VINTAGE LETTERPRESS CABINETS

A labour of love

Letterpress cabinets are rare and therefore have become very expensive items. Their scarcity is greatly increased by the use of compartmented printer's cases as ornamental items. They are regularly filled with small interesting objects and hung on the wall. The cases are used and split from the original cabinets, many of which are destroyed.

This practice sees individual cases selling for around £50-£80 at the time of writing. A complete cabinet of 20 cases therefore would need to sell for over £1,000 to make not splitting it profitable. They often sell for much closer to £2,000-£3,000 so setting up a letterpress studio can be very expensive. Actual type can be very expensive too, especially wooden type, with individual large letters selling for as much as £15 per letter.

I looked for a long time before I found a complete cabinet that wasn't at the opposite end of the country. It was for sale on Facebook marketplace and the owner didn't want to split it up. At £400 I was eager to see the cabinet even though it had some signs of woodworm. Woodworn is not unusual in wooden letterpress items or any other old wooden items in the UK.



When I arrived I found the woodworm infestation had caused more damage than I had expected and I realised that the price was probably to reflect this. Every case was covered with exit holes and some of the compartment walls were very brittle. Tapping the cabinet instantly produced a large amount of frass (a sawdust like bore dust left behind by woodworm activity). This didn't stop me from buying it.

One of the things I like about letterpress is it's connection to history and as a qualified museum curator I find objects that clearly show their history very interesting, we call it object biography (after Kopytoff 1986). This cabinet wears the scars of it's past, it is covered in ink, dents and damage from use. I felt that I really needed to have this in my studio.



The seller assured me that the cabinet had been treated but bringing an item so clearly damaged into a room with a lot of very expensive vintage wooden items would present a certain amount of risk. Woodworm has a long lifecycle (2-5 years) and can be hard to spot when inactive. Frass is often used as an indicator of activity but old frass can fall from old holes especially when moving an item.

The best way to treat woodworm completely is to freeze the wood at -20c for 48 hours and many museums have chest freezers for this very purpose. The cabinet was too big for this but I did need to be sure it was clear and that is wasn't going to degrade further. I scraped back some of the wax finish and treated with a woodworm killer solution. I then applied a deep penetrating wood treatment that soaked every part. I gave it four applications to ensure it was completely soaked and left it to dry. This protects against reinfection, mold, fungus and provides a wood hardener.



The next step is to be able to monitor for any signs of fresh activity. This would have been impossible in a cabinet with so many exit holes so I had to fill each hole with wood filler. I thought about matching the wood colour so the repairs would be invisible but then decided to buy a lighter coloured filler so that the holes would show. I wanted to see the history of the cabniet rather than hide it.



The whole process took about two weeks of quite laborious work and over the next month I still saw some possible signs of activity in the drawer runners (which I hadn't treated fully) and I ended up giving it a further three treatments of woodworm killer. Soaking it into all the gaps and concentrating on the joint areas.



By the end of all this the wood looked pale and very distressed so I applied several layers of Rentokil wood wax as a final protection and to help revive the wood's finish a little. Woodworn dislike beeswax too so I gave is a coating of a high quality beeswax polish also.



The damage has weakened the cases but it should hold up to being filled with metal type once more. I think the damage and stains from its historical use add to its overall charm. I've been monitoring it closely now and seen no further activity. As I said in the opening paragraph woodworn has a long lifecycle and is particulary active in March-April and August-September. I will continue to monitor on a weekly basis but am happy with how it looks and I'm optimistic that it will survive well.