The Airship: graphic novel printed on letterpress

John Baichtal of MAKE says:

Minneapolis letterpress printer Todd Thyberg received a Jerome Book Arts grant to write and illustrate his own 3-color graphic novel, then print it on a 90-year-old Vandercook letterpress in his studio. I had a chance to visit Todd in his his studio and checked out the huge stacks of prints and watched as he pulled prints off the Vandercook. He was outputting 400 of each page, with the expectation that he’d end up with 250, counting mistakes. One of the challenges he faced was trying to faithfully letterpress QR codes, which Todd believes may never have been done before. The final books will be sold as chapbooks or fancier, hardbound editions.

The Airship: A DIY Graphic Novel

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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http://www.ethanham.com Ethan

Sounds very cool! But not first to do letterpress QR codes. I have a business card of Patrick Barrett’s (owner of Lucky Duck Press) with a letter pressed QR code on the back.
kvh

Dittos on the QR code comment.

That is far from the first to appear letterpress printed. Most printers I know have had one pop up on a business card job somewhere along the line.

I printed one on an art print years ago that sent the user to the Ottmar Mergenthaler wikipedia page, and the letterpress/screenprinting shop I co-own called Baltimore Print Studios, prints one monthly a $2 coupon for the local Final Friday’s events.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1177098042 Erik Denning

This guy’s stuff looks a lot like Chris Ware’s.
kvh

AND ALSO – if they’re printing 400 in hopes of keeping 250 good ones, they must be pretty new to printing. An overprint of 60% is HUGE.
- http://pulse.yahoo.com/_Z2PCUJLFNNZNVRIBXBER67IBTI petr
  
  150 overs is not huge. On a typical colour offset run I allow a minimum of 400 overs, and difficult jobs with heavy solids etc could be double – as it is easy to spoil quite a lot quickly. For a letterpress run maybe its a little more than necessary, but 250 is a small run, you could always sell them. I’ve been printing for 30 years (letterpress, offset and lately digital)
http://twitter.com/Fornicus Fornicus

Interesting project to receive a grant for. The skeptic in me wonders how good the comic itself is when you ignore the print method.
copperwatt

A QR code on a letterpress print is like a bumper sticker on a Bentley.
http://twitter.com/LuxMentis Ian Kahn

Interesting project and I look forward to seeing the result. N.B. I had a set of letterpress printed QR codes (as trade cards) created about 2 years ago by Scott Vile at Ascensius Press (reading ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ And offering any who quoted it a discount at a fine press/antiquarian book fair…several takers, pleasingly).