Mirror, mirror on the wall, who makes the prettiest letterpress stationery of them all? Smock Paper is always one of my first answers. Followed, of course, by the wedding invitation gurus and sister company Bella Figura.
Smock Paper is based in Syracuse, New York, a post-industrial town whose sprawling warehouses and pretty grit have charmed them silly. Their print shop — 20 antique presses, 50 tons of equipment, and 17 employees — resides west of downtown in the Delavan Center, a rambling building with labyrinth hallways and wildly crooked floors. This place used to be a factory for John Deere, and before that for the Syracuse Chilled Plow Company, if you look far enough backwards. Nowadays, the Delavan houses many of the city’s painters, photographers, sculptors, and ceramists, as well as Syracuse’s largest art gallery.
So, who is Smock Paper? They are faithful lovers of historic craft. They have letterpress ink in their veins. They are idealists. Right now, they are trying to make the world a better place. They read Walt Whitman (he was a letterpress printer too, by the way.) They fall head over heels for heavy cast iron presses. They believe in the creation of beautiful things. And they want, like you, to feel good about where their beautiful things come from.
They are the first and only print shop in the U.S. to offer printing on a luxury bamboo paper. They developed this paper with the help of a historic European paper mill, because they wanted a truly sustainable paper that happened to be gorgeous.
So, what is letterpress printing? Invented in the 1400′s by a German printer named Gutenberg, letterpress is the oldest printing process on the planet. Letterpress began as printing for the masses; it was how people used to communicate with each other. It was how people once printed their books, their broadsides, their manuals, their pamphlets, their newspapers. If I could letterpress everything I certainly would.
But then the twentieth century happened and anything done by a skilled hand seemed old-fashioned, outdated, and way too slow. It was a dark time for artisans. Even back when we began printing in the 1990′s, the letterpresses we loved were still being dragged off to scrap yards to be destroyed. It took the 21st century’s true renaissance of craft to allow letterpress to thrive. These days, letterpresses are snapped up in an instant; so many people now want to practice this way of printing. THANK GOD. It is truly a beautiful art.
My next purchase from Smock are the letterpress hangtags. Town hangtags, letterpress & flat printed, set of 6 are $12.00. Hangtags are 3.63″ x 2.25″ Made from bamboo paper and sustainably printed: letterpress blind deboss on front, offset patterning on back. Each set contains 3 unique and colorful designs. Packaged in a clear sleeve.
I was fortunate to use Bella Figura for my wedding invitations. Click here to see my wedding invitation on their blog!
Smile,
Ashley
