Salvage Heart

My article on the return of letterpress ran in The Oregonian on December 31st, with a nice photo of Jean Sammis at Lark Press. What I submitted was too long (sometimes you roll the dice), and so a few paragraphs were cut, including an interview with Carye Bye, of Red Bat Press and the coordinator for the Independent Publishing Resource Center in downtown Portland.

The IPRC's letterpress workshops are the most popular of any it offers, and it also has open studio hours a few times a week for people to come in and press their hearts out. Some, Bye says, come in for a single invitation project. Others use it to launch a business (as she did).

Inge Bruggeman, who runs Textura Printing and teaches at the Oregon College of Art and Craft (the temptation to put an 's' on one of those words is almost too much to bear), points out that the fine arts wing is also starting to co-opt letterpress. She is co-curating an exhibit at OCAC for the end of February. In doing so, it places the work in a context, historically...letterpress signals a certain time and place. Coming to a biennial soon?

The piece I wrote was based on a personal interest in the subject, and the "Let Her Press" show at OFFICE PDX right now (thanks to Kelly for the image, which I tweaked in Preview). Since I am forbidden to bring home any more stuff (something about 27 boxes of vinyl records tipped the scales...Winston Churchill speeches anyone? Scott Joplin's Treemonisha?) I have to live vicariously.

Labels: journalism, letterpress, Oregonian, Portland, printing