The Plates! The Plates!

Just look at ’em! Aren’t they beautiful!? They came through the mail, just like magic. I am new to the UK and I don’t really know where to go for printing plates. Out of extreme laziness/decadence, I went ahead and ordered them from Boxcar Press in Syracuse. That all went swimmingly until I was slammed with (a) the shipping costs, which I was expecting, and (b) the UK Duty charge, which I was not. So, basically, it’s time to find a platemaker in the UK. But NOTHING WILL DAMPEN MY JOY TODAY, The Day of The Plates.

I made a mistake about four years ago, and bought a bunch of translucent paper to use for a book without testing the paper for printing. “Oh, it will be fine” I said to myself. “What could possibly go wrong?” Well I’ll tell you what went wrong. It took a more than a week for the ink to dry, and I had to wait with all the sheets laying out all over the place every time I wanted to add a layer of ink, and I didn’t have a drying rack, and the book was in an edition of a hundred, and I drowned in that paper, I tell you. I drowned in it.

Now I always perform reasonable and practical tests. As soon as I ripped these new and beautiful plates out of their expensive shipping packaging, I popped them on the press to give them a whirl on the Zerkall paper that I’d like to use for the book. I wanted to be sure that the slight tooth of the paper wouldn’t interfere with the halftone pattern of the images I would print on it. Success! Now I can buy a million dollars worth of paper.

To the paper warehouse!

UPDATE: Stupid Easter weekend no paper until Tuesday arrrrghghgh.