The house
A plate room at Foundry Row, a press hall, an archive of fifteen hundred steel plates, and about thirty people.
Intaglio has printed from the same building since 1874. The plate room is on the ground floor at the front, where the light is; the press hall is behind it; the archive is in the basement, at a stable temperature, holding a little over fifteen hundred steel plates.
What we do
We make documents that have to be trusted. Diplomas and academic awards. Share and membership certificates. Provenance seals for catalogued objects. Admission tickets, duty stamps, and authentication labels for manufacturers whose products are copied.
A commission normally begins with a conversation about where the document will spend its life, because that decides the substrate, and the substrate is the only decision that cannot be revised later. Design follows; plate cutting follows that. A first-time job of any complexity takes between eight and fourteen weeks.
How we specify
We build every specification as a hierarchy. The first feature must be checkable by an untrained person with no equipment: hold it to the light, tilt it, touch it. The second must be checkable by the issuing institution with one inexpensive instrument. Only the third belongs in a laboratory, and it is there to settle disputes rather than to prevent them.
That order is unfashionable. It also produces documents that are genuinely checked, rather than documents that merely look as though they could be.
The register
Everything the house can do is published in the register of security features, with a plain description of what each feature is, what it deters, and how the holder of a document confirms it. We do not publish methods, formulations or plate geometry, and we do not discuss the specification of one client’s work with another.
Apprenticeship
There are four apprentices in the plate room at any time, on a five-year indenture. Hand engraving is not a skill that survives being written down, and the archive downstairs is the teaching collection.