This longform article is a complex and fascinating POV thrill ride into an oft unknown and unacknowledged operation vital to preserving a vanishing art. Read this article in spurts/chapters, if need be. 

I was introduced to Jody Harnish by his sister, the amazing Detroit collector, Tracy Aldrich. Jody gave me a tour of his collection and introduced me to his friend and business partner, Fritz Swanson. 

Jody and Fritz and I toured an old tooling plant which houses some of their type casters, including a linotype, Ludlow, and an elrod. Together they run a non-profit called The Printing Stewards which is focused on preserving the art and tradition of typecasting. 

All printing used to be done using what is called the “letterpress” method. That means metal letters were assembled into the text, and then those letters were inked and pressed into paper. Those metal letters were cast. When Gutenberg invented the casting method in the 15th century, each letter was cast by hand one at a time. In America, in the 1840s, typecasting was finally mechanized.

Typecasting machines made all of the letters used in world printing from the 1840s through until the 1950s. The New York Times, for example, finally retired its metal type shop in 1977. When the Apple Macintosh was introduced in 1984, it came with “fonts” preloaded, and that finally allowed publishers to make a clean break with the ancient metal type past.

After meeting Jody and Fritz, I realized that whenever you select a font in Microsoft Word, there is a 500 year industrial history just below the surface. A hot, dangerous, dirty history that deserves to be preserved.

The Printing Stewards are on a mission to save that history. And they need your help. They are seeking funding to buy and operate a 10,000+ sq ft building in Southeast Michigan. They need their own dedicated building to house the machines and to host communal typecasting, along with creating a lending library for matrices and parts, conducting workshops and more. 

Jody also showed me how to hand-cast handset lead type at his house on the front porch. This was typecasting as Gutenberg had done it. The lead was melted at 600 degrees down to a liquid in a little melt pot, then he used a dipper ladle to pour it into a mold and create type. It was remarkable. 

I’ve crafted a set of questions for the Stewards, and Board President Fritz Swanson is here to set about answering them. There are four members of the board, Fritz, Jody Harnish, Val Lucas and Erin Beckloff. They will chime in here and there.

Let’s hear it directly from The Printing Stewards.

What year did The Printing Stewards start? How did it come about, what’s the official inception story?

The Printing Stewards were formally recognized by the IRS as a 501c3 Non-Profit in April 2022.

The work Jody and I (Fritz Swanson) and the board are doing is pretty complicated. We are preserving assets from two different corporations, Jackson Typesetting and the American Type Founders. I’ll talk about the Jackson Typesetting stuff at the end of this interview. Up top, I want to focus on the American Type Founders material, which we received from the Estate of Greg Walters. The ATF stuff is the cornerstone of our collection. (The next section will define what ATF is, and why it is important.)

(Greg Walters demonstrating a Kustermann Foundry Caster to students I had convened in 2018)

Gregory Jackson Walters was a significant member of the printing and typecasting community in the United States for most of his adult life. He was a commercial printer as well as a hobbyist. He was a member of both the American Typecasting Fellowship, the organization of active type castors, and the Amalgamated Printers Association, the primary hobbyist community dedicated to preserving letterpress printing.

Erin Beckloff, an Ohio based printer, graphic design professor, and the director of the film PRESSING ON, was a good friend of Greg’s through the APA community. She had long been committed to helping Greg and his family with his legacy planning.

I, Fritz Swanson, a Michigan based writing lecturer at the University of Michigan and design history journalist, had known Greg since I wrote a profile of the typecastor Theo Rehak in 2010. The very short story here is that Theo was the last man hired and trained by the American Type Founders Company. When ATF went bankrupt in 1993, Theo helped the broader typecasting community buy key pieces of equipment from the auction. Theo bought a collection of machines, and Greg bought the other major collection of machines. I profiled Theo in 2010, but then in 2012 Theo gave up his machines to a collector in Europe. Theo had been actively casting type while Greg had primarily been preserving his machines but not using them. Once half of all the remaining ATF machines left the US, I became worried about what remained.

I ran a letterpress studio at the University of Michigan that I founded in 2013. At that time the Ann Arbor District Library was starting their own letterpress studio. And so Jody Harnish, one of the librarians running that project, approached me to help them set up their studio. At that time I connected Jody and Greg.

Along the way, Jody and I carved up the remains of Jackson Typesetting (we’ll describe JT later). I bought the images, Jody bought the machines, and the AADL bought a lot of the type. 

I was actively corresponding with Greg through these years, and bringing students down to visit him and see him operate his machines. Jody came along on one of these trips. By 2019, Jody and I spoke with Greg about creating some sort of plan for the preservation of his collection. Greg was 66, and we all had the intention of slowly building something together.

(Greg Walters “fluxing” the pot on the ATF Giant Pivotal)

In November of 2019, Greg had Jody and I down to Piqua, Ohio where he lived so we could start to learn how to operate one of his machines. We spent a day learning about the ATF Giant Pivotal Caster, which can cast type up to 144pt (that’s a hunk of metal 2 inches by 2 inches by 1 inch). The machines don’t like the cold, so after that first day we agreed to reconvene in the spring of 2020.

Here is a video of us working with Greg:

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The spring of 2020 did not go as planned.

During the height of the pandemic, Jody continued to visit Greg (and he can probably add some more detail about that), but I was focused on pivoting all of my teaching work, and helping my children pivot their schooling. I was basically checked out for all of 2020.

(Jody Here: I visited Greg a few times the summer of 2020, to work on casting a font of type on the ATF Giant Pivotal caster, that Fritz and I had trained on in Fall 2019. With Greg’s help I chose a typeface from his matrices acquired at the ATF auction in 1993. Raleigh Gothic Condensed is a weird and fascinating typeface, and we decided to cast it in 144 point. It isn’t gothic really, it’s almost grotesque, in the best way! Here’s a pic of a specimen sheet that Greg printed with the type. There are several stories to tell about technical challenges involved in the casting itself.) 

In 2021, Greg informed us that he had been diagnosed with cancer. He said that we should get a move on with building something. At the start of 2021, Greg’s view was that he had another 10 years left. In that context I reached out to Erin Beckloff, and Erin and Jody and I started meeting regularly VIA zoom to make plans for a world without Greg. The Stewards really started in these meetings.

We communicated with Greg and with his family about what we believed needed to happen in terms of preserving Greg’s collection. As the year unfolded, Greg’s prognosis worsened, but he always maintained a belief that he had several years in front of him.

(Greg [right] in 2021. We all came down to help Greg sell this very rare Linograph to his friend [left] Dr. David MacMillan.)

Greg owned a home in Piqua, Ohio. It was a small ranch house he had built. It had an attached and a detached garage. And then, several blocks away in an industrial area he also owned a 4,000 square foot pole barn. The barn was filled with machines. His house was filled with machines and books and material. His attached garage was filled. His detached garage was filled.

In January of 2022 Greg was prepared to consult an attorney about his assets, his will, and whatever institution we were building. Unfortunately he died before he could finalize his wishes with regard to his printing collection..

We were formally recognized by the IRS as a 501c3 Non-Profit in April of 2022.

We then spent all of 2022 organizing volunteers to clear out Greg’s home so that his family could sell his home and settle his estate. We moved everything we could to his pole barn, and at the end of the year when the home was cleared and sold, the family donated the barn and all of its contents to The Printing Stewards. This included all of the books in his library, as well as maybe 100 tons of machines and material.

Since before we even took ownership, Greg’s sister Connie Mann worked tirelessly to carefully box and catalog thousands of books. Greg had books in every nook and cranny, even in his kitchen cabinets. There are metal and wood type specimens from Europe, the Americas, and Australia. There are machine catalogs and manuals, as well as educational and scholarly works. And of course there is a robust fine press collection spanning decades of American print production. 

In March of 2023 we formally owned the pole barn in Piqua, Ohio. 

Below are a few photos of volunteers during the move.

(Aaron Bushaw, Anna Cornel and Sierra Brown in the old garage on Greg’s residential property.)

(Aaron with one of many truckloads of brass matrices pulled from Greg’s garage.)

(Sierra in Greg’s basement assessing what needs to be moved.)

(Gerald Schulze and Li Chen of Small Works Detroit moved SO MANY THINGS.)

(Eastern Michigan University Art Professor Ryan Molloy works with Aaron to carry a Monotype Keyboard.)

(Jacob Simpson of the Cincinnati Type and Print Museum talks with Dr. David MacMillan about the best way to disassemble this elrod machine.)

(Amos Kennedy came by one day to lend a hand.)

(Fritz Swanson at the pole barn where everything went. [Photo by Sven Nelson of Pineapple Press])

Can you please explain in detail what your program does and what main info you would like the general public to know about it? What are the most important and significant aspects about what you’re doing?

We preserve historic typecasting equipment. We are especially focused on machines from a company called the American Typefounders Company. Which requires some context to explain.

Printing was a cornerstone industry in the colonial period. Newspapers and Publishers formed the backbone of the country, connecting the disparate English settler communities up and down the eastern seaboard. There is a reason that the First Amendment of the Constitution protects the press. The Revolution was born in the free press.

But at that time Benjamin Franklin noted as early as 1727 that “there was no letter-founder in America”. All of the metal type used by printers in Colonial America was imported from Europe. It was widely understood that our ability to freely communicate needed to be grounded in American industry. We could not rely on foreign imports to maintain our national communication system. Metal type WAS the communication system.

Several different entrepreneurs tried to create an American typecasting industry. Franklin was one of several groups that attempted to set up a successful type foundry. None of the 18th century foundries succeeded. But the remnants of Franklin’s foundry, as well as equipment from the others, ultimately came together in several successful foundries at the start of the 1800s.

Franklin’s equipment formed the basis of a foundry called Binny & Ronaldson, a foundry that would ultimately become known as MacKellar, Smith and Jordan. Through the 19th century several dozen type foundries grew up in many of the major American cities. And all of them ultimately reach back one way or another to these early colonial efforts.

In 1892, because of technological change, twenty three of the more than 30 foundries in the US came together to form a single conglomerate. MacKellar, Smith and Jordan was the lead of these foundries. That conglomerate was called The American Type Founders Company.  It was sort of the General Motors of type. In the years following 1892, all of the remaining foundries either were bought by ATF, or they went bankrupt and their assets were consumed by ATF.

ATF was the corporation which carried forward the traditions and history of American metal type. It was a history that stretched back to Ben Franklin and the colonial printing tradition. ATF employed thousands of people across the country, and across North and South America. It had 100s and 100s of specially built machines dedicated to designing and manufacturing new metal type. It was at certain points in its history the largest metal type manufacturer in the world, and by some measures it made the very best metal type that had ever been made, and will likely ever be made.

The gap between what people know about ATF today, and its significance in American and global history, is hard to overstate. And ATF is itself just the shell of American type founding of the mid-19th century, when the cultural significance of metal printing type was at a global peak. Every book in America pre-1886 was printed with hand assembled metal type. Virtually all of that type was made at one of the foundries that would eventually become part of ATF.

Leaves of Grass was handset under Walt Whitman’s direction in Brooklyn, NY. Whitman was himself a typesetter, which means he made his money in his early career by hand setting type. That type was most likely made at James Conner’s Sons Foundry in New York, founded in 1827, one of the foundries which ultimately became ATF.

Pick a book from before 1886. Look up its publishing city and date. Look at the dominant foundry in that city for that date and you will almost certainly find a foundry that ultimately became part of ATF.

All of those preceding foundries cast type using a limited set of equipment. They had matrices, which are the dies that form the face of each letter. Those matrices are affixed to the front of a mold which forms the standard body of the type. So a 14pt mold can take on all of the letter faces in a 14pt set of type. The foundries then either had molds for casting the type by hand, or had a machine that the mold fit in. Each foundry was a collection of matrices, molds and machines, and the tools for making new matrices.

When ATF formed in 1892, it collected together all of the matrices, molds, machines and supporting material from all of the foundries which preceded it. This was tens of thousands of individual items.

From 1892 to 1993, the vast majority of this material was disposed of as part of ATF operating as a corporation. But even by the end, there were still thousands and thousands of elements left.

At the auction, Greg acquired ten Barth casting machines (we currently have nine of them), and seven pivotal casting machines, as well as two Benton matrix engraving machines (we currently have one), and 1124 sets of matrices. A tiny fraction of what remained of ATF. But it represented a little less than half of all that was preserved.

Here is Greg’s account of the 1993 auction: https://printingstewards.org/ATAUCTION.html 

When Greg died, we inherited the responsibility of carrying forward the legacy of ATF. And when I say “we” I mean everyone in the world. The Printing Stewards are just the institution helping to lead that effort. We have Greg’s collection. But we are also concerned with tracking and where necessary preserving, the remaining fragments of ATF represented in other public and private collections.

At this stage we are sorting and cataloging Greg’s collection. We are creating the space to restore and bring back into use core ATF machines. 

Below are a few photos of machines and matrices.

(Board member Erin Becloff (center) and Stewards Sierra Brown (right) and Phil Driscoll (left) working in the barn.)

(Just some of the 46 casting machines in the collection. Up front is ATF Barth 233, a 14pt machine.)

(This is a matrix used to cast the Cap A for ATF Stencil.)

(This is a full set of matrices used to cast ATF Pericles in 24pt and 18pt.)

(Greg was especially fond of these, used for casting ornaments called Penline Flourishes.)

Any fun facts/ interesting trivia about your operation or anything related to it? What type of skills and equipment are required?

The famous Got Milk advertising campaign from the 1990s was centered around a typeface called Phenix. Phenix was designed in 1935 by Morris Fuller Benton, the head of the design department at ATF. This typeface originated at ATF, and we hold the matrices for casting it in sizes from 24pt up to 72pt. These are the original and unique matrices as cut at ATF in 1935.

We have three Barth casters that are good candidates for restoration. They are a 14pt, a 24pt, and a 72pt machine. We hope to get the 72pt machine working within the next 18 months. Once it is operational, we will be able to cast Phenix again at 72pt, using the original matrices and an original machine. It will be the only way in the world to cast that type again as it was originally intended.

Typecasting in general requires patience and a certain level of bravery. The machines melt type metal at between 700 and 800 degrees. The metal is then injected into the mold against the matrix at high pressure to form a single piece of printing type. The type is then ejected and in some machines it is trimmed and finished, while with other machines that finishing work needs to be accomplished by hand.

Once made, the type is a semi-durable tool necessary for printing. The printer will use the type for many thousands of prints, but over time the type will wear away, and a new piece of type will need to be cast.

If we are to preserve traditional printing, we need to preserve metal type casting.

What are some of the biggest misunderstandings/misconceptions that people have about what you do? 

The vast majority of people have no idea what we are doing. Most people alive today have only a very vague notion of what letterpress printing is. Many people probably don’t even know about that historic tradition. If we live in a world where a 20 year old doesn’t know what a VHS tape is, it is hard to expect the average person to understand and appreciate metal type.

Within the letterpress printing community there is a similar level of vagueness when it comes to people’s understanding of how type is made. Some letterpress printers don’t even use metal type. They work with wood type, or with plastic plates made by a computer. Only a small fraction of printers really understand how metal type is made. And among them, an even smaller fraction could actually operate a machine that makes metal type.

On planet earth right now, maybe 200 people could operate a typecasting machine that makes hand set type. Maybe 100 could do it well. And even fewer could repair a machine. (I for example am in that 200, but not in that 100.)

There are more machines than there are people with the skill to operate and repair them. And there are very few machines.

Anything else not mentioned that you would like to include? 

It’s worth mentioning here that Jody and I took on preserving Jackson Typesetting privately, before we got involved with Greg. It’s a whole distinct and wild collection. Eventually it will be part of the Printing Steward collection, once we have a bigger building.

As I noted above, Jody and I were collecting material personally, and for our respective institutions. Jackson Typesetting was a company that set type for major publishers in the middle of the 20th Century. Typesetting houses like Jackson used some hand set type (usually purchased from ATF) as well as linecasting machines such as the Linotype.

The Linotype was commercialized in 1886. It’s a keyboard operated casting machine that casts an entire line of type at once, as a single solid slug of metal. It’s radically different from the hand set type tradition which uses individual letters which can be set, and reset, over and over. With a Linotype you set a whole line of type at once, but once you are done, you melt the line down in the pot of the machine and cast a new line later.

The Linotype is especially good for body sized typefaces. Which is to say, type below 14pt. The bulk of the type used in book and newspaper printing is type of this size. So, when the Linotype was perfected, the foundries which made hand set type saw their market share radically reduced. The Linotype was to the type foundries what the internet was to traditional book publishing.

The invention of the Linotype is the reason ATF had to form. Otherwise all of the foundries were going to go bankrupt.

So, in the 20th century, lots of companies rose up that had banks of Linotypes, and they were dedicated to just typesetting books. Publishers sent manuscripts to these typesetting houses, the houses set the books using their linotypes, and then they prepared the typographic output for different printers to turn them into finished books. Printing technology changed rapidly through the 20th century, which made it so that printers no longer wanted to handle the type inhouse.

It was in this context that Jackson Typesetting specialized in setting the type for mass market paperback books. Paperbacks were printed on flexographic presses. Basically, the plates for the books were big rubber stamps. And Jackson Typesetting specialized in taking metal type foremes and making from them rubber stamps.

So, for example, take Night Shift by Stephen King. The New American Library edition from Signet Books in 1979 was set by Jackson Typesetting (via a contract that passed through an intermediary). That meant in Jackson, Michigan the manuscript was typed out (likely by a woman) operating a teletype machine in their typing pool. The punched tape was then fed into a tape interface on one of their Linotypes. It may also have been directly typed on a Linotype by a man operating the machine. They had several workflows. But then the Linotype cast the book line by line. All of those lines were gathered on steel trays called galleys. 

The galley trays used at JT were about the width of a paperback book page, and could hold three pages of type. They had rolling galley cabinets with 100 galleys in a cabinet. The current edition runs for 544 pages, so it would have filled almost two of those cabinets as it was being set. Each of those cabinets is about the size of R2-D2.

The title page of the edition was hand drawn by a designer, and that art was then made into a zinc printing plate. The plate was mounted on wood and put at the start of the first galley. The galleys were then proofed on a small automatic press JT had in shop, and those galley proofs were then set on to the publisher for corrections. One of those galley proofs, which had come from the press and type in Jackson, Michigan, would have gone all the way back to Mr. King for final approval.

Once the formes were approved, the galleys were taken to a machine at JT called the Moldmaster. In this machine, heavy board was pressed against the type, make a matrix for the three pages in that galley. They usually had two galleys on the machine, so six pages in all were made into a single hard board matrix. From that matrix they would make rubber printing plates. So in all they would have likely made 91 matrices for Night Shift.

While Jody and I were surveying what remained of Jackson Typesetting. He identified that they had one remaining Linotype with its assortment of matrices and supporting equipment. And I saw they had boxes and boxes of the old printing plates used to print the title pages and illustrations.

Jody bought the casting equipment. I bought the graphic archive, as well as one of the galley cabinets. We intend eventually to incorporate these into the Printing Stewards collection. This is a unique Michigan aspect of the larger story of type and book making.

Right now Jody’s machines are in storage in Jackson. And my plate collection forms the basis for my private press The Index. Subscribers to The Index (theindexpress.com) will get a print from one of the title pages with each issue, which also includes poetry and art bought from living artists and writers, as well as curated material from the past.

(The title page for The Colour Out of Space by H.P. Lovecraft, printed from the original plate for issue 16 of THE INDEX.)

Any upcoming events or items of business (for this year or next year or beyond) that you would like to mention?

We have two machines on a clear repair plan. The Giant Pivotal will be getting a new thermostat. And the 72pt Barth Caster will hopefully be brought back into operation. We hope that the pivotal will be reliable enough to allow us to cast large pieces of type in small quantities. There are several large ornaments that haven’t been seen or used in American printing for probably 100 years that we intend to make available to printers.

Here is a video of our first test casting using the pivotal:

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Here is a video of the five machines we are currently working on:

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The 72pt Barth hasn’t operated for more than a decade. Of our Barths, it is the closest to working order, so we hope to get it operating so we can learn about how all of the machines work. There are three people alive in North America who have operated Barths. Once we have one working, we will be inviting them to Ohio for a skill exchange so we can preserve machine knowledge. From there we haven’t made a clear plan. But it is likely that we could start making solid cast 72pt foundry type again. Our Barth is to our knowledge the only machine left in the world capable of making that kind of high quality type at that size.

(Jody Here: I like to think of the difference between a Pivotal caster and a Barth caster as the difference between a handgun and an automatic machine gun. Pivotals are relics of the victorian age and cast one piece of type at a time, but Barths are automatic and set squarely in the machine age, so you throw the switch and it goes off and does it’s own thing. This can be quite harrowing when thinking about the 72pt barth we are hoping to restart, it’s casting a golf ball sized blob of molten lead under high pressure, and it’s ejecting a piece of type every couple seconds, so if anything goes wrong, you’ve got a problem.)

But, because the machines are about 3 hours away from Jody and I, our work is necessarily very slow. Our other goal for the near term is to find and buy a building in southeast Michigan so that we can work on the machines more regularly.

If we had a building we owned up here, we could work on the collection every week rather than every month. And we would be able to build a community around the collection more effectively. The machines require special care, so we wouldn’t yet be able to make them accessible to the general public. But we would be able to connect with printing enthusiasts, as well as people interested in industrial history and craft skill preservation. 

We would ultimately like a center dedicated to metal type making, use and history. It would be like a special collections library that had spaces for the public, as well as spaces for specialized researchers and craftspeople. And of course we want to be able to supply our regional printing communities with high quality cast material to support their public engagement work.

In order to do all of this we need to grow our community of supporters. The ideal way to support us is by joining our Patreon (patreon.com/theprintingstewards) where for $3 per month you can get regular updates on our progress. We are seeking a broad and diverse base of supporters, which is why we have set the baseline donation low. 

People can also of course support us with one time donations by check or through paypal (https://printingstewards.org/donate.shtml) or by reaching out for other opportunities. Or just by following us on Instagram and/or Bluesky and telling other people about the work we are doing.

The ultimate way to support us is by educating yourself and others about printing history, and the unique role that metal printing type has played in global history.

How many people work on the program? Is it just you two?

Jody Harnish, Erin Beckloff and Fritz Swanson are the three living founders. We are also the board which manages the institution. Val Lucas joined the board in 2024.

We have an active community of volunteer Stewards who work at the barn, with the library, and on digital preservation work. There are at least 38 active volunteers.

We also have over 100 Steward patreon supporters who donate a minimum of $3/ a month to help cover the basic costs of owning the building.

Since this is a complex story, can each of you please list your various areas of expertise and interest and anything else you work on? 

Fritz:

Fritz Swanson teaches writing, literature, and book history at the University of Michigan. He received his MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction writing at the University of Michigan in 2001. He has written for publications such as The Believer, Print Magazine, McSweeney’s and The Christian Science Monitor. He was the founding director of The Wolverine Press at the University of Michigan from 2013 to 2024. He is a co-founder of The Index, a quarterly letterpress and poetry publication. He lives in Manchester, Michigan with his wife and two children. He and his wife run The Manchester Mirror NPO. He can be found online at fritzswanson.com. 

Fritz Swanson is a co-founder of the Printing Stewards, and President of the Board. He is co-managing the Gregory Jackson Walters Machine Collection.

Erin:

Erin Beckloff is a connector in the printing community. She holds an MFA in Graphic Design from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Erin is the co-director and writer of the documentary “Pressing On: The Letterpress Film.” She co-founded and coordinates LEAD: Letterpress Educators of Art & Design. For over a decade she served as a professor of Communication Design at Miami University where she revitalized the Curmudgeon Press type shop. She has given presentations at regional and international typography, design and book arts conferences as well as taught workshops and lectured at universities across the US and UK. She lives north of Columbus, Ohio with her daughter and husband and shares her workshop with her Dad aka. Moore Wood Type. 

Erin is a co-founder of the Printing Stewards and a member of the board. She is caring for the Gregory Jackson Walters Typographic Library.

Jody:

Jody Harnish is a Librarian at the Ann Arbor District Library where he focuses on cataloging, item selection and public programming. He received his Masters of Science in Information and Library Services in 2005 from the University of Michigan. Jody started the AADL non-traditional items collection, which has included (among other things) tools, telescopes, microscopes, synthesizers, data meters, and games. He co-created and continues to advise the AADL Letterpress Lab which has for several years been a free and regularly scheduled public program which introduces traditional printing techniques and typesetting to all ages. He co-planned and co-hosted two AADL Wayzgoose that drew national audiences. He repairs broken telescopes, and is an amateur watchmaker. He once manually re-cataloged 35,000 audio CDs and 15,000 DVD/Blu-ray discs by hand. 

Jody is a co-founder of the Printing Stewards, and a member of the board. He is co-managing the Gregory Jackson Walters Machine Collection.

Val:

Val Lucas, a graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art, runs Bowerbox Press, a letterpress and woodcut printing studio in rural Monkton, Maryland. She has been hauling home heavy letterpress equipment since 2005. In addition to woodcut and letterpress prints and posters, she creates new metal type for printers by engraving and casting new ornament and border designs. She teaches Letterpress and Bookbinding at Towson University.

Val Lucas is a Member of the Board for The Printing Stewards. She is co-managing the Gregory Jackson Walters Machine Collection.

How long have you personally been doing this? What got you into it?

Fritz:

I have written some about my journey as a printer here: https://www.printmag.com/article/death-of-a-pressman/

But the very short version is that my dad’s best friend was an old farmer named Tom Trumble. Tom had been a letterpress pressman since he was a boy. He had dropped out of high school to work full time for the Parma News Publishing Company in the village of Parma, Michigan. By the 1980s, when I was a boy, that company had shifted entirely to offset printing. Tom was farming full time, and driving truck for the road commission. But he had bought most of the letterpress equipment from Lee Chamberlain, his old boss.

So, when I was a boy, my father and Tom worked on restoring a vintage Model A John Deere tractor, and I was left on my own in the garage while they cut the machine apart with a torch. There, by the milk cow, was a Chandler and Price 10×15 press that had originally been at the PNPC. It had a big fly wheel on one side, and I pretended I was a ship’s captain.

That’s the first time I ever saw a printing press. I was probably eight.

Around the same time my school district ran a competition every year for kids to write, illustrate, and make their own picture books. It was like the science fair, but it was book making. This was Western Schools in Jackson, Michigan, but as I recall the event was countywide I think. So all through elementary school we made books every year. I thought every school did it. In the world. I have since learned this is not the case.

But I remember writing a book in the first grade about the Easter Bunny going on strike. A very Michigan idea for a boy in 1982. My mother helped me type it onto the sheets using a manual typewriter. I illustrated the sheets. And then my dad figured out how to make a basic book binding press. We bound it in cardboard cut from an old box.

My mother was a librarian. My father was an officer for the DNR. But when I won an award for my book I told everyone I wanted to be a writer. And as far as I knew, that was the job. Making the whole book. I remember around that same time we learned about the River Rouge plant, and how Henry Ford brought in raw steel and rubber and wood through one end of the factory, and finished automobiles came out the other end. I had a very holistic view of how stuff was made.

So for my whole childhood, with this idea that I was going to “make books” I was always interested in every part. How was the paper made? How did they get the letters on the page? Who wrote the words? How does a story work? What is a character? How do you bind a book? Should I make my own book shelves?

It wasn’t until much later that the world insisted that I specialize. But I was never very happy with that. So even though I have a Masters of Fine Arts in Fiction Writing from the University of Michigan, I don’t have a very narrow view of my responsibilities.

Jody: I got into this at work, at the public library. We had built out a new program space called the Secret Lab, whose goal was to host non-traditional library programming. Someone threw out “Letterpress Printing” in a pitch program, I asked “what’s that?” and it went from there. 2012

Erin: Getting that first press is a story that printers remember fondly. Having a press is often the beginning of something much greater, literally and figuratively. One press leads to the need for type, tools, books, and then ‘oh, just one more press.’ Some women receive bone china, Egyptian cotton sheets, or a KitchenAid mixer for their wedding, but I was given a gi¤ that would impact my life in ways I could never have imagined. My mother-in-law had seen some type displayed in my o≠ice. The details are fuzzy, but she started sending me links to Ebay auctions of something called a ‘Kelsey’ which appeared to

be a printing press for small cards. I knew so little at that point that I naively thought I could easily bring one home on an airplane! Kelsey printing presses weigh more than sixty pounds and would not be a convenient carry-on. She won the auction (for much more than the now more-informed-me likes to admit) and it was crated and shipped to my home in Kansas. There it sat waiting patiently. 

My husband tried to get a letterpress poster made in Kansas City to propose. Jerrod contacted Brady Vest of Hammerpress to order a single, “Will you marry me?” poster, but because letterpress is time consuming and not the proper medium for just one poster, they said ‘no.’ His proposal was still unique, he deftly disassembled and reassembled a chocolate Kinder Egg, hiding the engagement ring inside for me to discover when opening the toy capsule inside the chocolate egg. A diamond was quite a surprise when I was expecting a plastic character! Our wedding invitations were traditionally printed with historic type in Nashville. Letterpress was in the periphery of my life, but my press sat and waited. A year later having moved back to my home state of Ohio, with the encouragement of my husband, I decided to figure out how it worked. Simply having a press does not make you a printer; using the press is what sparks the addiction to the process. But I needed help figuring out how to use my Kelsey, which is how I met Steve Robinson, a letterpress equipment revitalizer, more like a printing press surgeon.

Val: I was studying printmaking at the Maryland Institute College of Art and took a letterpress class my last semester. I fell In love with the type, the presses, and the whole process immediately, and began connecting with printers in my area. I dragged home an 1800lb press that summer and never looked back. I now have 11 presses and literal tons of type, and have been learning typecasting since 2021. My background as a visual artist allows me to create my own work while using historical printing practices. 

Location(s)?

Fritz lives in Manchester, Michigan. 

Jody lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Erin lives in Sunbury, Ohio.

Val lives in Monkton, Maryland.

The machines are in the pole barn in Piqua, Ohio. The library is with Erin in Sunbury (as well as Greg’s wood type collection and press). 

We intend to buy a building here in Michigan. We need to raise money for that. Our goal is to create a space for the machines to really live and see active use.

Personal favorite eateries, hang out spots, vacation spots, etc, in either Metro Detroit or Michigan or abroad? 

Fritz:

I’d obviously like to shout out Signal Return, Small Works, and Amos Kennedy, three of the great Detroit area printing establishments. And I always have to mention Chad Pastotnik of Deep Woods Press, up in Mancelona. And the late, great Gwen Frostic of Benzonia.

Book Suey and John King Books are my favorite book stores in Detroit, while Literati is my home town bookstore in Ann Arbor. But also, The Detroit Public Library, the Ann Arbor District Library, and the University of Michigan Library system are such vital elements of regional book culture. My mother was a rural librarian in the Jackson District Library system, so I have books in my blood. And of course I have to shout out the Manchester District Library in my village, where I was Secretary of the Board for many years.

Third Man Records and Jack White are for me a personal inspiration. I’ve loved Jack White’s music my whole life, but the work he has done preserving and reviving traditional music production processes has been a very meaningful inspiration and guide for me in my own work.

I would classify all of the above as “hang out spots”. 

I should write a book on eateries. I could write a whole book on the places that are gone that I miss. But here is my current top eight in Michigan.

1. Ralph’s Italian Deli in Ishpeming, the iconic home of the cudighi sausage sandwich.
2. The Legg’s Inn in Cross Village, for when you absolutely need authentic Polish food but you’re in Petoskey or someplace like that.
3. The Antlers in Sault St. Marie!!!! Paul Bunyan Burger 4 Life!
4. My buddy Eli just introduced me to The Polish Village Cafe, and I loved it.
5. For authentic OG Jackson style coneys, you should go to either Jackson Coney Island or Virginia Coney Island, both by the train station in Jackson, Michigan. Dry ground beef heart makes you strong!
6. In Manchester, Frank’s is the best for classic pizza. My favorite pizza in southeast Michigan.
7. But up north, in Cadillac, I gotta shout out G&D’s Pizza for a pretty unique square style pizza. It’s not Detroit style. It’s a special thing on its own. The crust is so good.
8. I should also shout out the brisket at the Manchester Market, where I live. So good. The fried chicken there is also really good.

Plus, in Piqua, Ohio, where we work on our machines, in the summer everyone needs to visit BK Rootbeer. It’s a traditional drive-in with carside service. They make their own root beer, and it is creamy and sweet like old Hires root beer. The Mexican burger is a pretty good old style sloppy joe. An authentic spot.

Our preferred vacation destination is Lake Superior. Copper Harbor is wonderful. Shoutout to the monks that make jam and bread at the Jampot.

Jody: Taqueria Lupitas on Bagley St in Detroit. Izzy’s Hoagie Shop on Stadium Blvd  in Ann Arbor. DJ’s Bakery on Packard St in Ann Arbor. 

Val has yet to visit Detroit!