Mis En Plates: VOCABULARY

I've gained a bunch of new words in the last three years of my life. There was once a time when the word etch was followed by sketch and hard ground was something you walked on, and not something you brushed on a plate. I've interacted with a new chemical vocabulary that didn't include THC, nicotine, or caffiene (which is in someways a lie), ones that, everyday, shave minutes off my life from being around them (which applies to those other chemicals mentioned above. Incidentally)

HOWEVER.

The most esoteric of these new dictions has to be the new language I'm learning: Letterpress.

Ain't she a beaut? I'm guessing she's a she. Like a boat. Or a skiff. Like from Old man and the Sea. That dude would have done letterpress.

Meet our lovely Vandercook 219 Old Style. They mean old. This model was made between 1927 and 1947, before the company began to make electric presses in 1950. Someone Kurt Once Knew and Told Me About But I Forgot once set type on this very press, and here it resides, laying in wait for new victims. Obviously, printing type in this manner has long been phased out. In an era where you can wirelessly print images from your phone, its a small wonder why no one sits in a corner and plucks tiny little letters from a case by hand anymore.
The language for this process is a verbose list of words to describe all the necessary objects of working with a letterpress. Talk about needing a mis en place. There are quads and beards, chaises, and furniture, all meaning something else than what they would normally. Theres history involved, in the way a letterpress shop acquires imagery from years and years of printing posters. This belies the fact that working with a technique this old (much like all other printmaking techniques) is being apart of a dynamic, still progressing story that will be, one day, history itself.
Some gratuitous letterpress shots: