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TIL my old shop teacher used to press books under a cast iron radiator, never bought a nipping press
Was at a yard sale in Rockford last month and ran into Mr. Delgado, who taught my high school book arts class back in 2001. He saw the marbled endpapers I was selling and told me he bound 40 years of shop records with nothing but a bone folder, a phone book and whatever heavy thing was nearby. He said he never owned a real press and his spines still held up better than half the stuff on my bench. I've been buying gear for 15 years and it kind of rattled me, because I've got a standing press out in the garage I've used maybe 6 times. He also said he'd warm his glue on a hot plate from Kmart, which sounds terrible but somehow worked. Does anyone here press with something weird like that, or am I the only one who went and bought the whole catalog?
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river_scott98d ago
Did you ever try the phone book trick yourself after that? My grandpa was a printer back in the day and he'd stack old yellow pages on wet signatures with a concrete block on top, swore it worked better than the press at the shop. Thing was like four inches thick and smelled like a basement, but the paper came out flat as a pancake. I keep meaning to test it against my real press just to see if he was full of it or not.
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