Registration

Two passes, one margin for error

Single-colour printing from a hand-press is forgiving enough. A second colour is not. The moment you lift the sheet to re-ink and re-lay it, you introduce the possibility that the red band at the top of the masthead lands three millimetres low, or canted, or both. That gap between intention and result is the registration problem, and the small flatbed press offers no mechanical solution.

The press has no side-lay stops, no feed guides calibrated to a hairline. What it has is a platen, a chase, and whatever the operator improvises. In practice, schools printing two colours solved this with pins or pencil marks on the tympan — the paper pad against which the sheet presses — so that the sheet could be seated in the same position for both passes. Two small pin-holes through a dummy sheet, pricked against fixed points, let every subsequent sheet find the same seat. The method is slow, adds a handling step per copy, and punches holes in the stock, but it works.

The alternative was to print the second colour wet into the first, keeping the sheet on the press and swapping only the forme. This demands a second forme ready before the first impression is pulled, and it demands that the press-operator not smear the wet ink while handling the type. Classes that tried it usually decided the pin method was cleaner.

Registration also rewards thinking at the design stage. A border that runs to the edge of a colour block hides a millimetre of drift. Two colours that do not share a hard boundary — a headline in red, body text in black, separated by white space — need no precise alignment at all. Many classroom newspapers that appear two-colour are, on close inspection, designed so that the colours never touch. That is not a compromise; it is sound presswork judgment applied before the stick is loaded.

The surviving sheets that show tight registration — a second colour sitting exactly inside a rule, for instance — were not achieved by machinery. They were achieved by a pinned tympan, a careful hand, and enough patience to spoil the first several copies before the method settled.