Start the Presses

From handmade hair accessories to artisanal pickles, there’s a metaphorical back-to-the-land movement for every profession. For graphic design, it’s letterpress, a labor-intensive printing process that creative types are taking up as an antidote to days spent staring at their iMacs. Produced on antique presses and characterized by heavily impressed lettering on thick paper, letterpress cards and stationery — if you’ve received a wedding invitation from an even vaguely arty couple in the past few years, chances are it was letterpress printed — are the graphic design equivalent of slow food. For designers who want to unplug, literally, letterpress is a chance to spend time refining their craft using a method that was considered old-fashioned long before the days of Photoshop. “People miss the hands-on experience of printing,” states Daniel Gardiner Morris, a fourth-generation letterpress printer and the founder of the Arm, the Williamsburg studio where many local printers have learned the basics of handling Industrial Revolution-era machinery. “Even if you don’t know anything about the process, when you pick up something that was printed on a letterpress, you know there’s something different about it. It was touched by human hands.” Here, the lowdown on five printers who are getting their fingers inky.

Nic Taylor received his first letterpress as a graduation present, but it gathered dust in his parents’ basement until he and his wife, Jennifer Brandt-Taylor, rediscovered it a few years ago. After spending two years commuting from Manhattan to Taylor’s parents’ house in Washington, three weekends a month to print, the pair set up a full-service design and letterpress studio in Garrison, N.Y., in 2009. Along with producing lovingly made, painstakingly researched wedding invitations — “we speak to our clients about everything from their favorite films to the type of music they listen to,” states Brandt-Taylor — the couple are designing one-of-a-kind coffee table biographies for the Memory House.

“I think people are tired of buying disposable things,” states Elizabeth diGiacomantino, who runs with her partner, Joseph Traylor. “I’ve had friends state they’ve framed our cards and put them on the wall, which is incredibly flattering.” Though many letterpress printers embrace an old-timey aesthetic, diGiacomantino and Traylor are resolutely modern. Their series of George Carlin cards, for example, was inspired by the stand-up comedian’s list of the seven words you can’t state on television. “You have to be selective about who you send those to,” diGiacomantino says.

“I went to grad school specifically to get away from the computer,” states Robert Fisher, a graphic designer who runs a letterpress studio and stationery shop with his wife, Christina Fisher, in a converted 1950s gas station in Sullivan County, N.Y. “Now I can spend four hours tweaking an ink color if I want. With commercial printing, you just spec your green and hope it comes out O.K.” Fisher likens the interest in letterpress to the Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain in the 19th century. “That was about a rejection of mechanization, a feeling that it was important to return to handmade things. That’s happening again in our post-industrial, supertech world.”

A bookbinder as well as a letterpress printer, Maggie Campbell works out of her 400-square-foot Brooklyn apartment, a feat made even more impressive by the fact that she has a toddler. Growing up with a dad who made furniture in his backyard wood shop and a mom who kept an etching press in the living room, she says, means that “doing something the simple way is not part of my heritage.” Like a lot of local printers, she prints massive jobs at the Arm, but the binding for her delicately stitched albums and scrapbooks is done at home, when 18-month-old Charlotte is napping.

More source:

Start the Presses - NYTimes.com
Karen Dalton-Beninato: Start the Presses: Leap Day Publication ...
Start the Presses: Sometimes an editor and his staff earn the right to ...
Intercollegiate Studies Institute - ISI Books - Start the Presses!

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Submited at Wednesday, April 13th, 2011 at 1:00 am on House by alliana
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