Arms of Canada + Letterpress

My friend Ian Scott dropped round the Reinventorium yesterday with an early Christmas gift: the loan of another set of cigar boxes filled with old letterpress cuts. By far and away the most brilliant one of the bunch is the Arms of Canada. From the look of it, this is the 1920s version — the telltale sign being the tails on the animals on the right and left, which are reserved in this version and wild and bushy in later ones.

It’s such a delicious cut that I couldn’t wait another day to get it on the letterpress, so I ran a quick test print this afternoon, which showed just how lovely it is (and how high-quality the craftsmanship of the cut itself is; it hasn’t deteriorated at all):

You can see some black dots around the edges, which were the impression of inked tiny nails that are holding the cut to its wooden base. I took the cut off the press and tapped those in so they lay flush, and ran another print, which I then scanned on my Doxie scanner; it is (perhaps in a way that only I can appreciate) positively dreamy.