Job 04Paper4 sections8 min

Paper through the damp season, and when to dampen it

The room is at the back of a courtyard on the ground floor, and between the middle of September and the end of November it behaves like a cellar. Paper notices this long before I do, and it tells me by changing shape.

First pull: 9 November 2025
Last revised: 13 February 2026
Room: Vilnius, Lithuania

What autumn does to a stack

Paper is mostly cellulose fibre, and cellulose takes water out of the air and gives it back, swelling across the grain as it does. A stack that came into the room flat in August will, by the third week of October, have edges that wave and corners that lift. Cut sheets go first and full sheets last, because a smaller sheet has more edge for its area. The middle of a tall stack stays flat for weeks after the top and bottom have gone, which is why I once believed a ream was fine and printed forty ruined cards.

What I do about it is unglamorous. Paper lives wrapped in its own paper inside a lidded box, off the floor on a shelf, with two boards and a weight on top of anything that has been opened. A cheap hygrometer sits on that shelf and I write the reading in the margin of the day's notes, which sounds obsessive and takes four seconds. The room runs at about fifty-five per cent through the summer and climbs past seventy-five in late October. Above seventy I stop planning anything that has to register in two colours.

Dampening for drypoint, and how damp is damp

Drypoint puts the ink below the surface of the paper rather than on it, and dry paper will not go down into a scratched line. Dampening makes the sheet soft enough to be pushed into the plate, and the difference between a dry pull and a properly damp one is not subtle: the dry one is grey and broken, the damp one carries the burr and gives that slightly raised, velvet edge that is the whole point of the technique. Getting the amount of water right took me an entire winter of bad prints.

My method now is to brush each sheet on one side with a wide soft brush, interleave the sheets, put the pile between two boards under a light weight and leave it overnight. By morning the water has distributed itself and every sheet is evenly limp rather than wet. The test is the back of the hand: a correctly damp sheet feels cool and shows no shine, and anything glossy needs blotting before it goes near a plate. Too wet and the paper drags ink out of the lines and leaves the plate with a sucking noise. Too dry and you have made a grey drawing of your own plate.

Type wants the paper dry

Everything above is wrong for letterpress. Damp paper against metal type takes ink onto the shoulders as well as the face, the counters of the small letters fill, and by the twentieth sheet there is a soft grey halo round every e. Damp also puts lead and moisture in contact, which is good for neither. Historically type was printed on damp paper, but that was on a wooden hand press with a very different impression, and it is not what my machine or my type is for.

The practical consequence is that autumn and winter are drypoint and linocut seasons here, and the type jobs get planned for spring. When a letterpress job cannot wait, the paper spends two days in the warmest corner of the room between boards, and I print a dozen sheets more than I need because the first few will show the halo before things settle. Deep impression, which is fashionable and which people ask for, makes all of this worse: pressing metal hard into soft damp paper crushes the face and bruises the sheet. I print a kiss impression and I say so when asked.

From the make-ready sheet

Dampen for drypoint, never for metal type
Two days between boards before a winter type job
Print a dozen spare sheets while the halo settles
Kiss impression on type; hard pressure bruises the face

Drying flat without a drying press

A damp print will dry into a shape unless it is held flat, and the shape it chooses is a shallow bowl. Proper drying presses exist and I do not have one. What I use instead is a stack: blotting paper, print face up, tissue, blotter, print, and onwards through the pile, with a board on top and about fifteen kilograms of scrap iron on the board. The first blotter change happens after roughly four hours, when the sheets have given up most of their water and the blotters are visibly cool and damp.

Changing the blotters is the part it is tempting to skip, and skipping it is how prints go mouldy in a damp room. Fresh blotters at four hours, again the next morning, and after that the stack can sit for two or three days under weight without attention. Prints come out flat enough to post. What they will not do is stay flat if they go back into a humid room unweighted, so finished work lives between boards on the shelf as well. Nothing in this room is ever quite finished with being pressed.

From the make-ready sheet

Blotter, print, tissue, blotter: build the stack properly
Change the blotters at four hours and again next morning
Weight for two or three days, not two hours
Store finished prints between boards, or they bow again