Fireworks Night’s “A Mirror, A Ghost” EP- printing

Ok, this may turn into a multi-part post, so apologies for length. It will also probably cover the intricacies of screenprinting and letterpress stuff, almost certainly in tedious detail, so if this is of no interest, you might want to come back at a later date…

If you know me, you’ll probably know that I have a very firm belief when it comes to music packaging: “DIY” doesn’t have to mean “badly made”. It seems like every single mid-level group looking for a bit of indie cred makes “handmade” or “individual” packaging for their CD-Rs they sell at gigs. Normally they’re pretty badly made: liner notes printed on a deskjet printer, CD with Rymans-bought labels in crappy resolution, ill-fitting plastic wallets- these are the hallmarks of hundreds of CDs I’ve seen at plenty of gigs, and I’m sure you have too.

So when Jim and Organ Grinder Records started talking about the next series of releases we were going to do, this was something I was very keen to do properly, if I were going to be involved in it. Jim had exactly the same thoughts, pleasingly; Daley (a friend of mine who’s responsible for nearly all the Monroe Transfer artwork that exists, including flyers, CD sleeves etc) and I had done quite a lot of printing together before, and he’d done even more on his own, so we were hopeful that the whole thing could look quite professional.

Knowing that I wanted to use a letterpress on the new Monroe Transfer release (about which I’ll certainly bore you all later), I’d mentioned this to Jim at Organ Grinder a while ago; we decided to go halves on a bargain set of things we found on lovely, lovely eBay. And, as I’d hoped, I love it. We have an Adana Eight-Five and a Five-Three, a few fonts of various sizes, and all the relevant little quoins, gizmos and gadgets. It’s been living at my house, so Jim hasn’t had the full joy of playing with it for hours, but it’s a lovely thing. I’m bound to post something a bit later on about how letterpress is infinitely better than digital printing, so I’ll leave that for later…

So, A Mirror, A Ghost. This is the first record featuring the actual live band, so we wanted to do things properly- 500 copies of a single sleeve, with a single CD. Simple enough, you might think. After a couple of hours of hard thinking, we’d worked out that it would take a weekend, pretty much, and that each sleeve would need to have the main artwork screenprinted onto it, stamped with the Organ Grinder rubber stamp and have three separate passes with the letterpress (one for the credits, one for the tracklisting & title on the spine, and one for the band name and title on the cover); each CD needed the Organ Grinder Records stamp, and two stamps with the leaf artwork. This, we thought, was possible in a weekend. We accepted that we would all go insane in a tiny cottage in Peckham in the process.

So- phase one. Artwork was designed by the lady Ve (with whom I have the great pleasure of living), and was exposed onto photo emulsion on a mesh screen ready for screen printing:

(there are a million sites that can explain that whole process; I can’t imagine that I have a lot to add to that right now…)

So, those images are screened onto our recycled chipboard sleeves (from the legendary Stumptown Printers) and pegged up to dry in the bathroom…

…meanwhile, the credits are being letterpressed onto the inside flap of the box in the living room (and, for those of an interested mind, I’ll put up something about the joy of letterpressing a little later)…

After we’d done half the sleeves each, we swapped and printed the other side. Finished ones could then have the Organ Grinder Records logo stamped on the back…

Then, of course, we had the horrible realisation that we had no idea at all how to set type in a circle. As far as I know, there’s no standard way of doing it, so we were on our own- just our ingenuity. This, of course, meant that we were basically screwed. Eventually, inspiration dawned in the place it always does: the pub. The solution we came up with involved making a jig to hold the type in place, and then locking up the jig in the chase; it looked pretty freakish, but seemed to be the only way we’d get our type in a circle…

Pretty, no? And I don’t mean “pretty” in a normal sense; I mean “endearingly ugly”. That seemed to be the best we were going to do, anyway. In any case, it worked, and meant that we could set our title and band name in a circle around the moon on the front. Yay.

Then, all we had left was to change the chase in the letterpress, and print the track listing and the spine title and touch up some of the prints by hand…

…before the nightmarish folding could begin. By the end of the afternoon on the second day, the only thing keeping us from losing our minds from the repetitive folding was listening to That Mitchell and Webb Sound over and over again. I’d recommend it, if you have a similarly repetitive task to accomplish.

Anyway. It was worth it. We now have 500 copies of a new Fireworks Night EP…

…and, while some of us had a well-earnt nap…

…I went upstairs to document the whole process on this ‘ere blog.

So, there we go. At some point, I’m sure I’ll write something more detailed about why letterpressing is wonderful, and pisses all over digital printing, and something similar about screen printing. For the meantime, just look forward to the music coming out- we think the street date is some time in September or October, ish. More news when it comes in…