Printing Envelopes on a Letterpress

Sunday, September 29, 2024 at 5:10 pm

Peter Rukavina

Back in 2011, when I purchased the Golding Jobber № 8 from Bill and Gertie Campbell, I spent a morning with Bill, in their shop in Tryon, learning the ins and outs of it. It was, in essence, a very compressed course in running a job shop with a workhorse letterpress at the centre, taught by someone who'd forged a close relationship with the press.

One of the things Bill showed me--I suspect because it was one of the last jobs he'd printed on the press, and likely the sort of job he did quite often--was how to print envelopes.

Envelopes are tricky beasts: if you pick one up and pull it apart, you'll see that, depending where on the envelope you're looking, some areas have two layers of paper, some have three layers, and some have four. If you're hitting the envelope with type that's all at the same height, and the type hits different areas of the envelope, the printing is going to be inconsistent in relation to the "hills" and the "valleys" the type hits.

What Bill showed me was how to create a set of "shims" under the envelope to make up the difference; to fill in the valleys and flatten the hills, so to speak.

Today I had a chance to put that learning to use, as I set out to print 9x12 inch envelopes to hold This Box is for Good boxes. Here's what I ended up with:

Yellow pieces of envelope paper set on the platen of a Golding Jobber No. 8 letterpress, with the type in the background, already inked and ready to print.

This took some sorting out to arrive at; after some futile "winging it" attempts, I sat down and charted it all out:

A printed envelope, with "THIS BOX IS FOR GOOD" in large letters, surrounding by cut apart parts of another envelope, with a red pen and a metal ruled in the background.

My shims weren't perfect--there are still some hairline inconsistencies in the final printing--but the result was a lot better than if I'd had no shims at all. One thing that really improved things (and I think Bill showed me this, and I'd forgotten), is covering the shims with a top-sheet of paper. This makes things far less fragile, and smooths out some of the intersections of hills and valleys.

It was nice to be able to put my 13 year old learning to use today; I owe Bill and Gertie a great debt for letting me become the next caretaker of the Golding Jobber, and for setting me off with just enough knowledge to figure out the rest on my own. An endless, ongoing task.