I’ve been sadly neglecting the old blogeroo recently; as per usual, it’s not because there’s nothing to tell, simply that I’ve been doing to much. For instance, in the last few weeks I’ve been getting to grips with this our lovely Monotype composition caster at Hand & Eye Letterpress. It’s a hugely complicated machine, and one that I’m only just getting to grips with; not least, of course, because we acquired all the machinery secondhand in various conditions of wear and in need of being cleaned. Once you see one of these running, you can really understand the origin of the phrase “well-oiled machine”.

I’m sure I’ll write a more detailed description of the caster one day soon, for anyone who might not have a clue what’s going on, but in the meantime we’ve been casting some lovely borders, ornaments and fonts of type that we’re selling on eBay. If you’ve an Adana press, the fonts we’re selling are an ideal size for an Eight-Five or a Five-Three, and the border founts will be enough to put a border around an invitation or similar.

We’re also selling substantial amounts of spacing material; it may not be glamorous but, as someone who’s had to do a fair amount of setting with ill-sized or improvised spacing, i have no problem in saying you really can’t make a much better investment. If you’ve a decent stock of thins, thicks, mids, ems and ens, your hand setting will be so much more efficient and enjoyable.

You can see what we have for sale on our eBay shop:

http://search.ebay.co.uk/_W0QQsassZhandeyeletterpressQQhtZ-1

Keep checking back, as we’ll be adding more founts as we cast them; if you’re looking for a particular typeface, or you wanted more sorts, just drop us a line at print@handandeye.co.uk and we’ll tell you what we can do.

Our lovely Monotype Caster (with whom I'm developing a close relationship)

Some of the borders & ornaments I cast last week (after a frustrating morning of not-being-able-to-do-anything)

A rough proof of just some of the 10pt borders and ornaments we have in our stash of matrices. I suspect we won't be casting many 2-colour swastikas...