Damp paper, three days in advance

2 July · makeready

Dry rag paper takes a letterpress impression by being crushed. Damp rag paper takes it by yielding, which is the whole point, and the difference in the printed page is not subtle. The cost is that the decision has to be made three days before the press is touched.

The stack

Sheets are interleaved — one damp, two dry, repeating — then boarded and weighted, and left alone. The moisture equalises through the stack over roughly seventy-two hours. Opening it early to check is how a stack ends up unevenly damp, because every look lets the top four sheets dry.

Getting it wrong

Too wet

Ink sits on the surface and refuses to set; the sheet cockles as it dries and the register is gone by the second colour. Recognisable on press by a printed line that looks fat and slightly grey.

Too dry

Needs more impression to look like anything, which punches the type through and shows on the back of the sheet. Also wears the face of the type, which is the expensive part.

Unevenly damp

The worst of the three because it prints acceptably for twenty sheets and then does not, and by then the makeready has been adjusted to compensate for the wrong problem.

What the shop does now

Weigh a sample sheet dry, dampen the stack, weigh the same sheet again on the morning of printing. Between six and eight per cent added weight is the working range here, in this building, with this paper. The number is not transferable and was arrived at by ruining most of a ream.

The other rule is that a dampened stack gets printed or gets thrown away. Redrying and redampening produces paper that behaves like neither, and no amount of makeready will argue it into a good impression.