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.

"Projets,” like the one shown here, were student projects we composed of metal type at the Laboratory Press at Carnegie Tech University. The fine press printing program was the first of its kind in the U.S., started in 1922.

The Fellowship for American Bibliographic Societies (FABS} is having their annual conference at the University this weekend and today brought a lively group to Lead Graffiti to talk books and to breathe some creative and rarified bookmaking air.