Sheet 02 · The press
Three people, one loft, and a press that came in through the wall.
We have been at the same bench on the West Quay since 2009. Everything on these pages was surveyed, drawn, cut and printed within about forty feet of where you would be standing if you came to see us.
The first plate took four months and was wrong.
Marged Vaughan took the loft in the spring of 2009 with a burin, a small rolling press and a plan to engrave the Torridge from Bideford Bridge to the bar. It took four months. The proof went up on the wall, and within a fortnight a pilot came in, looked at it for a long time, and pointed out that the eastern edge of Pulley Ridge had walked about sixty metres since the survey she had copied from.
She cut a second plate. That is the whole of the workshop's method, arrived at expensively: draw nothing you have not been to. We run our own lines with an echo sounder off a 5.4m Orkney, we walk the moor with a level and a notebook, and where a sheet leans on somebody else's data we print a note in the margin saying whose and when.
The Vandercook arrived in 2011 from a newspaper works in Barnstaple that had finally given up on hot metal. It weighs a little over a tonne, would not go up the stairs, and had to be craned through the seaward wall — which is why the render on that side of the building does not match the render on any other side of the building.
“We do not sell decoration. If you hang one of our sheets on a boat and it gets you across the bar, that is the job working.”
Plates 01–03
Everyone here, surveyed and contoured.
We could not agree on photographs, so Marged drew everybody the way she draws everything else. The spot heights are accurate to the nearest centimetre.
Engraver · founder
Marged Vaughan
Trained at the Slade and then, more usefully, for six years under a chart engraver in Cardiff who would not let her cut a curve until she could cut four hundred straight lines to the same weight.
Surveyor
Ivor Pengelly
Thirty-one years on the estuary, twenty-two of them for the harbour board. Knows where the banks go in a north-westerly and is usually right before the sounder agrees with him.
Pressroom & editions
Nell Ashcombe
Runs the No. 4, mixes the inks and keeps the edition book. If your sheet is numbered 17/45, Nell wrote the 17 and can tell you what the weather was doing that afternoon.
Materials
What we print on, and what it costs us.
| Stock | Weight | Used for | Per sheet |
|---|---|---|---|
| Somerset Satin | 300 gsm | Editioned charts, two to four inks | £6.40 |
| Zerkall Book Wove | 145 gsm | Text sheets, notes, colophons | £2.10 |
| Hahnemühle Copperplate | 300 gsm | Intaglio, deep bite | £7.85 |
| Khadi rag | 210 gsm | Proofs and working states | £3.20 |
| Irish linen (backing) | — | Restoration, per A1 sheet | £14.00 |
“Every edition closes. When the last sheet of forty-five goes, the plate goes in the rack and stays there. We have never once brought one back out, and we have been asked to more times than I would like to admit.”
Visiting
Come and see the press running.
Tuesday to Friday the loft is open and somebody will show you the plate rack. Ring first if you want to see the Vandercook pulling — it is not on every day.