I love juxtaposing the lock-up and the broadside on these kinds of projects. I didn’t make it square for Instagram, so I’m throwing it in here so you can see the entire width of both images.

A great comment on Instagram from the BookLab at the University of Maryland was, “That lockup is sorcery.” We like that. We will send them one of our Poe broadsides as a gift. AIGA took all of the others of the AIGA ones.

Locking up the text / dots took about 6 hours. Here are the oak dowels that we cut to 0.918.

The first step was locking up and hand rolling “FEEDBACK.”

Then the experimental trick (as often as possible, we like to try to do something with letterpress that we’ve never done) was with the dots and lines of text.

There was no easy way to do the type and the dots in 2 separate runs and keep them in registration without taking a week or so, even if you could do it then. So, we just locked the dots (which are oak dowels that have been cut as close as we could to 0.918” on our lead saw) with an n-space between it and the text. Then we would put the press on “trip,” and “ink” the type / dots with a double run of ink using our Vandercook Universal III. Then we would lift the rollers and hand roll the dots (right overtop of the ink for the text) with GOLD (this is different gold ink than the standard stuff people buy). Then we would put the press back on ink and print the sheet.

Here are a few of the hand-rolled Bs.

Mia Culbertson was with us on the first day, so she wasn’t in the finished job photo.