Our printshop is located in a renovated barn on the high banks of the Skagit river in the foothills of the North Cascades Mountain range. The barn houses an extensive collection of 19th & early 20th century letterpress equipment. Six different letterpresses with cast iron flywheels or stout cranks & cylinders stand where the cows used to get fed. Each press can accommodate different capacities for paper sizes & ink coverage which allows us to execute a wide range of printing possibilities.
For hand typesetting we have over 20 cabinets filled with wood & metal type which line the barn walls & stairwell. The staircase acts as an ersatz gallery of letterpress printed ephemera, broadsides, poster art & prints. Upstairs where the hayloft used to be, is now the skylit bindery filled with wide tables, nipping presses, glue jars, needles & thread. Behind the barn is the type foundry where we preserve the craft of casting metal type. The bronze type matrix library is stacked so high it almost reaches the ceiling.
All of this equipment was scavenged from the basements of retired printers, defunct printshops, extinct printing schools & obsolete typehouses over many years of search & rescue operations. As much as we are printers for hire we are also preservationists of the craft of letterpress printing.
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