Do you have an etching press? It is one more thing that I;d love to have and my wife would hate fore me to have...
Yes, indeed I do have an etching press, albeit a small one - one of the last to be manufactured by Charles Brand, in fact.
Here is a link to a little pictorial that I created, in an effort to explain the complex etching process.
I must say, etching is a painstaking affair - definitely a labor of love. So many things can go wrong during the long and complex process - and people don't seem terribly interested in acquiring etchings. My press is, at this very moment, laying dormant and neglected in the tiny garage of Rafael Buñuel (for those of a certain age - yes, he is related to the late surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel - one of his two sons; the other son, Juan-Luis, lives in Paris). Perhaps one fine day I will have space to set up shop again, although I must admit that a whispering voice keeps telling me not to even THINK about such a thing.
BTW, I did mention, a few years back, that I did collaborate on two photogravures with Michael Montfort. We created the plates using half-tone exposures with a service that probably is no longer in business. And then I went through the laborious process of printing both plates in VERY small editions of only eight. I spit the edition with Michael, who eventually moved to Prague. I still two or three prints of each image (from my half of the edition; I have no idea of what became of his).
Here is one of the images...
And here is the other...
It was dumb of me to not take ANY photos of our collaboration process. We were, alas, too busy quaffing beer in every spare moment. I did, however, snap a photo of Michael perusing the Fante biography that Stephen Cooper had recently given me...
