Go letterpress love! Congrats to Syracuse Street Press for this great write-up in Design*Sponge. We loved seeing Sycamore’s beautiful home interior, and their beautiful Vandercook, and their beautiful printing, and (gasp!) their beautiful Boxcar Base! We’re in Design*Sponge (kind of) — hooray! See more of Sycamore Street Press’ letterpress magic at their web site: http://www.sycamorestreetpress.com/. (photo from design*sponge)

This is a save the date we letterpress printed for Mandarin Oriental Hotel’s new location in Boston. We flat printed the liners on our offset press in a pattern that mirrored the blind deboss of the save the date. There was rumor that the actual invitations were going to be cut in stone (!).

The Boxcar Baby decided he wanted to see the Canadian Rockies, not next year, not next month, but RIGHT NOW. He booked a flight, made reservations at various places of lodging, and hoped to sneak away with his parents noticing, because he is 22 months and can do things by himself now, thank you very much. However….his parents spotted him in his Little Tykes car on the way to the airport and decided they probably needed to go with him. So the Boxcar Baby is taking his parents on a grand tour of the Canadian Rockies! We will have all sorts of adventures to tell you on this blog once we return. Look for more posts in early October, and take care!

Ah, nothing as pretty as letterpress coasters in sunlight, even if the beautiful room where we’ve been doing our photography was about 110 degrees! The only thing about letterpress coasters: they seem too pretty to use, don’t they? But then again, functional pretty things are good. Designed by Don Kilpatrick III.

Boxcar Press has been supporting American Forests in a variety of ways this year — we’re planting one tree for every platemaking order over $100 in 2008; we match tree donations that our customers make if they purchase trees during checkout on our web site; and we’ve done various promotions for our custom printing, like donating 100% of certain sample purchases to American Forests, or giving printing discounts if our customers donate a certain amount of trees. We just did a year to date tally of our tree donations, and saw that we have planted 4,168 trees through American Forests this year so far! Each new tree planted by American Forests will absorb roughly 740 pounds of carbon dioxide, so doing some fancy-pants multiplication, we found that our trees will absorb roughly 3,084,320 pounds of CO2. Pretty cool stuff! (Photo of tree & forest from a letterpress photo shoot in Buttermilk Falls - Ithaca, NY)

Last month, Boxcar Press launched BPPPPRP, a photopolymer plate recycling program to help keep letterpress plates out of landfills. We’re now working to set up drop boxes at several book arts centers across the country, so plates used by the centers’ students & members can be collected and recycled. Thank you to Sarah Nichols, the program manager at Center for Book Arts (CBA), for setting up a box for photopolymer plate recycling last week at CBA. The box is in the vicinity of CBA’s presses, and plates will be collected and sent to Boxcar Press every so often for recycling. Way to go, CBA!

Victoria Wilder from Two Letter Press in Saint Helena, CA, sent us the sweetest California thank you wine for helping her with her rush platemaking orders. It absolutely made our week over here. Thanks, Victoria! Our letterpress customers are honestly the nicest people you’ll ever meet. Here’s the Boxcar platemaking team with the wine.

Thanks to Boxcar Press’s Cathy Smith for finding this gem of a book cover.

From One Hot Summer by Eve Gladstone. Copyright 1988, Harlequin Books.

I only wish Jenna was printing on her Golding Jobber on page 124 when we read: “She found a cry of resistance welling up in her throat, but as he [censored by Debbie], [censored by Debbie], something happened that changed it, turned the sound into a moan of sheer, unexpected joy.”

Compare Dave Tribby’s excellent list of letterpress resources today with the same list in 1995. It’s amazing how much the online letterpress community has blossomed. Even more amazing: that Dave has been updating this resource since 1994 (pre-Internet Explorer, pre-Netscape, from the era when you would use Mosaic to access the web). Way to go Dave!