My First Impressions of the Stanhope Press
 

Well… now that my back is giving me a bit of a break and a few pills are beginning to ease my stiff neck (these old fogeys on the verge of senility are such a nuisance: they’re always moaning, even when they’re feeling fine), I find myself thinking: “Come on, old boy! Time to have a play with your new toy, your beloved Stanhope press, which you haven’t laid a finger on since you gave it a thorough clean!”

A bit of rummaging here, there, up and down (my workshop occupies two floors), and I gather together everything I need. Wood type only. Some of it came from Paris, back when I still had a workshop there; the rest I recently bought from the printer in Sézanne, whose print shop has, sadly, closed its doors for good.

And so I gather it all together, and gather some more… piling everything up and arranging it on the bed of the Stanhope. Now comes the job of setting the type and laying out the poster. I’ll give you a little taste of the process in pictures, so you can see for yourselves that hand-setting type, even with large, lightweight letters that are easy to handle, takes longer than you might think.

As you’ve seen, the typefaces are quite varied in style, and the letters come in a range of sizes. I decided on a centred layout, a very traditional choice for this sort of job, and tackled it in two stages. First, I worked out the centre of the top line, then aligned the centre of every other line with it. I filled out the other side of each line with spacing material, surrounded the composition with furniture, fitted the quoins, and tightened everything up in the chase.

With the forme finished and locked up, I placed a blank sheet of paper over the type — rather casually, to put it mildly (no problem there: the sheet was larger than the forme) — and stuck it to the tympan with some bargain-basement tape, in a thoroughly ham-fisted fashion. Not exactly textbook practice, but then again, this was a first attempt…

After that, it’s all very straightforward: rolling on the ink with a hand roller (a medium-sized one with a single handle), then pulling a print. Let’s carry on with the pictures…

You can see my rather rough-and-ready taping job

Right, time to ink up.

You’ve just had a quick look — and you’re welcome to watch it again if it went by too fast — at the process of inking the type with a medium-sized hand roller. Naturally, I used the lovely inking table I made a few weeks ago. But I didn’t feel up to using the two-handled roller; it’s a bit too heavy for me at the moment. I’ll have to start taking vitamins, since you can no longer buy Vin Tonique Mariani, the coca-infused tonic wine made with Peruvian coca leaves (what a shame!), which used to put a bit of strength into our grandparents back in the early twentieth century.

Once the type was inked, the next step was, quite logically, to pull a proof on a sacrificial sheet of paper. That would tell me two things: whether I’d attached the sheet to the tympan reasonably well, and whether the impression itself was satisfactory.

I fold the tympan down over the type and slide it underneath the platen.

I grab the lever to bring the platen down.

With the press stroke complete, I pull the forme back out from under the platen. What’s going to happen?…

A rather faint impression (not enough pressure on the middle lines), and a lovely little typo caused by transposing two letters: “AL” instead of “LA”. Well done, Mr Typesetter!

Let’s show that picture twice, just to make sure I feel properly guilty about the typo. I’ll also have to try to fix the lack of pressure.

The letters have been put back in the right order. I’ve quickly knocked together three makeshift packing stops using scraps of brass rule and two-point leads. I’ve also stuck a small piece of card onto the sacrificial sheet to provide extra pressure on the middle lines. After inking the type again (you do ink it for every single sheet, don’t you?), I position a fresh sheet of paper for printing.

Positioning the sheet. Those hastily improvised stops don’t exactly make the job any easier

Almost there. Let’s hope it doesn’t slip off while I lower the tympan.

I hold the loose corner, opposite the gripper edge…

Both hands on the lever…

…and put my whole heart into it…

Out it comes from under the platen for the second time… Better? Worse?

The type was thoroughly loaded with ink, and the packing stops weren’t exactly up to much. The result? The sheet stuck to the forme.

Peeling it off.

Hmm, yes, that’s better…

(poster text: "Rebellion is the privilege of the young. So, young people, stop growing old!")
Not perfect, but readable…

Right, time for an aperitif, now…

P.S. This post should have gone up on fornax.fr yesterday, 26 October 2026, when I finished writing it. But my website is down. No idea why. I contacted my hosting provider and spoke on the phone to a very pleasant chap in technical support. They’re trying to work out what’s wrong, but so far they haven’t found the problem. So, watch this space — assuming they manage to fix it… (P.S. added on 27 October 2026, hence the date!)

Better Vinçard Late Than Never!
 

“That's it! You've gone and wasted more money on something you don't need…”
“Er, what's it to you, you miserable little twerp?!”
“…None of my business, I know, and I absolutely love sticking my nose into things that don't concern me. I admit it! So you've bought yourself another book…”
“…for my technical library, yes. And your point is…? What's wrong with that? And I would appreciate it if you addressed me as ‘Sir’ from now on. A simple matter of respect, on your part.”
“Well, as I understand it, the book you've just bought is one you've already got… in photographs, I mean, photos you took yourself…”
“I see our little twerp is rather well informed. What he doesn't seem to understand, however, is the difference between reality and an image of reality. As Comrade Korzybski puts it—and he's not the only one—‘The map is not the territory.’ And a picture of a book is not the book itself. It has none of the book's weight, its feel, its smell… And there is far more pleasure in leafing through a real book than in scrolling through pictures on a screen, which, on top of everything else, may tire your eyes—or at the very least tire them a good deal more than reading a good book by the light of a good candle…”
“A good candle…”
“Yes, or, if you're a thoroughgoing modernist, by the light of a not-too-bright electric lamp. And, needless to say, while sitting comfortably in a nice, soft armchair.”
“Well, well! You certainly know how to tell us things…”
“Go on, mock me, mock me, you ignorant Philistine… always glued to one screen or another.”
“I imagine, Sir, that you are also partial to making notes on fresh clay tablets with a wedge-shaped reed.”
“Well now! Perhaps you're not quite the Philistine I took you for, since you seem to know something about the existence of cuneiform inscriptions…”
“Yeah, well, that's all very nice, but it still doesn't beat a cracking good manga downloaded from some dodgy Japanese website!”
“I shall leave you to answer for your own words… though I have my own thoughts on the matter. If you'll excuse me, I'll be off. I have more important things to do… like leafing through my new book, for instance…”

Chance—that suspicious entity which more often than not plays some thoroughly nasty tricks on us—was responsible for the arrival, just this very morning, of a book I had never dared hope to place on the shelf reserved for typography manuals in my technical library. It all began with an exchange of emails, sent using my pedal-powered computator, its brass gears painstakingly filed by hand, and connected to my hand-operated printing press by a bicycle chain. The emails were with a correspondent whose name I shall not reveal, in order to spare him any unwanted attention. We were discussing printers' correction marks. We talked about Castillon's manual (1783), Brun's manual (1825), and I mentioned Vinçard's L'Art du typographe (1806), a manual I rather like. The page devoted to printers' correction marks in Vinçard's book was not printed in good, honest, solid hot-metal type, as Brun's was, but by intaglio printing. This was despite the fact that intaglio is more expensive, more complicated, and less logical to use in a book devoted to typography. The reason is simple: it is much easier to produce the marks that way, and the result is closer to the handwritten signs used by proofreaders.

Once our email exchange had come to an end, it occurred to me to have a look at the online bookshops and antiquarian booksellers' websites to see what old typography manuals might be available. I have quite a number of them already, but there are still gaps on my shelves. Every now and then—though not very often—I check those websites, which I shall leave unnamed, to see whether one or another might have come up for sale. I do so without much hope, I must confess, because the ones missing from my shelves are precisely those that are rarest and hardest to find. Please don't take this confidence as an invitation to burgle my house: it is under electronic surveillance, and you might well get caught.

And then, there it was. A Vinçard for sale! No sooner said than done: I bankrupt myself! Well, admittedly, it wasn't the 1806 edition, but the second edition, published in 1823. Not as good. Not as complete. Revised, corrected, and expanded, yet somehow less complete than the 1806 edition. No samples of coloured inks, no examples of heavy papers coloured throughout the sheet for making covers. You know all this, of course, because you've read the wonderful book Jacques André and I wrote, Histoire de l'écriture typographique au XIX^e siècle français (A History of French Typography in the Nineteenth Century). You haven't? Well, what on earth are you waiting for? <self-promotion>You can find it →here, complete with a splendid preface by my friend Didier Barrière</self-promotion>. In the book, I don't say much about the 1823 reprint, but I do quote a little note that made me smile. It was added by Alkan the elder to the copy held in the library at Estienne:

So does this second edition have nothing going for it? Of course it does! It has the merit of existing, and I have the merit of having bought it. Besides, my copy has a few rather amusing peculiarities of its own. Its binding is somewhat unremarkable and a little clumsy. There is nothing particularly noteworthy about it, unless you count the decorative border made with a roll tool—which, admittedly, isn't much to write home about either!

Flat binding.

The title label, however, has a particularly amusing feature, especially for a typography manual. It reads:

ART
DU
TIPOGRA

Of course, it isn't the missing PHE that makes me smile. It's the I in TIPO. One can only assume that the person who did the lettering was Italian and inadvertently followed the spelling of his mother tongue.

Title label.

More troublesome for me, as the new owner of this copy, is the absence of leaves 27–28, which some disrespectful two-legged creature has torn out. Fortunately, I can remedy this by copying the photographs I took of the corresponding pages in the copy held at Estienne. But this loss is compensated for—by a curious paradox—by the presence of a duplicated gathering. My copy contains two sets of leaves 49–50, 51–52, 53–54, and 55–56. Very useful, really. If you haven't quite grasped those pages the first time around, you can simply read them again without having to turn back! Had this book not been destined to rest on a shelf in my technical library, it might well have earned a place in my little library of bookish teratology—the study of bibliographical monstrosities.

Let us now forget these “peculiar peculiarities” and turn our attention to the contents of the book, and to the differences between this edition and the first. First, since this was the very subject that started the email exchange which led to my purchase, I'll show you the page illustrating the printers' correction marks. It was printed by intaglio.

Correction marks plate.

One of the distinctive features of Vinçard and his manual, right from the first edition of 1806, is his proposal for a new type-case layout, which he called hamapolygrammatique. He had patented it as early as 1804.

The 1804 patented type case.

Having had a second look at the complexity of his invention, he simplified it when his manual appeared in 1806, and made no further changes when the book was reissued in 1823.

The 1823 type case.

The fact that this manual went through two editions during the nineteenth century—a period when technological developments were occurring at an almost daily pace—gives us an opportunity to observe how printing practices evolved. In 1806, ink balls were still the principal means of inking the formes, although the inking roller had made its appearance in the final years of the previous century. Vinçard's 1806 manual therefore illustrates the ink balls in much the same way as the Encyclopédie had done.

1806 plate: the ink balls. The two fingers holding the book open for the photograph belong, of course, to yours truly.

The 1823 edition has much the same illustration, more or less… but this time the inking roller makes an appearance, because by then its use had become widespread.

Ink balls and roller plate from the 1823 edition, with the captions on the right-hand page.

Ink balls and roller plate only.

And there we are. I have the feeling that, for once, I've been a little long-winded. I'll try to be more concise next time. Well… I hope so, anyway…