Back in Print

By Coeli Carr

There's not much that ben webster, a stationery designer in Salt Lake City, Utah, won't do to get his hands on another letterpress machine.

In late 2003, Webster, who produces cards using that traditional process, took possession of letterpress No. 3--he currently owns seven--by dismantling and transporting it piece by piece through a shaft he had dug in a window well. "The owner of the press told me, 'If you can get it out of the basement, it's yours,'" says Webster, 29, who started Seraph Stationery a year and a half ago.

It's notable that letterpresses, weighing up to 2,500 lbs. and made by companies with Old World names like Vandercook, Heidelberg and Chandler & Price, haven't been manufactured for decades. Not surprisingly, printers covet them. That's why a machine in good condition can fetch a high price. A Vandercook might go for as much as $6,000; four years ago, you could have bought one for less than $1,000. "If one machine breaks down, I want to have another one to back it up," says Webster.

Only those antediluvian behemoths can create the signature sculptured, three-dimensional letterpress look of deep impressions made in paper. That's what attracts printers and consumers, says Fritz Klinke, 65, who has spent more than 50 years working in the printing industry. Klinke owns NA Graphics in Silverton, Colo., which sells letterpress-printing supplies and parts.

Klinke is seeing a letterpress renaissance. He estimates that over the past three years, about 500 people have joined the ranks of letterpress printers in the U.S. He has 3,000 customers. Most companies, he says, are one- to three-person outfits, and about 90% post revenues of less than $100,000.

Webster projects that his revenues this year will crack six figures. With two full-time and two part-time employees, he produces stock cards of his own design and wholesales them for $2 apiece (each retails for $4 to $4.50), fills wedding-invitation orders from retailers and does letterpress jobs for other designers. Webster's in it for the long haul. "The final product and the effect are what I'm in love with," he says.

So is Lisa Krowinski, owner of Sapling Press in Pittsburgh, Pa., who became a full-time letterpress operator in early 2004. She loves the instant gratification letterpress printing offers. "When you're done, you have a stack of whatever you've just printed right in front of you," says Krowinski, who owns three letterpresses. She's a one-person shop, dividing her time between turning out her own stock cards, which she wholesales for $2.25, and custom work like wedding invitations and personal stationery. She projects 2006 revenues in the middle five figures.

Paul Moxon, a consultant, designer and printer in Birmingham, Ala., who owns Fameorshame Press, has seen the growth of letterpress printing reflected in the popularity of courses he teaches around the country. Recently, at the San Francisco Center for the Book, both his classes were sold out. Moxon believes designers are attracted to the technique because it allows them to control the entire process and select paper not used in commercial printing jobs--lush sheets with deckle edges and uneven surfaces and such inclusions as bits of leaves or flowers. It's the uniqueness of a letterpress creation that makes people willing to pay a premium. "It is pricey, and that's one of the reasons why printers put the real bite into it, so you know it's letterpress from across the room," says Moxon.

Working in an archaic mode has its competitive advantages. "Because the presses are obsolete, you're not competing with other people who are getting the newest machinery, so actually our capital investment is far less than most offset printers'," says Julie Holcomb, who has run Julie Holcomb Printers in Emeryville, Calif., for 25 years. Ironically, she adds, advances in computer technology have allowed letterpress designers to use photopolymer plates--which contain the image and text to be printed--in place of hand-set type. "I hope the people who are printing now--me included--are helping develop an audience that will be cultivated and maintained so our craft can survive," she says.

Fortunately, those vintage machines are still out there to be tracked down. Klinke estimates that there may be as many as 20,000 left out of several hundred thousand presses that existed in the 1960s. That bodes well for diehards like Webster, who admits he can't walk by a printed piece of paper without touching it. "If I see a flat-printed piece," he says, "I think, 'Boy, that would sure look neat if it were letterpressed.'"