Read Online That Will Do Nicely by Ian Campbell - Free Book Online Page A

over the face of the type. At almost the same instant the bed of the press rose to meet the type and made a clear impression of the text he had spent hours setting. There was a slight metallic ‘clunk’ as the inked rollers spun back to their resting position at the top of the press. The sheet of paper sprang clear from the sticky surface of the type. Apart from having put two letter g's in the word ‘agreement’, the print quality was fine, except that the contrast of the ink varied from one side to the other, but that was simply a question of adjusting the uneven pressure. After spending nearly an hour making fine adjustments to the platen pressure, ink texture and the position of the text on the sheet, he achieved the quality he was searching for and started the first run. Two and a half arm-wrenching hours later, he had printed the one thousand two hundred copies that he needed; twenty-five per cent on straw-colored paper, twenty-five per cent on white and the remainder on pale blue. As each sheet came off the press he laid them overlapping on every available horizontal work surface. When he had finished one layer overall, he started the next, until he had finished. Apart from one copy which he took to show Sam, he left the rest to dry naturally. All in all, it was a satisfying day's work and he was halfway home before he realized that the time was already past 8.00 p.m. The day had flown by.
    Later that week, after he had finished printing the Purchasers' Agreement Forms he turned his attention to the book of Refund Notes. He knew it would be one of the more difficult printing tasks because of its small size, measuring only 10 x 7 centimeters and consisting of several pages of close-set type. He cut out the foreign language section of the original and reduced his work by six pages. Even then it was still a nightmare. It took him a month in all to print it to his satisfaction. The collating of the booklet he left to Sam, so that she could still feel involved in the scheme of things.
    He started the artwork for the actual cheques in mid-November and here his problems really began. The cheques he had studied each had background detail, consisting of the name of the issuing company repeated many times across the face of the cheques. Sometimes this lettering was distorted by size - sometimes by color. The background pattern had been printed in very pale ink, before the cheques themselves had been printed. When he had first thought about tackling the job, he had decided against attempting to match this background pattern, but now, spurred on by his success with the agreement forms, he felt inclined to try and gave himself three days to solve the problem.
    The secret of the artwork for these processes was always to work on a large scale and then reduce the size photographically or mechanically. Originals of coins and banknotes all start oversize like this, and any minor mistakes made by the artist/designer disappear with a little retouching and the reduction in scale. For the background detail of the American Express che ques, the company uses its name repeated many times in tiny letters across the face of its cheques.  Citicorp also repeats its name but constantly varies the size of the background detail and he decided to do likewise.
    He set to the task with 12 point Letraset. Obviously, to create the artwork repeating the whole name of his fictitious bank would have involved too much work so he settled on a shortened version of the fictitious bank's name using the motif, ‘DALLASBANK’. Carefully, he made up a block of the name with Letraset
    - DALLASBANKDALLASBANKDALLASBANK - several lines deep and when he was satisfied with the artwork, he photographed it with the process camera, then made a line negative and a subsequent contact positive from it.
    A lengthy retouching session followed the camera work as he painted in all the pinholes on the master positive using an 'O' size sable haired paint brush and Johnson's