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A printer may say their wedding invitations are hand made, but what exactly does that mean? Is there really any advantage to this? None that I have discovered in my 22 years of working in the printing industry. Does a handmade wedding invitation mean that the paper is put into the letterpress by hand? Most all presses are set up to have the paper put in by hand. How else would it get there?

So are we talking about handmade or hand fed? A hand fed press means that each sheet is put into position by hand and taken out by hand. Someone may say that more care is taken if each piece is individually handled. In my experience as a printer, that is not the case. When you are hand feeding paper into the press about all you can be concerned with is getting the paper in and out in the proper timing and sequence, and to keep your hands and fingers out of the press. You can not stop to see what your printing looks like without stopping the printing process or creating a dangerous situation.

When you are hand feeding a letterpress you are setting the paper by hand against stops, called 'head stops'. The accuracy with which you can set down a piece of card stock on a moving platen translates to the precision of the final printed product. While this process works fairly well, I do not trust my own hand to consistently place a card in exactly the same place each time while the platen is moving. An auto feed press usually has a mechanical process that 'registers' each sheet with mechanical precision each time. In terms of consistent precision, the human body just can not match a mechanical process. Hand feeding paper into a press does not improve the printing.

Does handmade mean hand fed and hand powered? There is a distinction between hand fed and hand or foot powered. This may seem like a minor point today, but a debate around this split the printing community in the first decades of the 20th century. Eric Gill, the master printer and creator of the Gill Sans typeface, was at the center of this debate. In the early 1900's most presses were powered by hand, except for some powered by steam or water. Some craftsmen felt to keep the practice of printing pure the entire process must be by hand, so that a person was not a slave to a machine.

If a press is hand or foot powered there is an even more complex set of motions going on than just hand feeding. Now in addition to placing the paper in the press and taking it out as it opens and closes, the printer must be powering the flywheel with their other 'free' hand or pushing on some sort of foot treadle to keep the press moving. This is really a rather complex dance and is not pleasant for very long. It adds nothing to the actually process of the type impressing onto each wedding invitation.

In fact it is understood that the varying speed of the press, as it is powered by hand or foot, changes the force which the press exerts in closing and actually printing, thereby varies the printing process. Hand powered is not and can not be as consistent as an electric motor. Many hand presses are actually powered by electric motors and a human being must keep up with a machine. During this process, the motor contains the speed, not the press operator. I do not enjoy keeping pace with a machine. Placing the paper in by hand adds nothing to the quality of the printing or its consistancy.

With an automatic feeding press you are free to pull sheets out as often as you want and to spend as much time as needed to look at and compare the printing without stopping the press. This allows for the print quality to be maintained.

One of the possible reasons letterpress invitations are so expensive is because hand fed presses are so slow. It is not a pleasant job for a human being to be keeping pace with a machine. Many times an owner may hire some less experienced person to feed the press, adding to the cost but not improving the actual printing.

For these reasons I am not sure what 'handmade' means when used to describe letterpress printing. Many parts of the process are done by hand, but hand feeding and hand or foot powering a press does not improve the quality of the printing. Handmade is a trendy word people like to use that really does not apply when talking about improving letterpress printing.

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Source by David Walrath