eyond picture windows filled with an array of strikingly beautiful stationary and cards, a steady thunking greets visitors at the door of Blue Barnhouse, a letterpress and design studio in West Asheville. The rhythmic melody of hulking machines drowns out all but yelled conversation. This is a busy time of year, and there’s no stopping the presses until the day’s work is done.

Today, an inebriated Santa lying belly up is the droll design that employee Sara McDonald tends to on the turn-of-the-century Chandler and Price press. She feeds sheets of thick white paper into the machine—placing them one by one between notches to hold them in place, as a massive plate bears down, coating the image with black ink; and pressing it into the paper. Once the run is complete, McDonald cleans the plate and changes the ink (another hour of set-up), the second round will add a touch of red to Santa’s coat, thus completing one of the company’s many lines of seasonal cards.

She is making holiday cards the old-fashioned way—the very old-fashioned way. And Brandon Mise, founder and co-owner of the growing company wouldn’t have it otherwise. On the walls of the small boutique are numerous samples showcasing delicate

ginkgo leaf impressions cascading down the side of a wedding invitation, an undulating vine climbing up the cover of a greeting card, 19th-century Alice in Wonderland storybook illustrations on sheets of paper, and retro cocktail lettering on various stationary and cards. Pinned on a clothesline above, concert and event posters with eye-catching designs, obscure color combinations, and funky lettering set on unique paper stock scream anything but mundane.

Freedom of the Press
Blue Barnhouse uses the centuries-old letterpress method of printing. The workers operate three foot-powered or hand-cranked machines dating from 1890 to 1960. Though these contraptions are antiquated by modern printing standards, this is the only method that allows words and images to be pressed into the page, leaving a debossed texture on the final product. With two-days worth of stubble creeping up his cheeks, 31-year-old Brandon Mise putters around the shop in jeans and bare feet as if he were at home. Indeed, when he and wife, Meighan, first moved to Asheville they managed the letterpress business out of their house for three years before purchasing the Haywood Road building with Bookworks, a community resource center for book art and print.

“Blue Barnhouse came out of a love of literature and magazine production,” explains Mise. The East Carolina University graduate originally from Wilmington found himself involved with the letterpress and bookbinding community when he moved to California to pursue a master’s degree in creative writing. At the San Francisco Center for the Book, he created the award-winning hand-bound magazine Em Literary.

“We wanted to steer away from the standard mass-produced fare that’s so common to the publishing industry,” says Mise. “Bookmaking initially came from wanting to make really cool books for not a lot of money.” But since that first project, Mise has learned the economics of printing on a small scale that require long hours of labor. “If you screw up a book somewhere in the process—which is very easy to do—you actually lose money.” Even if you don’t make a mistake, it’s rarely a cheap endeavor.

A second book he created—a gorgeous stitched, hard-bound tome that unfolds like a treasure, contains letterpress text, woodcut images, and a pocket for an origami-style note with additional text—sold for $65 a piece. According to Mise, the costs (time, work, and supplies) should have pushed the price upwards of $300. Turning the crisp pages, feeling the impression of the letters with a forefinger, and gently ferreting out the hidden fold-out surprises, it’s clear this object is a piece of art almost too precious to read. That’s where the company’s marriage of old-fashioned and modern brings letterpress into an era where it can successfully bridge art and commerce.

Laurie Corral, director of Bookworks next door has hired Mise to teach classes, and book artists who rent studio space there have teamed up with Mise to use the letterpress. “For graphic designers, getting off the computer and feeling the paper, feeling the texture, and getting their hands into it is key,” says Corral.

Culling the Presses
One by one, Mise amassed his presses. The oldest, an 1890 Chandler and Price, Old Style, he won on eBay for $600, but spent more than three times that getting it to Asheville. It had been owned by a printer from Cincinnati, whose family discovered, upon his death, that he had been a spy in World War II.

This press is the hand- and foot-cranked workhorse that Matthew Farrell controls. The 23-year-old UNCA creative writing major comes up with captions and sayings for some of the cards, but the hours he spends on the press are also wholly satisfying. “It’s exhausting work, but it’s very intriguing to me,” says Farrell. “There’s a fluidity to it and a satisfaction that’s hard to quantify. But you can’t zone out.”

These machines predate safety guards, OSHA, and idiot-proofing. Operated properly, the printers are safe, but worker carelessness makes them lose-a-finger dangerous. The foot-controls are akin to sewing machine pedals, but the press closes down on the paper with the force of a predator’s jaws. Farrell recently met a printer whose hand had been mangled while reaching down the machine for a jammed piece of paper.

Working safely and methodically, Farrell can print 500 to 800 sheets in a four-hour run, with an additional hour for set-up.

Marriage of Modern
  In a combined break room and laboratory no bigger than a closet, with coffee mugs piled high on either side of the sink, Mise checks on a curious machine the size of a filing cabinet.   “We use a healthy mix of hand-drawn artwork that we scan and digitally designed work,” he explains. Mise’s—or his client’s—drawings are finalized on the computer using a design program and creating a negative that is then transferred to a photopolymer plate (light-sensitive plastic). In this machine, the unexposed areas of the plate are rinsed with water and a rotating brush, leaving the exposed area intact. Here, the image is revealed as a raised surface. “This raised surface is what bites the paper and creates the debossed letterpress effect,” he says.

While desktop technology has allowed practically anyone to become a publisher, the resulting accessibility has also revived an interest in hand-set type and elevated the work of true letterpress to a fine craft, rather than being simply utilitarian in nature.

“A shop like Blue Barnhouse plays the role of expanding possibilities for book artists, for people who want to use letterpress for commercial reasons, and especially for us in the academic art community,” notes Warren Wilson College professor Gwen Diehn, a nationally renowned author about book art and a book artist herself. But for the wistful bride looking for invitations, the up-and-coming band who wants a poster for their gig, or the nostalgic letter-writer who wants to impress the recipient, it’s all about the beauty of the printed page. And nothing captures a design’s spirit like a letterpress.