Typoretum is a print shop located in the small town of Coggeshall in Essex, England. They specialise in the old fashioned art of letterpress printing.
Letterpress is essentially the very earliest method of printing text, invented by Gutenberg in the 1400s. A print is created by inking reversed movable metal or wood type and then pressing it onto paper using a wonderfully complex machine.
Part of the novelty of letterpress prints are their tactile nature – the “bite” of the raised letters leaves a slightly embossed impression, and due to the manual work involved no two prints are exactly alike. These qualities have caused a recent resurgence in the popularity of this archaic printing technique.
Take a look at these nice letterpress posters for sale from Typoretum, and the snapshots of the process behind them:
