Job 05Jobs4 sections9 min

Printing a friend's wedding cards, and what it cost me

Nothing leaves this room for money, but once or twice a year somebody I know is getting married and asks, carefully, whether the press could do the cards. The answer is yes, and it has never once been as small a job as either of us thought.

First pull: 15 June 2026
Last revised: 24 August 2026
Room: Vilnius, Lithuania

Agreeing what the job actually is

The conversation matters more than anything that happens at the press afterwards. Two people who have been looking at photographs online arrive with an idea of letterpress that involves a colour I do not have, a script face I could not set in a year, and paper the thickness of a beer mat. What I offer instead is a short list: the faces in my cases, the papers in the box, one or two colours, and a size that fits the press. Choosing from a real list takes twenty minutes and removes about six weeks of disappointment.

The other half of that conversation is what I will not do, and I have learned to say it plainly while everybody is still cheerful. No photographs, because a halftone needs a plate I would have to have made. No addressing of envelopes, because my hand is not good enough and two hundred of them would end the friendship. No changes to the wording once the type is locked up, unless there is a clear fortnight in hand. And a date for the final text that falls three weeks before the date they think it does.

From the make-ready sheet

Show the real cases and the real papers, not a screen
Say what you will not do while everyone is still cheerful
Final wording three weeks before they think it is due
Agree the spare count before anybody buys paper

Setting two hundred cards by hand

Setting is where the time goes and it is nothing like typing. Six lines of text in a twelve-point roman took me three evenings, composing stick in one hand, reading upside down and backwards, spacing each line out to the measure with brass and copper thins until it locks. Names are the slow part. Lithuanian names need accented sorts, and the case that has them is not the case with the italic in it, so the second line of that card came out of a different drawer and needed its own fitting.

Proofing found four errors that three people had read and approved on a screen, including a comma in the wrong clause and a date that was a Thursday in the text and a Friday in reality. A proof is worth pulling badly and early: rough ink, any paper, read it aloud, hand it to somebody who has not seen the wording before. Locking up afterwards is its own small craft, furniture and quoins tightened from the middle outwards, and the whole forme lifted a centimetre off the stone to see whether anything wants to fall out of it.

Two colours means registration

A second colour doubles almost everything except the printing. Every sheet goes through twice, which means every sheet has to sit in exactly the same place twice, and exactly is doing a great deal of work in that sentence. I make a lay gauge from card taped to the tympan, two stops on the long edge and one on the short, and I push each sheet into the corner rather than aligning it by eye. The eye is good to about a millimetre. The corner is good to a fifth of that, and a fifth is what a small red ornament beside black type can tolerate.

Drift still happens over two hundred sheets. The card stops wear, the tympan shifts slightly, and somewhere around sheet one hundred and forty the red begins to creep left. The cure is to check one sheet in twenty against the first good pull, held up to the window one behind the other, and to stop and re-set the gauge the moment two in a row look wrong. I printed the black first because black hides a multitude, let it dry a full day, and then ran the red. Eleven cards out of two hundred and thirty went in the bin, which is about what I expect now.

From the make-ready sheet

Lay gauge taped to the tympan: two stops long, one short
Print the darker colour first; it forgives the most
Check one sheet in twenty against the first good pull
Set thirty spares against an order of two hundred

What free actually costs

Adding it up afterwards is sobering in a way that has never yet stopped me. Four evenings setting, one evening proofing and correcting, two Saturdays printing, an afternoon drying and trimming, and a fortnight of the back of my mind occupied by a date that could not move. Materials are the small part. What a free job really costs is the one thing a hobby is supposed to protect you from, which is a deadline belonging to somebody else, attached to the most important afternoon of their year.

I keep doing it, and the reason is not generosity. A job for friends is the only thing that makes me finish to a standard I would never hold myself to otherwise, and everything I know about registration, about spares, about refusing a change on the Tuesday, came out of one of these. The cards went out in envelopes I did not address. Somebody's grandmother kept one on a shelf for a year, which I only found out afterwards, and that is a better result than anything I have printed for myself.