“Why Letterpress Endures,” with Blake Riley of Arion Press

(This is a computer-generated transcript. While it has been lightly edited, there may be some errors.)

Pauline Bartolone: This is The Secrets of Mastery, a series of conversations with artisans about what it takes to master their craft and what their journey has taught them. I am Pauline Bartolone, and this is a production of Craftsmanship Magazine. A multimedia publication about artisans and innovators who are creating a world built to last.

This week we're talking about letterpress printing For centuries, newspaper and book publishers use this analog method of printing involving heavy machinery. Ink paper and thousands of tiny metal type casts to reproduce their words for the masses. Though it's largely been replaced in commercial printing by cheaper, faster methods, there's a tactile, handmade quality to letterpress that makes the digital word feel merely two dimensional. I visited San Francisco's iconic Arion Press, one of the last fully integrated letterpress printing shops that casts types and binds its own limited edition books. There I sat down with creative director and lead printer, Blake Riley, who surprised me with details about the craft's history and recent revival.

Though he was skeptical about applying the term master artisan. Here's an excerpt of our conversation. Thanks for talking with us today.

Blake Riley: It's a pleasure to be here.

Pauline Bartolone: So you yourself have been working here for over 20 years. Just wanted to ask you personally, what makes you passionate about this work? What got you into this, this craft?

Blake Riley: The 10 people who work in production here, you know, we all have these wildly diversion backgrounds, but the, the one thread that connects us is a passion for the book. So ultimately it kind of comes back to an interest in and belief in the book form as a artistic medium. What keeps it interesting is that that form is infinitely elastic.

There are so many ways to kind of approach kind of the notion of a book and what it can communicate. That you never get bored.

Pauline Bartolone: I want to get a little bit more about history. I'm wondering if you could share the history of letter press printing. I, my understanding was that it got its start in 15th century Germany.

Blake Riley: What happened in the 15th century was, which is the story that most often gets shared that Johan Gutenberg invented the printing press. It's not entirely true. What he did really was figure out how to put movable type into a production environment. And from that moment it became then possible to print the Bible.

But centuries earlier in Asia, not only was paper originally invented, but the notion of printing from characters of individual type, which were typically woodblocks then in Korea and in China existed. So there was a gap before Gutenberg, came along and kind of automated the process to the point that it became, it could disseminate quickly, which it did in Europe.

Within decades there were printing houses that were popping up. So going from Gutenberg's contribution to printing on. How did the technology change after that to today? Well, really, it's kind of a series of refinements, but they've got so much right so quickly that it really gives you an appreciation for how genius the technology is. It's was not meant to be disposable, but there were obviously additions that could be made to smooth the process and speed the process. So after the invention of the hand press and movable type hundreds of years go by really before you could say the next most important intervention would be the introduction of the motorized presses, which are then obviously fueled a global industry.

Pauline Bartolone: I also understand that starting in the 1960s was when letterpress printing started to become somewhat obsolete. Is that how you understand it? And why did that happen?

Blake Riley: In the sixties you see the rise of photo composition type. It was suddenly possible to use a photographic process where you were converting letter forms onto a film and then exposing that film to a plate and that began a very rapid shift in how the technology was deployed and how books were made. The photo composition era was fairly short-lived, but it was significant because it's ultimately what led to the desktop publishing, you know, revolution in the eighties, all of which began to shift the book production and the print industry kind more widely and close some doors, but open others.

Pauline Bartolone: This seems like an obvious question, but why isn't there more letterpress printing? Is it, is it merely economics? Is it cost of labor? Loss of materials to do so?

Blake Riley:  There's more of it than might meet the eye. We found in the last decade kind of an uptick in the orders for type from the foundry.

A lot of that has to do with the resurgence of the book arts programs in colleges and book art centers that have, you know, spread across the country. But it is a very slow process. Paper's very expensive. Labor's expensive. So those are probably the two primary hurdles, but we are kind of constantly encouraged by seeing how many people are, you know, drawn to this work.

Some of it is certainly in reaction to kind of the digital, what would you call it? Mania obsession, you know, that society is going through. But I think part of it you can attribute really as a backlash to that, but part of it is that it really is the only way to kind of achieve the look and feel. So there is something kind of perfect about it that continues to draw people.

Pauline Bartolone: I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the actual labor of. Letter press printing. And as a cross person, what is that like for you? Is it very physical or more laborious than other kinds of printing?

Blake Riley: You know, I joke with people that our job is really mostly about moving piles, and we've picked the pile of paper from there and move it there and it has to go back. The physical aspect is kind of fundamental to kind of what we do. And I suppose another one of those kind of hidden components that makes the books look different than a commercial book. Since everything in our world has a very hard edge is actually a physical object. Every piece of [typeset] essentially is touched and put into place, and it's secure there. All of the effort that is required in making that happen has to add up to something and it has to be sustainable or else you just go out of business. So there's this constant interest in doing things in the smartest possible way as a way to keep that physical labor in check.

Pauline Bartolone: You've been doing this for over 20 years. What does it take to be a master letter letterpress printer?

Blake Riley:  Well, I don't know. That's a term that I don't quite understand. I feel like that has to be saved for Japanese paper makers in their nineties or something.

...You could look at the, the Gutenberg Bible, for example, which was, by today's standards printed in with its obvious 15th century technology, perhaps with kind of rudimentary techniques. And you could argue, oh, that was made by a master printer or not.

I'm not quite sure what that serves us. When you're looking at the artifact certainly there are kind of levels of technique and just levels of experience that help inform how much ink is too much ink to run on a press or all kinds of those kind of incremental decisions, I guess.

I would consider any master printer or any printer or master who continues to work in the trade who just is dedicated and committed to finding ways to continue to print. Like, all of those contributions are great. And you can look at a zine and for all of its kind of lo-fi artistry, regardless of kind of the machine that it was printed on and, and determine, oh, that was the work of a master printer. I hate to make the world seem too exclusive in that way.

Pauline Bartolone: Are there ever examples of letter press printed books or art where you're like, oh, they didn't do that right. I mean are there certain secrets to quality printing?

Blake Riley: Sure. But I suppose it also depends on like kind of what your goal is, you know? So ultimately the thing that attracts my eye is kind of the ‘looking at the big picture,’ of how all of the parts come together, all of those decisions of like material and type and technique and format and how successful is that expression in a holistic way. There was that time where fine printers would always send their books out to be bound.

And so if you go to an antiquarian book fair, you'll find books that have superior print quality and then like a Doy as a binding, or it might be vice versa. And a lot of that's not intentional. A lot of that is just kind of happened in the evolution of the market. But what is especially interesting is when all of those choices are intentional.

Maybe it's you don't have fancy equipment and you know you're just doing spoon prints. There's no reason that that book is any less well conceived than a book by someone who's been at it for 40, 50 years.

Pauline Bartolone: That's it for this edition of The Secrets of Mastery Music in this series is from Blue Dot Sessions.

From More Secrets of Mastery episodes or more stories about craft, check out craftsmanship.net. That's craftsmanship.net. You can find us on Substack too. Thanks for listening.