THE OLD SCHOOL PRESS

Moments in the making of The Colours of Rome.

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Setting the standard


The final task is to determine the amount of ink that I want to lay down. There is of course a relationship between the weight of impression and the darkness of the resulting print: the harder you impress, the more ink is left on (and in) the paper, but I would like to get the amount of impression and then adjust the inking, remembering always that ‘less ink, more impression’ is better than ‘more ink, less impression’ – we want to see the shape of the letters. Elsewhere I have described how on a proof press one needs a strategy for ensuring that all the sheets in a copy have the same density of ink throughout. It does not matter if one copy is overall darker or lighter than another: the crucial thing is that within a single copy there should be consistency of colour. (How often do we open a modern paperback and find, on facing pages, text that is barely legible for lack of ink and text that is smudgy with too much ink?)
 I ink up the press and keep adding small amounts across the rollers until the forme is printing a tad darker than I would like. I then run twenty sheets through. I now look for the ten consecutive impressions that look about how I want them to look: the first will be darker than the last but individually both must be acceptable. I then make those first and last sheets my 'dark' and 'light' standards: I put them by the press under a strong light as I will use them for checking the inking during a run.

Copyright © Martyn Ould 2013.