It’s not hard to love letters, they give us ideas and inspiration and connect us to the world through writing. For traditional printers that letter-love is as precise as a knife-edge. This month the Hand-Eye Supply team visited the letterpress virtuosos at Portland’s KeeganMeegan & Co. to watch them work and drop off our new printer’s rulers. Well-known for their traditional letterpress work and hand illustrated printing, the duo combines old-school techniques and visuals with inviting modern design.
Letterpress, the OG method of putting squiggly lines onto paper, uses blocks of carefully aligned moveable type mounted in a bed, an inked plate or roller, and something to carefully squish the paper in. KM & Co. uses particularly epic-looking platen presses that look like they’re just a generation or two removed from Gutenberg, yet are capable of producing stylish work for businesses and famous bands.
As you can imagine, their work relies on tiny adjustments, painstaking attention and a lot of patience. While computerized layout can still be a chore, it’s a much longer process when doing it by hand. To shuffle type and images into the careful alignment needed, the line gauge is an invaluable tool. It has several features that give letterpress, printmaking, graphic design, zine layout and other typographic or tactile traditionalists a leg up.
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