To start somewhere near the beginning... this was my first print on the Adana 8x5. I fell in love with it pretty much straightaway. This print was a mix of metal and wood type. Unfortunately I didn't have enough of the letter Ls so had to get a little creative.
And this was my first print on the Vandercook SP20 (more on that later). It's a tribute to Woody Guthrie who had a "This machine kills fascists" sticker on his guitar. Apparently the bombers in the Spanish Civil War also had the words painted on the sides of their planes. It seems an appropriate sentiment for a press as printing has often been a political (and sometimes dangerous) act. It feels like a manifesto and I printed it as a statement of intent. Not literally, obviously, although a vandercook would definitely make a nasty mess if it landed on one.
A note on kerning: After printing this, the kerning between the F and the A of "fascists" really bugged me. A lot of wood type has chunks cut out of the blocks so the letters can be spaced evenly. That is of course one approach to take – however, I'd rather not take a hacksaw to my beloved wood type (plus it makes it really hard to lock it up in future printing projects) so I have taken to adding spacing to the other letters instead. I reprinted this later with much better letterspacing...
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