, it's just not traditional letterpress.

If you're interested in the history of letterpress printing you could take a look at the british letterpress website.