| I call this the "letterpress phenomenon". Once upon a time the only way to get some text printed was to hire somebody to arrange lead type letter-by-letter and print your thing on a six-ton iron press. This required significant amounts of training to do well and still resulted in artifacts of the process, in this case slight debossing of the paper as the fibers were crushed between the press and the type. Then came photolithography and xerox and laser printers, and nobody saw the point of all that labor and machinery. Then came inkjet printers and Microsoft Word and email, and suddenly a textual message doesn't seem to have the gravitas or expertise that once did. At which point, having something letterpress printed is very noticeable and neat, even if you can't put your finger on what's different, and a person who does letterpress printing has necessarily invested enough time to correlate with passion and a keen typographic eye. Once the old thing takes off, people really want those artifacts of the antique process, to the point where contemporary letterpress printers are goaded into ramping up the pressure on the press until the paper is crushed to oblivion and your print is ridiculously three-dimensional, more so than would have been acceptable back in old times. Similarly, people who are shooting on Super 8 these days are really looking for grain and weird color temperature. And it also explains why, like photolithography, 16mm or analog video are neither distinctive nor expensive enough to be as interesting. |