Starting to get pretty jazzed about the upcoming Tour de France 2026, which we always watch. Speaking as Ray, I’ve followed the Tour religiously since the late 1980s, when American Greg Lemond won 3 times. The 2026 Tour de France is dominated by the rivalry between Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard. Pogačar is looking for a record-tying fifth yellow jersey.
I was trying to think of something I could do to talk about the new stages while also including what we consider the major project of our 24-year career as letterpress printers.
Download the image 2500 pixels wide.
So, this is the plan. At each stage, we’ll post the five broadsides from the same stage each year from 2011 to 2015. The image above is for each of those opening stages. Not sure this works very well on a phone, but that is your problem and not mine
We’ll likely just show the same 5 images above and perhaps write a paragraph about each one, including some interesting details we remember about the design or the printing, with maybe a bit about what happened that day on the 2026 Tour. It will be fun reliving THE Lead Graffiti project.
During that time, always finishing the broadside on the same day as the stage, often with a sometimes strange and sometimes familiar collaborators, The broadsides are 14.25” x 22.5” (essentially a sheet of Somerset 300gsm textured white (we used soft white the first year as you can see above, but ended up thinking it had too much impact on our colors and switched to white the next four years.
Each day, I hope we can find the time to highlight some elements from the various broadsides. Originally, we did a broadside for each of the racing stages (21) and the rest days (2), and a composite of all of the broadsides overprinted on a single sheet.
Jill and I were in Belgium for the opening day prologue in 2004.
We ended up printing a letterpress book called “Moments Carved in Paper 4: Endurance Letterpress” about our Tour de Lead Graffiti experience. Two highlights from the project, among many others, include the sale of all 5 years in accompanying clamshells to the Library of Congress and the Special Collections at the University, and an exhibition of the first 3 years at The British Library in London.
This is the “Moments 4” book.
This is the look of one of the clamshell and four of our favorites from that year with the 2015 Tour.
