"Johannes Gutenberg, of the Gutenberg Bible fame, revolutionized the modern world when he invented the printing press in the mid-1400s. The use of moveable type printing swarmed Europe and the rest of the world in a short amount of time, and this basic printing technology, through many incarnations, was the dominant form of production for over 500 years.
While no longer valid for mass commercial use, letterpress printing has come into vogue as an applicable form of fine DIY printing and artwork in basements and garages around the world — evidenced locally by operations like Brian and Sara Turner's Cricket Press, Alex Brooks' Press Eight Seventeen, and the University of Kentucky's King Library Press.
From striking concert posters to stately social stationary, these businesses are a reminder of how yesteryear technologies are still viable for customers who want a product with more charm and distinction. But excellence takes time, and some projects, like intricate hand-bound books, can take years to complete. Other smaller projects, like business cards, can be completed in a matter of days.
As an absolute reminder about this obsolete technology, and as a way to see how our contemporary artists are re-interpreting and re-invigorating this tedious process, LexArts, with partial funding from Vice Mayor Jim Gray, hosted the letterpress exchange and traveling show Salad Days in November. The traveling exhibit highlights a collection of printmakers from across the country, and Canada, who have remained true to this antiquated process.
An ironic title that revels in the innocence and idealism of youth, Salad Days has brought together a collection of 35 pieces of work from 15 artists, and came to fruition via the modern world's most dominant form of communication — the Internet.
Brooks, a co-curator of the exhibit, met John Pyper, in Boston, through an online forum. Pyper runs a press in the basement of a Harvard dorm. After noticing obvious similar interests, the two wanted to do a print exchange, a letterpress tradition in which all the participants print enough versions of their edition to give to everybody involved, with other presses around the country they have become familiar with through various means, mostly online.
Brooks also got Brian and Sara Turner involved. They all contacted other presses to be involved in the exchange, but they soon thought it might be more beneficial if they clued the public into all the work that went into letterpress printing by showing off a wide range of artists.
"There's not many people doing what we're doing," Brooks said. "And there's not very much knowledge about it, especially when the dominant group of people who know about this stuff is sort of even past retirement and getting to the point where they're passing on. We thought it'd be cool if we all get to know each other, but it'd also be cool if everybody else got to know us, or knew that we were here at all, to show the breadth of everyone's different styles and potentials."
Letterpress' livelihood remains within the public's knowledge and understanding about the trade, according to the late Ross Zirkle, whom Brooks studied under at the University of Kentucky, where he also nurtured his affinity for the art while volunteering at the reputable King Library Press for five years. The King Library Press celebrated its 50th anniversary last winter.
There he learned, from Dr. Paul Holbrook, the press's director, the intricacies and patience associated with letterpress, and the philosophy of the artist Victor Hammer, the patron father of the King Library Press who believed that true art could only be rendered through the use of one's hands. The use of machines perverted the final product.
And while there is technically a machine involved with the process, the press is simply the means by which the art is applied to a surface. The real art lies within the proper alignment of thousands of tiny metal pieces to make a single page of a book, or carving an image into a woodblock which has to be manipulated each time a new color is applied to the print.
While letterpress enjoyed its heyday for centuries, it fell out of fashion with the advent of offset printing, which required fewer people and less time on a project. The new technology left the old presses, like Brooks' 1,200-pound Vandercook Universal 1, useless to the commercial industry. Useless, but not gone.
"The positive thing about that was that there were presses stacked up in warehouses just waiting to get thrown away. Anybody that wanted a press could just go grab one, basically. If you had a truck, you could have it for free," Brooks said. "A lot of people started doing the fine press stuff. They're taking what artists have always done, which is take an obsolete technology that's cheap and use it to their own end. In that way, it's still a really practical thing.
"It's not like we chose to do letterpress because it's esoteric and nobody knows about it. It's just because I want to make something with my hands, and this is the best way I can do it."
For more information on Press Eight Seventeen, visit www.press817.com; for more information on Cricket Press, visit www.cricketpress.com.