Lasered Blocks for Letterpress

Here's a quick and cute video summary I made of the project: (For more info, check out the dedicated website or ever read an essay I wrote about the experience.)

The Story

One of my hobbies is small scale graphic forms and letterpress. I love big, heavy, ancient machines, smell of ink, and amazingly defined lines embossed into quality cotton paper.

While living in Boston, USA, I realized the local communcal letterpress shop (Bow and Arrow at Harvard) had no lead type with Czech alphabet special characters. Driven by a desirere to typeset a part of a lovely Czech book Ryba Hulajdá as a birthday present for my mom, I decided to experiment with lasercutting my own letterpress plates.

The testing motto became a random though I had in a cognitive science class once day about Intrinsic Motivation.

It turned out great, and, just as importantly, it gave the letterpressing community something to talk about.

Mind you, this was many years before I got involved with designing 3D printers and using lasercutters for commercial production.

Oh, and I have discovered during my experiments that there are commercial letterpress shops using lasercutting as their main production method… go figure. Great minds think alike.