THE PROJECT : This year The William Morris Society celebrates 125 years since the publication of the Kelmscott Chaucer, the crowning glory of William Morris’s book printing venture.

The society invited a variety of letterpress printers to participate in a collaborative project to highlight the various tales involved in Chaucer’s tales. We gladly agreed. Each printer got to choose tales they wanted to use as the basis to create a poster. The collective work will form of the basis of an exhibition that will be hosted by the Society and on their website.

We’ve had a metal cut of the knight image for a couple of years. You see it printed original size in the lower right of our poster below.

If you would like an Adobe Illustrator file of the image (16” x 11”), click here.

If you would like to see what the other contributions were, click here.

If you want a digital Illustrator copy of the Knight, click here to download it free of charge.

re IllustratorA key part of the Society’s celebrations will be a new interpretation of key extracts from the Kelmscott Chaucer, created by contemporary letterpress printers and artists. This work will form of the basis of an exhibition that will be hosted by the Society and on their website.

As a participant Lead Graffiti received a complete set of the pieces.

On our poster we wanted the type to have an aged feeling to it. We often handrail type to get it to have a more “painterly” feel. This time we worked backwards.

Using our Vandercook Universal III we would ink the type and then lift the inking rollers. Using the small bubble bubblewrap we would lay a sheet over the text (not the headlines) and apply a pretty fair amount of pressure over all of it. We would then lift the bubblewrap which would randomly remove ink giving it a mottled look with a nice sense of age.

You can see how our “aged” type looks below. Bubblewrap use #442.

Printed : September 2021

Client : The Kelmscott Society, London, UK

Size : 17.75” x 24”

Type : Satanic, Melior

Runs : 4 (& bubblewrap extractions)

Paper : ?

Press : Vandercook

Edition : 65