Projects Eight and Nine: Letterpress and a rant on a postcard

Another one of our inductions included going to Old Street in East London to an old letter pressing workshop called New North Press. We got to go in and spend a day there learning about the facilities and do a print based the first line of a novel out of a list that we had to choose from. So, I looked through and one that spoke to me was:

"He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad." - Scaramouche

Letterpress is a tedious process. We were there for eight hours printing out 10 - 20 words each only. You have to handpick the type, do all of the spacing between both characters and words as well as between the lines. It's a long method of printing but a rewarding one. 

And as a little side-note, we had a little project coinciding with us learning about our college's special collection in the library. This is a collection of exhibition catalogues and artist books that are rare and exclusive to Chelsea. However, our assignment was to "rant" about one of the books in the collection on a postcard only using blue pen, so I chose a book called "Cinema" by Albert Mertz. I picked it up as I was intrigued by the title, and then found images such as this.

So, as a reaction, I sent this in:

Ah, art...

-Liam