Monday, March 14, 2011

The Black Corsair (part 1)

My exciting adventure in letterpress has begun before beginning. In reality, I've been looking for a press since October 2010. In the north of Italy where I live nestled near the foot of the Alps.

After finishing up my thesis (How To Make A Band Dangerously Cool), having had it printed on a laser printer, I was left a bit unimpressed at the quality of the print. But it was my only option unless I had a small fortune to get 500 copies of my thesis run on an offset press. So my search began in October 2010 by doing the obvious searches on Google, eBay and Briarpress. There's not a tremendously open and easy market here in Piedmont for that sort of thing, but I have found tons of table top presses in nearby Germany where I almost attained one from Berlin. It was all packed and ready for delivery until the darn little press had it's rollers stolen and other titbits just before shipping day.

Since then, I've been in touch with tons of people from Europe and America, because at that point it wasn't just about finding a press, but finding "the" press. I've come across a very helpful community of people who know tons about presses, and have been great help in whittling away the good from the bad. One of my very helpful contacts gave me a lead. It turned out to be a German tabletop Hohner (apparently a doozy), and is being fine tuned before I go and pick it up in April...

It's been a sweet chase for this press which has entailed some travel (one of my absolute favorite things to do), and meeting interesting people whom I never would have met had I not undertaken this challenge.