One of our esteemed Boxcar platemaking customers, Suann Song from Simplesong Design, is guest blogging on design*sponge this week where she showed off her Boxcar base and KF152 plates and is sharing insight into letterpress printing, design and more. Check it out!
We loved seeing Jessica Hische’s awesome business cards featured on FPO this week. Jessica is a designer based in Brooklyn and we are huge fans of her work. Her sweet letterpress business cards were printed using a standard Boxcar Base and 94FL plates at The Arm – check out that cool shot of her Boxcar plates!
[Photos by Jessica Hische]
Receiving awesome letterpress samples from our platemaking customers never stops being fun for us. These come from Officiana Briani in Raleigh, North Carolina where Brian Allen brings over 30 years of work in the field of typography to his love for letterpress. Brian tells us that his primary press is a Swiss-made Gietz, approximately 12×18 inches, unknown model, unknown date of manufacture, likely from the late 1950s or early 1960s – a sweet press, with adjustable roller height, considered one of the best hand-fed platen press ever made. He uses a Boxcar Base and KF152 photopolymer plates, except for those occasions where he turns to handset and wood type.
In addition to past work as a typesetter, calligrapher, digital typeface production worker and letterpress printer, Brian loves to teach the letterpress craft. “Teaching letterpress is a very important part of my mission, sharing my love of letterforms, etc. Most students are young women, but all are people seeking balance and to regain a sense of touch in their lives. Fewer than half of the students have thoughts of printing themselves, the rest just want to see what it’s all about and get their hands inky! I share my 30 years of knowledge of type and letterforms, let students look through my large library and soak in the camaraderie with other students who have felt alone in their passion for handcraft but have found a home at my studio. I love to emphasize finding the extraordinary (lovely letterforms) in the ordinary (a lowly trade). Words and their expression still matter in my world.”
Brian also has a really cool Albion handpress that he eventually plans to use to print posters, but currently uses for demonstrations when visitors come by the studio so they can print their own copy of a keepsake to remember their visit to Officiana Briani. Brian says, “It entrances and seduces people into the magic of communicating with letterpress! The press is an Improved Albion 18×24 from the 1850s, made in London. It’s a crude/elemental machine, but symbolizes much – the arguments over who we were to be as a country were printed on a wooden handpress, one lever pull at a time, just as our single vote makes a difference in the aggregate. The most refined thoughts of the Enlightenment were given physical form with a handpress, and I use mine to emphasize to young people that an individual’s thoughts and actions matter, can be given form. Truly the power of the press!”
Brian’s career has been a true evolution that has led him through three decades of work with typography and even led to his personal handwriting being developed into the Microsoft font Segoe Script, for which he is listed as co-inventor on the patent. He tells us that he found his path “accidentally, but inevitably by working first as a typesetter in Boston and New York in 1975-79, taking calligraphy classes and reading the history of printing and typography. In 1982 Sumner Stone hired me at Autologic, Inc. in Southern California, to work in the pre-desktop world of digital type. Autologic made 700 dpi typesetting machines for the newspaper industry. We used the German IKARUS software to digitize outlines of alphabets, which were converted to run-length encoded bitmaps.”
After a time, Brian found himself at Imagen Corp. making type in a proprietary digital format for before moving to IBM to make fonts in the Folio F3 format, then PostScript Type 1 followed by TrueType formats. During this time, he opened his first letterpress shop as a part time venture, before leaving IBM to make letterpress his full time career. Eventually he closed his shop and returned to font production before finally returning to letterpress in 2005 when he moved to Raleigh and set up shop with Officiana Briani.
According to Brian, “The 1980s/early ‘90s was a very exciting time to be involved with fonts as the desktop revolution happened…It is quite amazing to see how many “civilians” know what a font is now. I was a part of the “font wars” in the late 1980s – the format competition between Apple, Adobe, and Microsoft, with Type 1 and True Type. Now of course, we have the blend of Open Type. The font wars are over. What comes next?”
It just makes our week when we receive beautiful letterpress things from our platemaking customers, so we were thrilled to open our mail a little while ago and find some great letterpress pieces from Fitzgerald Letterpress in New Orleans, printed on a Heidelberg 10 x 15 windmill with a Boxcar Base and 94FL photopolymer plates. 
Owner John Fitzgerald was kind enough to send us some thoughts on letterpress and printing in New Orleans. John writes, “I’m running a mostly one-person operation in the Bywater section of New Orleans. Things are still a challenge here, but they were before Katrina too. I do custom work like invitations and business cards, plus some note cards and art prints that I sell at a local art market and wherever else I can. The letterpress scene here is small. When I moved here in 2003 there was one artsy letterpress outfit (Hot Iron Press) and they have since shifted to a fine art focus and don’t take much custom work. This town is not really up to speed with the hip, new letterpress scene, which is fine with me because being hip is a lot of work. As it is, there are a few people who like the look and want letterpress. As more people see it and want it word spreads and some day New Orleans will join the scene (which by then it will no longer be hip and we can all relax.)”
“The original idea came to do a print depicting something like the “last supper” but inclusive. We call it “All Are Welcome.” Girls stand very close to girls and boys hold hands with boys, men hold babies, old fat skinny young – we are all here. My wife Katy Quigley made the drawing and I cut the block and printed on Crane Lettra 14 x 20. Then Katy hand tinted them. People like the image so I scanned a print (not tinted) and sent you a re-sized file. Then I ran about 500 of them on Cougar (Domtar) 80# cover, natural white. Then I scored and trimmed them to A-7 size and wrapped them with a matching envelope. I think I’m done running cheap paper. Next time I’ll go with something like Crane Lettra (they also have a nice matching envelope.) The run was smooth and trouble free once I got the feeder to cooperate. I did a version of Pantone 4625 with some 874 metallic gold thrown in for that extra opaque punch and subtle glow.”
Thanks so much for sharing your work with us, John!
Okay, we’re in love.
Actually, we fall totally head over heels in love with the Studio On Fire calendar every single year, and this year is no different. The design is always amazing. The letterpress printing is always amazing (amazing solids, great impression, super crisp type).
And we’re so thrilled that the calendar is printed using our Boxcar Base and Boxcar’s photopolymer plates.
Studio On Fire, by the way, is a design and letterpress shop based in Minneapolis, Minnesota and they consistently create some of the most original letterpress work out there — so go check them out and get inspired! The calendar is available for purchase for $30 from their web site — and sure, it’s March, but that means you can still get nine more months of authentic over-the-top letterpress pleasure from this calendar. Also check out their awesome letterpress blog Beast Pieces.
Oh we love it when our platemaking customers send us really lovely letterpress samples! These come from Todd Thybert from Angel Bomb Design in Minneapolis–Todd uses our platemaking services and our Boxcar Base for his printing. He also wrote us a sweet letter: “I’ve been using your photopolymer plates for a year and a half and have thoroughly enjoyed the quality and service I get from Boxcar Press.” Angel Bomb Design has been around for 10 years, and started offering letterpress to clients in the last year and half, after receiving some letterpress tutoring from the good people at Minnesota Center for Book Arts. Angel Bomb Design now uses their 8×12 C&P and their 12 x 18 C&P to produce colorful works of beauty (with really nice letterpress solids, we might add!). We’re in love with all the samples, but in particular, we don’t want to let the “Minnesota” fine art print out of our site. Thanks so much for sharing your work with us, Todd!
One of the joys of the new year for us is letterpress calendars – 12 pages of pure letterpress pleasure! So we were thrilled this year to receive a beautiful calendar from one of our platemaking customers, Rick Ziesing, the owner of Red Oak Press in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. Turns out, in addition to being a letterpress printer, Rick is also a photographer and has taken amazing photographs of his shop, his Windmill, and his printing. His pictures remind us of why we love letterpress printing so darn much – because everything about this printing process is beautiful! Can you imagine an offset shop looking so gorgeous? (see more photos of more letterpress printing at Red Oak Press here)
Rick shared with us some thoughts about letterpress (see below), and all photographs are taken by Rick. The calendar was printed using the Boxcar Base and KF95 plates.
“We bought a beautiful ‘red ball’ Heidelberg Tiegel (windmill) in August of 2007, in order to make products designed in-house without those pesky clients telling us what to do.”
“Of course, I was not a printer, had never run a press nor even seen a Windmill in the flesh until it arrived. Armed with the Heidelberg manual, Platen Press Operation, by George J. Mills, and Kelsey’s little green book, I commenced my self education. The paper companies loved me as I burned through reams of cotton paper while learning to get the press to feed, then to print, then to print properly. Many trials and errors later, I am able to produce something of reasonably good quality.”
“This calendar was designed by Lori Gray, my wife’s partner in Kedash Design, a graphic design firm in Kennett Square, PA.”
“The printing of the calendar itself was not particularly difficult, registration was not critical but getting good ink coverage on both the text and the graphic for the month was trying. I resorted to running most colors twice through the press, which is supposedly a sacrilege but certainly gets the job done without having to resort to smashing one run and deforming the letters to get the graphic to print. I did some makeready by glueing some tissue thin press packing to the platen in certain areas. Of course, the Heidelberg is so beautifully designed that you can run pieces through multiple times and get dead on registration every pass.”
“The gray wash graphics were simple, once I got the color right. There’s just a hint of color anyway and lots of trusty transparent white was consumed. We bought a hand operated wiro binding machine for finishing as the cost of outsourcing 100 calendars to some drone in a copy shop was more expensive (and frightening) than just doing our own.”
“I use standard Boxcar Bases and the KF95 photopolymer. If you’ve dealt with them, you know that this is a top-flight operation.”
“Here are a few hard learned tips. If you’re running a Windmill, get it to feed perfectly before trying to print. If your final print looks bad, it can be a million things, but I always go to the packing first and use fresh tympan and packing for every run. Roller height is critical and may even need to be changed according to what kind of job you are doing. Don’t overink….as in most things, less is best.”
Letterpress printing is so darn pretty that we wanted to share it with the world – so Harold spend the afternoon filming our printer Jake interacting with one of our favorite Heidelberg Windmills as he printed some letterpress invitations — then Harold spent days and nights and days and nights editing the footage down into three really tight seat-gripping minutes of total printing beauty. Enjoy (and make sure to turn the volume up loud so you can dance along to the press sounds)!
Letterpress sure can be pretty, but sometimes there’s a need for things that are more than pretty right now. To be pretty + meaningful. It is SO inspiring to see good political letterpress being made right now. We fell in love with a previous broadside collaboration by Jessica Spring of Springtide Press & Chandler O’Leary of Anagram Press back around election time, so we were thrilled that these letterpress masterminds are developing a broadside series called (only half jokingly) the Dead Feminists Set. Their latest broadside, “Victory Garden,” features a lovely quote by Eleanor Roosevelt. It was letterpress printed from hand-lettered typography on 100% rag recycled paper using 94FL plates and the Boxcar Base. Chandler writes, “This broadside was kind of a monster for registration, so that grid on the base really came in handy.” More broadsides are in development too. Hooray! The previous drop-dead gorgeous broadside, “Come, Come My Conservative Friend,” sold out in just a few short weeks, and within 2 days of publication, Victory Garden has already sold 2/3 of the edition. What a letterpress success story. Victory Garden has edition of 76 and is priced at $30. Visit the Anagram Press web site to order NOW before the broadside sells out! Great work, Jessica & Chandler!