There’s a woman in Wisconsin working with a wax stencil right now. There’s a lady in Louisiana using a line gauge. There’s a gal in Galveston greeking. Yes, from Key West to Sydney; San Diego to Chicago; Portland to Saint Petersburg, there are women of all ages in garages and studios and galleries with ink on their hands, sorting metal type and working a letterpress. They’re enthusiastic about working with their hands and creating art, books, notecards, posters, broadsides, recipe cards, paper ephemera, and more. Some of these women, seventeen hundred strong and growing, are members of Ladies of Letterpress, an international trade organization that encourages women printers. Their website (ladiesofletterpress.com) is a town square for printers, providing both a space for members to get advice from and share resources with other commercial letterpress printers and offering consumers a market from which to locate and hire reliable independent printers.
Kseniya Thomas conceived the organization with co-founder Jessica White in 2008 upon meeting each other at the Oak Knoll Fest in New Castle, Delaware.
“We wanted a place,” Thomas said, “where new printers starting out could get information and ask questions, all the while meeting other printers and feeling a part of a community.”
Thomas herself is no longer new to the craft of letterpress. After graduating from college, she visited the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, Germany.
“I asked if they accepted interns. They did, and so I moved to Mainz. I worked there for six months and learned from folks who spent their whole lives in print shops.”
Thomas is now the master printer and owner of Thomas-Printers in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where she creates one-of-a-kind wedding announcements, birth announcements, custom stationery, CD cover art, posters, broadside poetry, love notes, and more. Thomas’ own love letter to her craft:
“I think people love making things because doing so makes them happy, and making things with words and paper makes some doubly so.”
Jessica White, the organization’s other co-founder, runs Heroes and Criminals Press in Asheville, North Carolina. She earned her MFA in printmaking and a certificate in book studies at the University of Iowa and now teaches letterpress classes at Asheville BookWorks and Warren Wilson College. Earlier this year she published Letterpress Now: A DIY Guide to New and Old Printing Methods. The introduction reads, in part,
“Every time you make something by letterpress printing, you can feel the materials course through your fingers.”
