A trip through wintery East London by train and bus to wonderful Paekakariki Press in Walthamstow has woken me up! Letterpress printing, an endangered method, is alive and well at this Walthamstow workshop, where the machinery is as beautiful as the poetry books they publish there. (Among others, I've been enjoying Chrissie Gittins' delightful collection 'Professor Hegel's' Daughter', and 'Patrick Bond's 'Signals on the Railway Land', poems celebrating a Sussex nature reserve.
This hulking beast is the Heidelberg KS Cylinder, brought from Coventry and now lovingly restored to good working order.
This hulking beast is the Heidelberg KS Cylinder, brought from Coventry and now lovingly restored to good working order.
I spent an hour lost in the joys of 'The Printers Vocabulary' helpfully provided by Paekakariki: from 'Asses' (a term for compositors used by pressmen, in return for being called 'pigs' by the compositors), to the dreaded 'Balaaam box' (into which were thrown rejected manuscripts) and on to 'Xylonite' (nothing to do with the planet Xylon, it turns out) and Zincos (blocks used in producing engravings on zinc). Before I knew it, it was way past lunchtime and already getting dark. Back to hibernation then.
Watch this space for my new chapbook, 'White Roads', due out with Paekakariki in 2018.
RSS Feed