It was the summer of 2002 in London when our obsession with letterpress first saw the light of day. Two and a half years earlier an omen of our life-altering experience was foretold in the pages of Life Magazine.

The idea came from an MSNBC  interview about 10 days ago about the events along the Mexico border. It was taken from a momentary phrase during a 5-minute discussion. I wish I could remember who was being interviewed. We thought the sentiment was powerful.

We’ve often collaborated with groups to produce calendars. We often use the projects as an opportunity to experiment with a printing technique we’ve had banging around in our heads.

THIS POST IS NOT SPECIFICALLY ABOUT LETTERPRESS, but it has good tentacles into our letterpress lives and our love of postcards, especially political ones.

In late 2000 or early 2001, before our interest in printing slowly and patiently via letterpress, germinated, Bill Deering and I had a group of Visual communications students on the field trip to Ogilvy, an advertising agency in New York City. We had set up to meet with Nigel Kent, Ogilvy’s Director of Typography. Nigel was from London and we were in the process of scheduling our first VCUK trip that summer. We asked if he could suggest anyone outstanding that could talk to our group about typography. Nigel suggested an instructor at the Royal College of Art named Alan Kitching.

This was the first item of Empire type I've seen come up on eBay. With about 5 days to the end of the auction, I figured out the maximum I wanted to pay and set it. If someone went over it, so be it.

We are working to expand knowledge of our letterpress and bookmaking workshops and have accepted a request to participate in Winterthur Museum’s ‘Teaching Tuesdays.”

We always like working with techniques that have some lack-of-control built into them.