Why do we love letterpress stationery so? Obviously, we’re a little biased – but it didn’t start out that way.
We first fell in love with letterpress as an artistic medium – it creates gorgeously tactile prints and beautiful, saturated colors. We also loved the authentic, vintage quality of it – it used to be the primary commercial printing technique back when commercial printing was still a small-scale craft and involved hand-setting individual letters of type, backwards. It reminded us of days gone by, an of the old nature books we used rummage through our grandmother’s attic. Today, it’s still a highly respected artistic medium, with studios like Arion Press in San Francisco producing sought-after limited-edition letterpress-printed books that are created in collaboration with fine artists from around the world.
Eunice and I love functional art, so the next step in our love affair was to figure out how to make the medium accessible. Greeting cards and custom stationery immediately came to mind as personal, creative, accessible, and affordable formats that many people could enjoy and share. Wedding invitations, in particular, mark an incredibly meaningful event and the first step in creating a new life, home, and family – if fine art is to have a place anywhere in people’s lives, it should be on such an occasion.
So, we started doodling and printing on a hand-cranked Vandercook printing press in Eunice’s garage, and the rest is history! Today, we continue to remain focused on letterpress as a fine art – our printers have advanced degrees in fine art, and have apprenticed with master printers for years. Our goal is to create beautiful products that have an heirloom-quality and that make art and craft a central part of our everyday lives.
Photographs courtesy of Sara Remington.