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This entry was updated on October 27, 2011 to add photos.

Yesterday I got the tour of a lifetime at the Bureau of Printing and Engraving in Washington, D.C.

I had an appointment at 10:00 a.m. I expected it to last 90 minutes. This was not the public tour, but a “Distinguished Guest” tour. It was led by a delightful young man named Kevin Nance who gives tours to senators, congressmen, the Secretary of the Treasury… and me.

I had arranged the tour through the Director, Larry Felix, who is very supportive of graphic arts education. He came to Cal Poly last year to speak to our students about the Bureau, and about the process of printing currency.

The tour began with a visit to the office of Letter and Script Engraver Dixie March. Dixie is the person who engraves the words into the plates that make money. She can make THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA look as glorious as anyone ever has. Every time you take a piece of paper money out of your wallet, you are looking at her work.

I was attracted immediately to a ruling machine that stood on a rolling stand in her office. “I have one of these!” I exclaimed, “…but I don’t know how to use it.”

At first I think she might have thought me crazy. I do have one of them – it’s located in the Shakespeare Press Museum at Cal Poly. A former student and I attempted to figure it out a year ago, and we got pretty close. Dixie gave me a thorough demonstration of her machine, and now I can make another attempt at using it when I get a chance.

Dixie March, Letter and Script Engraver at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing at her ruling machine. She was showing me how it works so I can learn how to use the one I have access to in the museum at Cal Poly.

On Dixie’s work table was one nickel sheet that contained 32 images of the U.S. one-dollar bill. She demonstrated how she checks it for imperfections, making microscopic corrections with microscopic tools – tools she makes herself. When the plate is complete, it is chrome plated and prepared to run on one of the Bureau’s gravure presses. These plates last only about 800,000 impressions, a result of the abrasive paper and special inks used for currency printing.

After leaving Dixie’s office we were taken to the office where components of currency engravings are combined on a huge hand-cranked machine called a Transfer Press to make composite plates. These machines, some dating to the 19th century, are used to make the master plates that are used to make the 32-up plates for printing. The process of putting together elements of a banknote on these machines is called siderography.

The Bureau is an example of art-meets-manufacturing. There are numerous people in the building whose 19th century skills are known to only a few dozen craftsmen and women in the world. There are also experts in precision machining, quality control, machine vision systems, and mass production. It’s unlike any printing plant I have ever visited.

In the rooms that followed, my tour took me to the offset platemaking department, to the offset press, and ultimately to the gravure press, the numbering and packing department, and the shipping area.

In a delightful photo-op, I had my photo taken, holding $1.2 million in freshly packed $100 bills. On the wall in the press room is a sign that says, “Free Samples – Tomorrow.”

What a burden! This is me with $1.2 million in freshly-printed $100 notes. It was fun to handle that much money. They made me give it back.

The photos above were taken by Bureau Photographer Thomas M. Jefferson. Director Felix assigned him to accompany me and my family on the tour.

This is Bureau photographer Thomas M. Jefferson and me at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.

Oh yes! I’m writing a new book. That book will be available in 2012, and I will crow about it here. You will not fail to notice.

Click below to get on my mailing list. I’ll let you know when the book is printed – target date March, 2012.

The smokestack of the Hamilton Wood Type Manufacturing Company. This beautiful brick stack stands above the factory that once produced type and cabinets for printers. Today, the building houses the Hamilton Wood Type Museum.

I spent an extra day in the midwest after GraphExpo last week. A friend and I drove four hours north of Chicago to Two Rivers, Wisconsin, to visit the Hamilton Wood Type Museum.

The Hamilton factory dominates the town of Two Rivers, Wisconsin.

The building is a formidable 19th (and early 20th) century manufacturing plant the size of a city block, with a giant smokestack with Hamilton Mfg Co spelled in white bricks. The three-story facility is still a working factory, used by a company called Fisher-Hamilton, which manufactures laboratory furniture and chemical fume hoods. Apparently a few dozen people still work in the Two Rivers plant building these products.

The first floor on the south end of the factory is now occupied by the Hamilton Wood Type Museum, the remains of what was once a huge manufacturing operation that made wood type, type cabinets, type drawers, furniture, and all of the accoutrements of a letterpress printing plant.

Blocks of type-high maple are stacked in the museum, adjacent to the pantograph-router, where letters are cut from patterns.

The business was founded in the year 1880 by James Edward Hamilton (incorporated in 1889), who went by the nickname Ed. He began his business in type-making when the local job printer asked him to make some wood letters for a poster. The type he made was successful, and he was asked to make more.

Hamilton’s first work in type-making was with Holly, which he cut with a scroll saw and laminated on a wooden base to make it type-high. His type was called Holly Wood Type, and he went into competition with the east coast type manufacturers Tubbs, Wells and others who were making type out of end-grain maple and other hardwoods. Hamilton’s laminate Holly Wood Type was comparable to, or better than his competitors’ offerings, and he made a name for himself among the nation’s printers.

In the center is a wood type pattern. The pantograph follower chases the pattern (operated by hand), as the router cuts the same letter in a block of maple 18 inches to the right. The pantograph allows the pattern to be scaled, making it possible to make various sizes of type from a single pattern set.

Ed Hamilton was also very good at marketing; he worked tirelessly to sell his wood type to newspapers and job printers. He sent sample letters to potential customers, with an advertising and price sheet enclosed, and the orders started to come in.

The Hamilton Wood Type Company soon had hundreds of employees, a larger building, and began to manufacture printer’s cabinets, desks, shelves and other cabinetry needed in the printing trade. Type was the biggest part of the business, but wooden products of all types made the company the go-to organization for printers.

The router cuts the pattern of the letter into a small block of maple, making a single character of wood type.

The company’s wood type selections grew, and the volume of shipments grew also. A printer could order wood type from less than one inch in size (36 point type was typically the smallest), up to huge letters 18 or 24 inches in size.

And, Hamilton’s type was as beautiful as it was functional. Though the Holly Wood Type had been successful, Hamilton switched to the more traditional end-grain hardwood type, sanded and polished to perfection before being cut into letters.

These are the chisels used by craftspeople in the finishing of wood letters. Where the round router cutter leaves a round corner (interior), a chisel can make it sharp and angular.

The factory closed in the 1980s, and several years later the community of Two Rivers, Wisconsin, reopened it as a public museum, and an educational organization. Today, old-timers who worked in the plant come around and explain the process of making wood type to the young museum staff. This helps to keep the story of the Hamilton Wood Type Museum alive.

Though the Hamilton Wood Type Museum has each of the machines necessary to make wood type, the organization seldom makes any production quantities of type. My observation is that the planing and sanding machines on display will not work, so preparation of maple blanks for type-making would require more modern machines (perhaps located in a part of the museum not accessible to visitors?).

The pantographs used for the actual cutting of type are still in the plant, and are still functional. The two routers mounted on the pantographs in the demonstration area are powered by compressed air instead of the original steam-powered routers, and they appear to be able to make type just as Hamilton did when the plant was running (I would have loved to try it).

The museum is a wonderful place that kindles memories of letterpress printing, and encourages people to learn about the process. I have long wanted to visit the plant, and now that I have seen it, I feel as though it is a dream fulfilled.

From GraphExpo 2011 in Chicago

For a brief moment on Sunday, September eleventh, GraphExpo came to a very quiet halt; we all stood still, and we listened while the bagpipe played. Hundreds of GraphExpo visitors stood in the building just outside the main show and paid respects to those who died in the terror attacks of 2001.

The memorial moment was appropriate and respectful.

The color guard exits the hall at the end of the 9-11 memorial service. The event was amazingly quiet, and dignified. No presses, folders or die-cutters could be heard in the background.

At an event where “normal” is the cacophony of paper folding, presses snapping, and bejeweled dancers gyrating in the Xerox booth to music, this few minutes was a reflective break.

Ten years have flashed-by, and GraphExpo has changed dramatically — along with the economy and our industry in general. The 2002 GraphExpo was a fractional reflection of the previous years, but over the years it has grown back to a show that is nearly as big as the heyday (I remember years when the show occupied two large halls at McCormick; now it is just one).

The visitors, about 25,000 total over the four-day event, still come with money in their pockets, and they buy presses and all of the accoutrements of the printing trade. They also learn about e-books, iPads, smart phones and the electronic delivery of documents — all things which characterize the changes we have seen in the last decade.

Though I was not at GraphExpo on 9-11-2001, I know a lot of people who were, and I am grateful that I was at home that day in my quiet suburban home with my family. I remember the stories of shared automobile journeys across the country, of planes abruptly landing in Lincoln, Nebraska, of people hiring taxis to drive them to Pennsylvania from Chicago.

This has been an “interesting” period in our history.

I was glad to have been witness to the moment of silence at GraphExpo 2011, and I salute those who organized and participated in the dignified service.

The original of this post appeared on What They Think in June, 2010. It was brought up to date today, August 21, 2011.

In a recent blog I introduced the idea of GREP styles in Adobe InDesign; that’s a really great feature for the occasional job where you want to format text as it is placed or as it is typed. It can save time in print production.

Today’s example is more common; I use it about once a week. I find I have a list of names (I am a teacher) that is in the wrong name order, either last-name first or the opposite. No matter what, it always seems to be in the wrong order.

So, I use GREP in InDesign to reverse the order. For simple lists (middle names add complexity, so I’ll discuss this later) it’s just a matter of reversing the order of the two words on each line.

My challenge here is to take a last-name-first list, shown in its original form (PDF) above, and reverse it (while shedding some extraneous data in the process). It’s surprisingly simple using GREP. Step one is to copy the text from Adobe Acrobat Professional, and paste it onto a page in InDesign. The context is unimportant. Following is the same material in InDesign:

To make the change, I use the Find-and-Replace pane in InDesign, with GREP selected from the tabs there. The search string in GREP is:

(\d+ )(.+), (\u\l+) (.+)~b

Following is the explanation of how this works:

The selections are automatically assigned to variables as shown. Once the selections are done, I reverse them in the Replace string by putting $3 before $2, separated by a space, and finish with a carriage return. This plays the data back in the opposite order. The remaining elements, stored in $1 and $4, are ignored and discarded.

Above is the functional GREP search and replace pane.

It’s delightfully easy, and it takes almost one second to complete, putting not a moment of wasted time on the clock.

The thing I like most about GREP searches, when they are needed, is how much time they save. Though the seemingly cryptic code can be intimidating, they are easy to build with the pull-down menus for the search and replace functions.

An added benefit of the GREP search pane in InDesign is that it allows you to store your successful search strings, so that you don’t have to puzzle this out more than once after you get it working.