Letterpress Make-Ready: I'll Do Anything to Make It Print!

Letterpress printing is one process where the end justifies the means. You try to get the most attractive printed piece, regardless of what nutty method you use to get there. Make-ready, that innocent sounding term, means getting the entire form to print evenly. Not so easy with older, worn type and cuts!

In theory, make-ready consists of underlays and overlays (see pictures below). You put small pieces of paper called underlays behind the form in the press. Or you put pieces of paper called overlays beneath or on top of the tympan paper. Underlays and overlays increase pressure on the parts of the form that aren’t printing well and make them print darker.

Here's the form for a Thank You card before make-ready.


The A, K, and O aren't printing well, so we added underlays beneath the letters to make them print darker.


Here's the overlay, a sheet of paper beneath the tympan paper to strengthen general impression.


And here's the finished Thank You card, looking a lot more even.

That’s the theory. In practice you can end up with a crazy quilt of little bits of paper held on with adhesive tape. Then there are the great equalizers, ideally spongy materials that will either pad out the type or squish down to nothing. Facial tissue is one. A printer friend of my father’s always used a sheet of X-ray film packed under the tympan. Every printer has their own secret (or not so secret) method for getting an uneven form to print. So long as it works, anything goes!

Often older type and cuts aren’t exactly type-high. (Type-high is 0.918 inch from foot to printing surface—and come to think of it, how did somebody come up with that odd measurement?) They may be worn down from too much use, or they weren’t manufactured type-high in the first place.

Sometimes you’re pretty much defeated from the start. For example: look closely at the two U’s in the font of 4 line Pica Ornamented below. Because they were cast incorrectly, both U’s sink in the middle. So try to print a July calendar page using one of those U’s. After much padding, packing, and muttered words, the results were still less than ideal.

A font of 4 line Pica Ornamented -- pretty old stuff, and it's not all type-high.


Can you see the sunken U? It's almost concave, with a big dip in the center.


After much fiddling, this was the best the U would print.


Older cuts are notorious for make-ready problems, especially if you use several in one piece. It’s like trying to get a roomful of opinioned people to agree on religion or politics. You could say every cut has its own idea of type-high. When my husband and I printed the piece below with a bunch of old advertising cuts from a print shop we bought out, we had to get pretty creative with the make-ready. The patchwork on the tympan was a mess, but the result, happily, was better that the U in our July calendar.


Old wood type can create another make-ready nightmare. There are high letters, low letters, and maybe a few that are just right. It can be a challenge to get larger wood type to ink evenly anyway, especially on a platen press. Below is a poster we printed using wood type, metal type, and a very old cut – a real exercise in make-ready. But the fun we had dreaming up copy for the poster made up for the tough time we had printing it.


Just remember, the key to make-ready is patience. It helps to think outside the box, too. Use whatever you can to make it print!

Printer's Dyslexia

If you’ve ever printed on a platen press (see illustration above), you’ve probably encountered what I call “printer’s dyslexia”. Most everyone struggles with it. It’s not a disease, though it can make you feel kind of sick as you make one mistake after another. It’s when you move your gauge pins (small metal clips that hold the paper) and your printed image ends up moving the opposite direction from what you intended.

This should be simple, I think, as I take a proof of my printed piece inside our Chandler and Price press. I want to move my image one pica (printer’s measure, equal to 1/6 of an inch) to the right, and half a pica (1/12 of an inch) down on the paper. But which way should I move my gauge pins? Right or left? Up or down?


Invariably I move the gauge pins the wrong way on the platen (surface that holds the paper) first. Oops! Careful, don’t tear the tympan paper. Measure again. Try again. Right or left? Up or down?

Then there’s the uphill/downhill dilemma. If the gauge pins are set unevenly, your lines will wander up or down. Try to correct it and you invariably overshoot. What once ran uphill now runs downhill. Time to try again!

It’s easier to avoid “printer’s dyslexia” on a cylinder press or a hand press. But since a platen press works like a clamshell, it presents challenges. Usually the top of your would-be printed piece is on top when you put the form into the press. So the top of your printed piece will print on the bottom of your piece of paper, on the part closest to you.

Confused yet? Now try to move your printed image to the left or the right, up or down. Try to fix uphill or downhill. Which way with the gauge pins? And which gauge pin? Good grief!

I really should try to work out a chart to help me remember how to move the gauge pins. Why I’ve never done that in all these years of printing on a platen press, I’ll never know. Here’s an attempt: 1) To move the image right, move the gauge pins left. 2) To move the image left, move the gauge pins right. 3) To move the image up, move the gauge pins down. 4) To move the image down, move the gauge pins up. 5) To correct an image running uphill, move the right gauge pin up, or the left gauge pin down. 6) To correct an image running downhill, move the right gauge pin down, or the left gauge pin up.

I think that’s right. Now I’ll try it again. Right or left? Up or down? Which gauge pin? Oh, drat! One good thing I’ve found about printer’s dyslexia – it certainly cultivates patience!


Test yourself! The red impression on the left is correctly placed. On the right the red is a little to the left and goes slightly uphill. Which way do you move the gauge pins?