Setting the Scene

Come into the Literary House, this big white house with its fresh new deck. Step into the foyer, and you'll see the kitchen straight ahead, and cozy reading rooms to your left. Turn right, though, and come down the stairs into the Print Shop, down because the shop is set lower than the rest of the House.

The light in the afternoon floods the print shop, sliding down from the high vaulted ceiling to idle along the heavy lines of the cylinder press and work tables, casually slinking to the floor in broad beams. The two tables, back-to-back, are black and pitted with age, cluttered with stacks of broadsides and reams of paper, littered with miscellaneous notes. The broadsides are fine, weighty things, basking muted greens, greys, and blues, sunning themselves.

Letterpresses and type cases line the perimeter of the room, their bulk leaving only two and a half feet or so between their fronts and the work tables. Tall windows promenade the walls above the cases, ushering green from a half-wild garden into the dusty atmosphere of the Print Shop. The walls fade out of attention, water-damaged and aging.

A broad doorway opens under a placard that declares "Book Arts," and the room beyond is darker, woodier. There is a work table in the center of the room. Another rests along the right-hand wall and offers a view into the garden. Large drills, broad sheets of cutting board, and the naked guts of books rest on the back of this work surface. Underneath, filing cabinets house the archives of posters.

Shelves line the other two sides of the room and are stuffed with books of various ages on printing, bookmaking, paper. Two new Apple computers are installed on the countertop beneath the left-hand shelves, along with other high-tech equipment to bring the medium of pixels to the studio. These computers have so far been used primarily to create a digital archive of the Literary House's posters. They are waiting to be tapped for design and multimedia.

This is the print shop: a world of iron, lead, wood, and paper, a melding of the handmade and the mechanical.