Silver-plated Letterpress

I have only linked to Etsy products a few times on this blog, but each time I do I feel that I need a boilerplate caveat about my views on Etsy — or more specifically, the products being sold there.  I mainly see Etsy through the lens of Regretsy, which goes to great lengths to point out the “fashion sweatshirts” decorated with glitter puffy paint and the macaroni necklaces and the fan art of Twilight characters and whatnot.  Apparently, all it takes to make something steampunk is to hot-glue some brass lock-washers to it.

Every once in a while something awesome appears among the hot-glue and puffy paint.  Previously, it was the Magritte “Son of Man” laptop sticker and the I Can Has Cheeseburger cat toy. Last week, it was the silver-plated letterpress necklace.

Although I have never been into letterpress enough to have experience in working with letterpress type or blocks directly, I have always had a strong curiosity when it comes to typesetting and early century graphic design. (We’ll overlook the fact that I still can’t tell the difference between Arial and Helvetica, but I did enjoy the Helvetica documentary.) The necklace is a great little memento of those times.

When the necklace hangs, it just looks like a square metal prism. It’s fairly angular, with everything squarely 90 degrees, and quite masculine in appearance because of this. Only after looking at it closely do you notice the raised “E” on the bottom. The silver chain it came with was a little too shiny and girly. I have since replaced it with a nondescript black cord. Overall, I am quite happy with it.

Posted in: Dear Diary

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Brian Enigma

Brian Enigma is a Portlander, manipulator of atoms & bits, minor-league blogger, and all-around great guy. He typically writes about the interesting “maker” projects he's working on, but sometimes veers off into puzzles, software, games, local news, and current events.

2 thoughts on “Silver-plated Letterpress”

    1. Oddly enough, it *is* completely coincidental. I didn’t notice the letters when I bought the pendant, only when I copied the picture for this blog entry.

      There’s also something funny going on in the picture in that I think the two letters are reversed, yet the whole photo isn’t reversed, as evidenced by the printed text they’re sitting on. Usually, that gap you see between the edge of the letter and the edge of the type block is at the bottom (so that capital letters are offset from the very bottom of the row to make room for the descenders in letters like “g” and “y”). But if that were the case with those two pictured type blocks, I believe the E and B would end up printing backwards. Weird stuff.

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