THE OLD SCHOOL PRESS

Moments in the making of The Colours of Rome.

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Setting the side-lay

With the skeleton designed, the next step is to work on the impression: position, depth, and colour. I load two pages into the skeleton and set the side-lay in roughly the right position. I ink up the press, print a proof, measure the side margins, and adjust the side-lay so that they will be the same on the next proof and the forme will print exactly centrally across the sheet – that means it can be folded and yield a symmetrical opening. From the next proof I measure the top margin and adjust the position of the forme – up or down the bed – so that, once trimmed, the text blocks are correctly positioned vertically on the page.

One final check is to ensure that the sheet backs up correctly, so I turn a proof over and print the back. I hold it up to a strong light and the backing-up should be perfect: left-right, up-down. This is a quick way of spotting a missing lead or the wrong spacing at the head of a page (both of which I should have checked when imposing the forme of course).

The forme is now in the right place and the side-lay is right. This is a good moment to record all of this in my day-book in case I have another job for the press which means taking the forme off the bed and replacing it later.