Craftsmanship Quarterly

In the San Francisco Bay Area -- a prime spot for the forces disrupting established publishing industries -- there is a long-held, enduring passion for an opposing direction: painstakingly printing and binding books by hand.

Touch, sensuality, and looks play essential roles in love, both at its start and as it endures. When I was 11 or 12, an uncle gave me two remarkable books bound in red leather. They had been published by Roycroft community craftsmen in East Aurora, N.Y., who were part of the Arts and Crafts movement around the turn of the last century. The Roycroft craftsmen had produced these books with a technique called letterpress — the old style of bookmaking with lead type and massive, gear-driven printing presses. 

I’d never seen books like these. They were portly and gorgeous, measuring about 12 by 8 inches and nearly two inches thick. As I paged through them, the still-rich black and deep red ink pressed into the thick, soft paper let me feel the deboss of each letter. And the lush, slightly ragged page edges were very different to the touch than the more utilitarian books around our house. The old books even had a unique smell; their leather covers and still-white paper gave off a pleasantly musty aroma from years of soaking up the scents of various owners and their respective homes or commercial bookshelves. I was a kid, not a collector, but it was apparent to me even then that the big, luxuriant volumes were themselves magnificent objects, special in a way that caused me to take close care of them for five decades.

By coincidence, I now live part of the year in a city (San Francisco) that has been one of the nation’s primary centers for letterpress printing ever since the technology for this “new” form of publishing was created. And so it remains today, with a committed community of printers and publishers producing books with painstaking care and respect for a venerable tradition.

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