Printing “The Supposed Huntsman”

This post is a detailed account of printing the foreground elements of the cover for Katie Fowley’s first full-length poetry collection, The Supposed Huntsman (UDP, 2021) on the Heidelberg “Windmill” at the UDP studio.

The cover art for The Supposed Huntsman was created by Mollie Goldstrom. She designed the cover with UDP editor Daniel Owen. Mollie’s drawings were scanned at 1200 dpi, made into grayscale, and then, after some adjustments to drop out any background fuzz and clean up extraneous dust and specks, they were turned into 1200 dpi bitmaps. The cover was composed in Indesign with two layers, one for each color. Each layer was output to PDFs with cropmarks — one to send out for offset, and one to send to Boxcar for plate-making (polymer relief plates for letterpress).

In December, Wen Zhuang (UDP’s Production Manager) delivered two boxes (2400 12.75" x 9.75" sheets) of Mohawk Via Cream White 100# Cover to Prestige Printing in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. This small family business does a lot of our offset printing for the covers of UDP books.

Luke Jr. at Prestige printed the background drawing — a finely sketched sea of plants — in a light purple (Pantone 2705) and sent the sheets back to UDP a few weeks later.

On Monday, January 18, 2021, I unpacked the printed sheets and set up the polymer plate we ordered from Boxcar Press on our Boxcar Base.

I looked up the formula for Pantone 3298 (I’ve been mixing ink by eye for too many years, so I finally broke down and purchased this darn costly but very useful formula book). This forest green is made up of about 3/4ths Process Blue, almost a quarter Pantone Yellow, and a dot of Pantone Black. Mixed it all up and tested it out with a (gloved) finger tap method that Rochelle Feinstein taught me; it seemed close enough to the intended swatch. Then, added some drier to thicken it up for letterpress. In case you might’ve thought otherwise, you can rest assured — that white powder is magnesium carbonate.

And onto the press it goes… Buttered up the top metal distribution roller, put the machine into gear (with paper feed and impression on trip) to get the ink to coat the rollers lightly, leaving the form rollers up for now.

I added ink to the reservoir, so that I could set up the automatic ink addition, adjusting for the areas of the plate that would need more or less ink. I activated the reservoir for a few pulses at high contact count to add ink, and brought it back to “0,” so that I could continue the set-up without adding too much ink. I then brought the form rollers down to take up an even coat for the first test prints.

On my first try, I’m just 6 points off register to the crop marks on the purple pass, or maybe a hair more.

Note that the actual crop mark is the very thin purple line — so I’m really on the dot in terms of the height. See the circled marks: my dark green and the light purple, with the check mark in this image.

That means I placed the plate at pretty much the right height from the bottom, but a bit off going from side to side. A thin reglet will give me the 6 points on the right that I’ll need to push the base (and the plate adhered to it) over. No need to rip off the polymer plate and place it again, which is always a sticky business I’d rather not get into. I just twist the quoin key to loosen the furniture around the Boxcar base, slip a 6 pt. reglet out of the left side and add it to the right.

Note the green spotting in the negative space around our Huntsman and his dog. When I put the plate back in, the ink splotching shifts. I may have had the base skewed on the first try, so I make sure it’s really flat in the press, give it more of a push, and this time the ink is spotting the depressed area (negative) of the polymer plate near the barcode.

It seems the roller’s too low on that side, so I’ll go over and tap the roller height latches up a notch on that side… Actually, more like 1/10th of a notch—just a micro-adjustment.

I make another print (#4). Still not quite there. First thing to do is to try the side stop. Now it’s looking good (#5).

Then I get the loupe and start checking for micro-adjustments—checking that the print is straight to feed guide edges.

I want the green crop marks to indicate the trim and spine, and I want the text to sit straight on the page. The offset pass may not be quite on target, but the foreground is more important.

For the spine to be perfect, it has to be perpendicular to the bottom feed edge, and—of course—running parallel to the side feed edge. Because of the way the background was printed on the sheet, I’ve oriented the cover plate upside down, so that my short-side guide edge (the direction it’s feeding into the press) is the same as it was on the offset pass.

I try a few adjustments with the bottom guide edge, lifting and lowering one side, and by print #7 it looks pretty spot-on. (While no one’s looking, I pat myself on the back for only wasting 7 sheets so far.)

Now I need to adjust impression and add some packing behind the barcode so it comes out crisp and scannable.

One way to do that is by taping blue painter’s tape (or similar masking tape, etc.) right on top of the tympan paper. But the tympan paper is easily destroyed by tape. When you pull off a piece of tape—to re-adjust, for instance—it can take some of the waxed tympan with it, and that’s an unevenness that might cause trouble. The old-fashioned way is more work — adding packing behind the tympan. It’s not a quick fix, but allows for more flexibility, and it will never mess up the surface or get pulled off by the windmill feed arms. (Do it nice, or do it twice, as we used to say at UDP back in the day.)

But where to place the packing so it doesn’t get behind the lettering where it would make “Poetry,” for instance, bulge with too much impression. I don’t want it looking like what Peter Kruty would call “BIFI” — brute force and ignorance — pronounced like the name Biff as an adjective. Worse yet, if just a the first letter or two and not the rest… uneven impression.

I’m going to take some of the ink off the rollers so I can get a light print on they tympan (creating a make-ready type thing), and then I’ll know exactly where to place some extra packing—a post it-note will do.

First, I lift the form rollers up (so they’re not taking more ink from the big metal ink roller) and set to printing off some of the ink onto odd sheets—my test prints, for example—and then wipe down the plate. Now I get a very light print on the tympan, and I can get behind it just right and set in the post-it note to a line just past the barcode.

The BAT — bon á tirer means “good to pull” — goes up on the safety, so I can check against it as I watch the prints roll in.

Now I’m ready to print. I just need to get the reservoir going, so it keeps adding a tiny bit of ink after each print. (I bumped it up to “3” after the initial prints came through a little lighter than I liked.) Then I set the counter to zero.

I’ll add some movies of the printing to our YouTube channel and link them here soon…

After a couple hours of mixing ink, setting up the plate, and making adjustments, the actual print time for 1768 impressions was probably only about an hour and a half. It could have been shorter on a faster speed, but I let it run slow at times, as some of the paper was curling odd — probably printed on the wrong side — and didn’t catch well in the gauge pin. Plus, there was some time spent on a couple more adjustments on the feed board (suction, tilt, etc.), and a short break to switch out the printed sheets and get the next stack of paper in, since the feed boards can only hold about a 800 sheets of 100# cover at a time.

A few days later, the ink was thoroughly dry—I did a final count and thumbed through once more for any misprints. I had 1750 good ones by the time I sorted them out. Since I only lost about 25 in set-up and mis-feeds and such (I set those aside to have a count before recycling), I must have started with 1750 sheets with the printed purple background. This leads me to wonder if we really sent 2400 sheets (our estimated count) to the offset printer, or fewer? I might have to ask them what happened — if they’d wasted 100 sheets, that’d be normal for set up, but not 600…

In any case, we have more than enough. 900 covers will go out for the first printing of 750 books—which is very generous overage for waste at the bindery. (We may get some overruns back). Another 825 covers are saved for a second printing down the road.

Now they go via UPS to McNaughton & Gunn in Michigan, where the book blocks are already offset-printed and waiting. The books will be bound into our “customer furnished” covers and shipped back by early February so we can send early copies to our subscribers, do a review mailing, and start fulfilling pre-sale orders. Bon voyage!

The Supposed Huntsman is now available for preorder on Ugly Duckling Presse’s website (here).