Focus on Artisan Culture: Letterpress Printing

Katey Schultz spent 4 years in a former life as a barista, serving coffee at Penland School of Crafts to gaggle of letterpress printers—ink-stained fingertips, colorful studio aprons, breathless drink orders between press runs, and all.

Most writers I know share the following dirty secret: we love letterpress printing. If given the chance to choose another artistic career, we’d gladly spill coffee across our laptops, ditch our stiff-backed chairs, and leap into the world of moveable type, fresh ink, and oh-so-tactile handmade papers.

What I’m talking about are those daytime fantasies that snag a writers’ attention. We glance up from our computer screens mid-sentence and start seeing words across a printed page. Call it positive projection. Call it delusions of grandeur. Regardless, every writer imagines his or her own words published in one form or another and if we’re going to daydream, why not imagine publishing those words using the most pleasing, sensorial kind of printing ever invented?

The thing I love most about letterpress artists is that they talk about their work in terms of touch and smell. It’s as though they’ve achieved some sort of contact high from the ink. Picture the children in Charlie & the Chocolate Factory, those lucky five who found the golden tickets and won their way into another world. Watching a letterpress printer engrossed in a project is not unlike seeing those golden ticket holders the moment they glimpsed Willy Wonka’s candy-filled “world of pure imagination."

During a recent trip to Portland, Oregon, I stumbled into Oblation Papers & Press and proceeded to lose an entire afternoon to a world so rich in the tactile experience of words and images, I contemplated throwing in my hat as a writer and begging the owners for an apprenticeship. Their versatile urban paper mill, letterpress print shop, paper boutique, and conservation ethics felt so much like home I almost curled up on a pile of Oblation handmade cotton papers and settled in for the night.

All of which got me thinking: Why letterpress? As Rainy Planet blogger reports, “The finished product has a tactile quality, since most modern letterpress printers choose to make deep impressions in the paper, to take advantage of what letterpresses can do that can’t be done by offset presses or photocopiers or inkjet printers. In its day, letterpress was the fastest way to print in volume. In an age of instant Internet publishing, it is a throwback to a slower era, where patience, craftsmanship, and quality mattered.” When it comes down to it, most writers I know are fighting the good fight using these same principles—patience, craftsmanship, and quality. We’re also interested in making a deep impression, metaphor intended, as no writer I know composes without audience and impact in mind. In an era of ever growing self-publishing coupled with a rise in MFA graduates saturating the market, working writers are faced with the perpetual conundrum of how to stand out.

Intrigued? Check out Briar Press, the AWP of the letterpress printing community that boasts more than 55,000 members. Or Laura M. Holson’s article in The New York Times, “Retro Printers, Grounding the Laserjet” for a brief, personable history. It’s no wonder esteemed publishers such as Copper Canyon have been selling handprinted broadsides for years. Or that established authors such as Dorianne Laux (whose latest poems, The Book of Men, hit #1 on Amazon last month) speak fondly of their “smaller works,” like Superman—a limited edition, letterpressed chapbook of Laux’s poetry published by Red Dragonfly Press.

Here’s hoping those letterpress artists out there adore us hermit writers as much as we adore them. Let the love affair go public!