Dissing and marbling

I'm bowled over by the response to yesterday's - thank you so much for more stars and hearts than I've ever had.

Today, for those who haven't dropped out, we're back to the penultimate cascading printing class.

This evening we printed the other side of the sheet we printed last week. The second side has some illustrations in red, so the inking was done with two rollers. Unlike litho printing, both colours are printed at the same time. For those of us whose page was printed last week, the quoins were loosened, the furniture (the wood blocks packing out the type in the chase so it doesn't move) removed and the type returned, page by page, to the galleys. We then had to dis our type. Nothing like as noisy or emotional as it sounds - it means distributing the type, piece by piece, back into the case, making sure that each letter, comma, hyphen and block returns to its proper place ready for the next compositor.

Then we set about marbling our book's endpapers by dropping small quantities of oil-based paint onto water, patterning it with a wide-tooth comb (which I hope you can just make out in shadow on the far side of the yellow bowl), then slowly placing the paper onto the paint, from middle to edge to avoid air bubbles, so that the paper picks up the paint over its whole surface.

I was tempted to blip our three strings of colourful endpapers hanging up to dry but decided to show the process instead.

So far:
Press
Type
Proof
Printing