On a recent rainy afternoon at The San Francisco Center for the Book, Yvonne Yeh stood before a steel press the size of a small deli counter. She detected the slightest bit of movement between the letters in her press bed, so she added small pieces of metal to the grouping to correct it. Using a T-shaped key, she tightened an expandable and locking mechanism called a quoin to further squeeze the letters together.
Her adjustment complete, Yeh fed a piece of paper onto the press and turned a crank, sending the sheet around a printing cylinder as the press applied pressure. The result in blue, the first of three colors she would use, was a test-run of the poster that read: “strength is the clarity of connection between mind & body.”
The mood in the studio was contemplative, and quiet, except for the plinking sound of people rummaging through letters, the clanking of pieces of wood used to keep the letters in place (also called furniture), and the clicking sounds of the old, metal printers. Letterpress can be time-consuming, even tedious. For those reasons, Yeh said, it’s also uniquely rewarding.
“It feels really handmade,” Yeh said. “It just feels effortful, and so it feels like I’m putting in this care and attention to make this gift for people that I’ve spent a significant amount of time with.”
Located in Potrero Hill, on DeHaro St. between 16th and 17th Streets, the Center for the Book offers workshops in art, bookbinding, and risograph. The studio is lined with about 600 drawers containing thousands of pieces of lead and wood typeface (also called sorts) in various fonts and sizes. Letterpress users were plucking out the pieces and carefully setting them into trays (called a chase), and tightening and tapping them into place with a wooden planer to form words and sentences.
To create a press bed for even a simple cooking recipe can take hours. Letterpress is often printed on thick paper, which leaves an impression of the letters that you can feel. The finished pieces have a heft and permanence. Spend enough time with them, and they also have a personality, revealed through pleasing imperfections that you don’t get from work that slides out of computer printers or copiers.
For letterpress creators at the Center, the main attraction is the Vandercook No. 4 cylinder press that Yeh was using. Manufactured early in the 20th century, the Chicago-based company stopped making the presses in 1976, though a shop in Silverton, Colorado, NA Graphics, still sells their parts and supplies. The Center has seven of these elegant workhorses.
“I wanted to do something that was more tactile, with my hands,” Yeh told me. “As we move towards an increasingly digital world, there’s a lot of excitement lost, and everything is so easy.” Letterpress, she said, “feels like returning back to the way things were done before, and gaining respect for effort.”
Yeh’s efforts were being overseen by her instructor, Thea Sizemore, who operates her own letterpress shop called Kavamore Press, which she operates out of an old grocery store in Berkeley.
“Everything that you’re using has been used before, and you’re kind of part of that lineage,” Sizemore said of the hardware, which she also fixes as a mechanic. The machines’ idiosyncrasies, the imperfections in the lead or wooden typeface, reflect their histories, she said.
As Sizemore assisted Yeh with her poster, a piece of damaged type (a letter “a”) failed to pick up the ink. Yeh had to loosen the tray and replace the letter, prompting Sizemore to point out a benefit of using lead: the disruptive “a” could be melted down, and reformed as a new letter.
The Center, which has operated in San Francisco since 1996, also offers instruction in binding books. The nonprofit earns about 40% of its revenue from workshops like Experience Letterpress! Posterized, and Freestyle Printing on the Vandercook, said David Owens-Hill, the Center’s executive director. The remaining 60% is made up of contributions from individuals, companies, foundations, and government grants.
“The book arts community is very strong in the Bay Area, and on the West Coast generally,” Owens-Hill said. “It’s a large community, and they’re very generous.”
“We are not a museum, we are a functioning print studio,” said Chad Johnson, the studio director. The oldest of the Center’s presses came to San Francisco at the end of the 19th century during an earlier boom following the Gold Rush.
“This is heavy equipment, so once it was out here, no one was sending it back to Cleveland or Chicago,” Johnson said. “Everything that landed here, stayed here.”
Vandercook presses can cost up to $20,000, but all of the Center’s presses have been donated. “We’re just really fortunate to have it all here,” especially because there’s no replenishing source for them, Johnson said. “My joke is, not only do they not make them like they used to, they don’t make them.”
