A four-generation print shop on Commercial Street, printing wedding stationery, business cards, broadsides, books, and the occasional Sunday morning poster, on the same presses the founder bought.
Letterpress is the only kind of printing where the type bites the paper, and where the paper, in turn, remembers that it was printed.
The bulk of our shop's work. Cotton paper, deep-impression printing, one to three colors. From save-the-dates through thank-you notes, a complete suite typeset for a single wedding.
Two-ply 220-pound Crane Lettra, edge-painted to order. Single sided, double sided, or with a foil stamp. Minimum 100 cards. We design from your existing identity or set type for you.
The shop specialty. Hand-set in wood type from our collection of nineteenth-century cases. Printed on the Vandercook in editions of 50 to 200. Sized up to 26 × 40 inches.
Limited edition books printed letterpress and bound in cloth or paper wraps. We handle short editions of poetry chapbooks, exhibition catalogues, and centennial commemoratives.
The shop runs two pieces of working iron. The first is a Vandercook Universal III proof press, dated 1958, on which we print everything large or finicky — broadsides, posters, fine wood-type work.
The second is an 1893 Chandler & Price 10×15 platen press, foot-treadle driven, which has been in the shop since the founder bought it for forty dollars in 1899. We run the entire wedding-stationery line on it.
We do not own a digital printer. We do not own a heated cutter. The work leaves the shop the way it would have left in 1910 — printed, scored, cut, sometimes deckled by hand, never trimmed in a hurry.
We accept new commissions through written inquiry — by post, by electronic mail, or in person at the shop on Tuesday mornings when the door is open and the kettle is on. We reply within five business days.
Tell us what you'd like printed, how many, and by when. Send us examples of things you like. We will quote you honestly; if we can't take the job, we'll point you to a print shop that can.