[MCruz]

Al­though a now-out­dated process, the let­ter press was once the only means of print­ing, up until the 19th cen­tury. It was used to make books, posters, busi­ness cards, etc. It is a process of print­ing which in­volves press­ing ink and paper over an im­pres­sion to cre­ate type and/or image. The process be­gins by turn­ing on the ma­chine, and ap­ply­ing ink to the disk at the top. The ink rollers move along the disk, coat­ing the ink along them­selves, and then the op­er­a­tor takes a sheet of paper and places it on the mov­ing ledge. Tim­ing is cru­cial, be­cause the ledge moves con­stantly and al­lows only about a 2 sec­ond win­dow to place the paper cor­rectly. Once the paper is placed, the op­er­a­tor pulls the lever, you hear a clamp­ing sounds, re­lease the lever, and grab the paper from the mov­ing ledge. You now have words and/or an image on the paper. The last part in­volves putting a blank piece of paper over the printed paper, so that no smudg­ing oc­curs.
Nearly any color of ink can be used dur­ing the let­ter press process, and you can even use up to two dif­fer­ent col­ors. One of the down­sides, how­ever, is that you can only print on paper that is slightly big­ger than 8.5″ by 11″ at the most. Also, clean­ing the let­ter press ma­chine is a lengthy te­dious process. You have to in­di­vid­u­ally wipe down the im­pres­sion plate, the disk, and the two ink rollers with a spe­cial clean­ing so­lu­tion.