Inasmuch as there was spare time before I got a turn on the press at the Introductory Letterpress Course at NCAD with Mary Plunkett to print my definition of tea, I also set these two lines from Hamlet:
The text is 30pt Centaur with 36pt line height on a 44pc measure. The plan had been 24pt text on a 42pc measure, but when I noticed that Centaur is skinnier than the other available fonts, I upped the font size to the next available size and only had to increase the measure by 2pc.
Font size wasn’t the only reason for using more ink. There was a problem with an ‘e’ and an ‘r’ that weren’t printing properly despite making contact with the paper. This was the last session, and there were other people waiting to print their stuff, so the best solution
available at the time was to add more ink. (If there’d been more time available, I would have tried replacing those two characters.) It achieved a result, but the letters lost their delicacy.
In The Elements of Typographic Style, Robert Bringhurst writes:
Printed letterpress, Centaur and Arrighi are unrivalled in their power to re-evoke the typographic tradition of the Venetian Renaissance.
I think that I accidentally managed to un-re-evoke the Venetian Renaissance, so it’s probably a good thing that the lines are notionally by a prince of Denmark rather than a merchant of Venice.