Letterpress revived: Debossed, yes. Debased? Maybe | The Economist found via: BoingBoing.net
The company figured its customers might not understand the charm of letterpress, so it included a short explanatory video within iPhoto and a more detailed one on its web site that lovingly depict a card’s letterpress-assisted birth. Customized messages and full-colour images are added through laser printing—which the video calls “digital printing"—after standard card layouts come off the press. (The video has a continuity error when it shows the Christmas-tree card at different times. See if you can spot it.)
Some sort of tutorial was probably in order. Letterpress is a pre-digital technology that was once widespread. But because it was favoured for commercial, rather than artistic purposes, even art-savvy sophisticates were probably oblivious to its inner workings. One reason for letterpress’s decline was that many saw it as a labour-intensive handicraft. A bed of type and images had to be set by hand, carved in relief from a linoleum block, or cast in hot metal from one of the very few remaining Monotype or Linotype typesetters.