Sometimes it is a great time to be a letterpress printer. Printing has obviously played an important role in protesting in newspapers, books, and posters. The Trump elections offered us a number (actually you could probably say invinite) of opportunities.
Our involvement with the resistance group Indivisible gave us ample opportunities to print postcards and protest march signs that Indivisible supporters could use. Nowadays, the cost of stamps, even for postcards, has gone up so high that it is hard to justify.
During Trump’s first term, we got involved with a political group called “Indivisible.” We printed a couple dozen different cards, which we would send to all of the United States Senators, Republicans and Democrats alike. Did it do any good? To us, it did.
We were moved by the story of Otto and Irene Hampel, a German couple who the WWII Nazis executed for making a series of hand-drawn postcards that they would drop on staircases for people to pick up. Here is one of the surviving cards.
Starting in 2025, we’ve worked to up our game a bit. Here are a few of the early ones. We print at least 300 of the two cards each month to start. We give them to all attendees at the monthly 302United meetings and have started giving them to participants at marches.
We are currently reworking the Auschwitz card to refer to the El Salvador terrorism confinement center, CECOT.
Another one that has gotten some legs is “Resist.” Jill did a hand-rolled piece she called “Trees.” I took it and added the word Resist, based on the concept of “resisting amidst the chaos.”
Cutting the “wood type,” or you might say “book board type,” using our laser cutter allowed us to work on our largest iron hand press and 26” x 40” paper. The image below shows the 25” x 38” press bed type.
We’ve reworked the typographic mark a couple of times, trying to balance the readability and the image of chaos, to side just a touch on the readability.
We’ve made the typographic mark into a banner we use when participating in political marches.
