I was thrilled to be involved with Pressing Matters magazine launch last week at The Forge, Bristol. The first issue is now available and packed with informative articles and gorgeous photography dedicated to printmaking. I love reading about other artists so it was lovely to have an insight into other printmaker's approaches to their work. I especially loved the article about Nick Hand (founder of The Letterpress Collective) and Robin Mather’s journey on The Printing Bike. They rode from Bristol to Mainz in Germany to visit the Gutenburg Print Museum. Nick cycled a bike custom built by Robin to carry an adana press on the back and a box at the front for type and paper.

Other great articles in the magazine cover the art of letterpress, linocut, collagraph, etching, screenprint, wood engraving, stencil art and risograph and an interesting reflection by Ben Goodman on the parallels between engraving and human existence.

In the lead up to the magazine launch I prepared some postcards using an old gramophone plate which I had bought in an antique shop in Bristol. John Coe, founder of Pressing Matters and creative director at coecreative carved his Pressing Matters logo into lino and we set it up on my adana 8 x 5 press for people to print onto the postcards. We put out some card for bookmarks too and the press had its work cut out for the rest of the evening!