The Harry Smith Print Shop at Naropa U. makes good use of its collection of historic presses and type.
Boulder, Colo. — It’s fast-food, Fox News America I’ve been driving across for the past six weeks. Golden Arches peer over the trees at every other freeway interchange, while talking heads babble above news tickers beside the breakfast buffets of a thousand Holiday Inn Expresses. Poetry—and I say this as a fan, sometimes a dabbler—is no more relevant here than dust.
So to come upon a place like Naropa University, where poetry is written and read and listened to and discussed, is a delight. And then to get a tour of Naropa’s Harry Smith Print Shop, where verse is lovingly printed—with old metal type and antique presses, yet—well, it’s both Disneyland and Dollywood for dactyl addicts, an enchanted kingdom of fonts and figures. I could gladly have spent hours pulling out drawers of type (Caslon, Garamond, Perpetua, Valiant, Van Dijk), leafing through chapbooks and broadsides, poking among ornaments. Everywhere I looked something caught my eye—poems tacked to the walls, pica rulers, paper cutters, Celtic capitals.
The poet Andrew Schelling, who teaches poetry, translation, and Sanskrit at Naropa, showed me around the shop, which is not much larger than a garage. It’s named for a legendary music archivist and filmmaker who lived at Naropa for several years at the end of his life.
“We have historic equipment from several presses,” Mr. Schelling said. In one corner is the shop’s first press, a small antique Chandler & Price platen press that belonged to the poet Lyn Hejinian, who used it to publish poetry chapbooks under the Tuumba Press imprint. She sold it, Mr. Schelling said, to David Sheidlower, “a very fine and exacting printer” who also published a number of works on it.
“In 1992 David phoned me up and said, ‘I’m tired of printing. I think it’s really too old-fashioned—the future is video,’” Mr. Schelling recalled. He raised $2,500 to buy the press and have it moved to Boulder.
In another corner is a plain Vandercook proof press that once belonged to a Santa Fe print shop. The larger Chandler & Price press in the middle of the room, he told me, dates to 1915. “These are the kinds of presses that were in every little town in America. Any town that has newspapers, restaurants, business cards to make—these are the presses that did them.”
A press is nothing without type, of course, and the shop’s fonts have a rich history too. Some came from Ms. Hejinian’s press, some from the same collector who had acquired the shop’s Vandercook, and some from Ken Mikolowski’s Alternative Press, in Ann Arbor, Mich. The type, of course, is all set by hand, which is why the shop’s output is so small. Typically, each semester’s printing class produces just one complete poem. “Letterpress is a slow, painstaking craft,” Mr. Schelling said.
But the payoff can be spectacular. Mr. Schelling opened a handmade box with a copy of the shop’s magnum opus, a collection of 13 beautifully printed broadsheet poems, each written and signed by a different poet, among them Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ms. Hejinian, and Mr. Schelling. The project, which is largely the work of students, has gone on about 10 years—so long that four of the poets have died, including Robert Creeley and Barbara Guest.
But it is, Mr. Schelling said, “the finest project that we’ve done here.” It would make any poet proud and any book lover covetous. And the shop’s less ambitious works are no less lovely, even if they’re just covers for poems that students have printed off their computers. In our YouTube era—video really was the future, it turned out—anything printed by hand looks like a treasure.
9 Responses to A Letterpress Shop Survives, Printing Poems in the Era of YouTube
janeer1 - December 15, 2010 at 9:06 am
It is amazing that you can see the difference even in these photos, on a screen. In the late 1970s, when I was working in production management for a major publisher, we used to still use letterpress for chapter and section titles when we wanted elegance and quality but could not afford to do the whole book that way. I have a small collection of type, and a pair of earrings made out of type that I still wear sometimes. Printing is indeed a beautiful art and craft.
11182967 - December 15, 2010 at 11:45 am
When my junior and senior high school friends were jerking sodas in the 1950s I was earning my spending money running a hand-operated Chandler and Price press, setting my type out of a California case (you see those drawers these days with knickknack displays). I printed letterhead, envelopes,and business cards for my father’s church and local businesses, tickets for school plays and dances, wedding invitations, and (on short notice) memorials for the local funeral home. I still have samples of many of those items, including a phony wedding invitiation for a high school buddy and a funeral memorial for a very much alive but universally despised teacher. In those pre-photocopy days I took artisanal pride in designing the item, setting the type, inking the press, and hand-feeding the stock. In my prime I could print 400-500 items an hour feeding and pulling stock with my right hand while I operated the sidearm with my left. I visit our campus printshop from time to time to listen to the presses and smell the ink–that’s the perfume that brings back memories for me.
aregan - December 16, 2010 at 7:54 am
Just as wonderful is the Book Arts Program at the University of Utah Marriott Library. The huge production and teaching space takes up most of the 4th floor of the library, and the folks there do amazing work with students and old technology.
http://www.lib.utah.edu/portal/site/marriottlibrary/menuitem.ef20a2517b2174c01a3b9cdbc1e916b9/?vgnextoid=6fefc3a580d58110VgnVCM1000001c9e619bRCRD
mikemarotta - December 16, 2010 at 8:02 am
Letterpress is an industrial process, as exacting and personal as you want it to be.
Working in robotics, I met skilled trades electricians who brought traditional craft values to the automotive assembly line. Writing for a small midwestern newspaper, I admired the Photoshop artist who touched up my digital photographs.
Tracked in junior high school for college preparatory courses, print shop was the only industrial arts class that I honestly passed. As a professional writer, knowing how words become type was integral to the foundation of my craft.
But I shared workspace with writers who showed up at 8:00, took an hour for lunch, went home at 5:00, and called it a day. They just banged out words well enough because that was what they got paid to do. The Detroit automotive universe imploded because for too many workers, artisanship was an alien concept. From Gutenberg, to Franklin, to Hearst, printing has always been a job. Literally, a “job” is a piece of work in printing, just as the assistant is a “devil” and unsorted type is “pied.”
Whether you bring a bard’s finesse to routine, mind-numbing production depends not on the tools but on who you are inside.
dmoser5 - December 16, 2010 at 10:23 am
I hope Mr. Schelling doesn’t run that press wearing that lovely scarf…:P
@mikemarotta expressed it succinctly: at the end of the day, “letterpress IS an industrial process.”[emphasis mine] And yet, the fact that one can adapt that process to a means of artistic expression means that books and printing will never completely disappear…we still have a few whipmakers out there and heaven knows there is still a healthy market for blacksmiths and ironmongers.
Artisanship can be learned; sometimes it rises to art.
11182967 - December 16, 2010 at 3:25 pm
My printing (see #2) involved graphic design, mixing inks to customize colors, choosing and often combining typefaces, as well as physicial dexterity in setting type and running the press. I recall also the care with which my father cut mimeograph stencils for the church newsletter and bulletins. He had a carpenter build a backlit, glass-covered sort of an easel so he could use the tools then available to create decoration, shading, and fonts not available on the typewriter. From him I learned to value the pleasures these sorts of artisanal skills provided, especially for persons whose professional lives were not focused on physical activities–and, by extension, to value the work of those persons whose trades were based on these sorts of skills.
In those days in SE Michigan there was a whole class of persons in the auto industry, mikemarotta, who manifested such artisanal skills: tool and die makers, builders of clay models, etc.–skilled tradespeople who took pride in their work, mikemarotta, and whose descendants are still part of every enterprise which requires skilled labor. It was not they, or even the assemblers who denigrated quality but, rather, those who designed a production system which, unlike the assembly plants today, made it nearly impossible to produce the kinds of products which are made in auto plants today.
11182967 - December 16, 2010 at 4:11 pm
Sorry, mikemarotta, I only intended to address you once–didn’t mean to be heavy-handed.
klminma - December 16, 2010 at 10:38 pm
As someone who is more than mildly obsessed with poetry, I enjoyed learning about this letterpress and taking a closer look at the broadsides. However, I found the opening paragraph pretentious. I have no doubt that poetry is being read, wrought, discussed and declaimed in quiet, funky, and unnamed spots and living rooms across the America you describe. Perhaps it is the academy that is becoming increasingly irrelevant. And don’t the fourteen-year-olds all along that map of yours deserve the acknowledgment of the gut-wrenching, I-need-more-of-this, magic they feel when they hit a line of poem or prose that takes their breath away – no many how many Walmarts exist per the square miles of their lives? I love academia. I work in academia. I love the permission it gives to research what ever minute interest you ….no matter if no one else cares. But it is not the only place that beautiful ideas take root.
amylynnhess76 - January 27, 2011 at 1:50 pm
It gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling to see these letters again. See that fancy “A” in the lower left corner of the first photo? I used it in my first broadside. Naropa is amazing place, and the print shop is magical.