The Origins of Our Dream

In our first post we said we had a crazy dream “to print books and other printed things”. With our second post we thought it might be a good idea to describe the origins of our dream.

We can begin by saying that both Kate and I, Felix, love printed things. Printed things are multi-sensory. They are made to be looked and read, but they are also tactile so we like to hold them, smell them – no, not as weird as it sounds, the combination of ink and now paper and the other components of manufacture, gives every printed product a unique signature and usually this combination often smells great, try it sometime.

Where has this dream come from …

… apart from this enjoyment of the objects themselves? Kate is a printmaker and artist. She is knitter and dyer, increasing dyeing her yarns using eucalyptus for pigments, prior to knitting. So there is a natural fit here with the tactile nature of the printed object and her work.

Felix, on the other handed, had his first introduction to printing while at high school, where was an old Heidelberg letterpress (and a small one-colour offset press). We had one colour to print with, reflex blue, the closest colour to the school colour. We would send out to a local compositor for slugs of type generated on a Linotype and then print away. Not really knowing what we were doing the type we got back would sometimes be a bit of a surprise, the typeface would vary and sometimes it would be all caps, but hey, so long as it didn’t have any typos we were happy. Well that was the beginning. There have been a few distractions and side journeys but he is back in printing and best of all, creating print. (The image is of the FAG proofing press we own.)

And the rest of the story about Tiliqua Press is here.