Robert Fisher of Echo Letterpress

First of all Robert, thanks for taking time out from your very busy schedule, and congratulations on the recent addition to your family. By way of introduction, tell us a bit about Christina and yourself.

Christina and I are both graphic designers. She has a BFA in Visual Communications from Virginia Commonwealth University and I have a BFA from the University of South Carolina and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, both in graphic design. We spent ten years in Manhattan working in the design world. Christina’s work was focused on textile graphics and corporate design work in both print and interactive. I started in NYC as an art director in publishing doing book design and magazines (with a 3.5 year stint at Martha Stewart Living) and then moved into interactive as the dot com bubble grew. We both worked on major brands such as Crayola, Little Tikes, Fed Ex, Nissan, Gucci, Prada, United Airlines and Motorola. We also have a passion for not-for-profit and educational work, which never pays well but is very rewarding.

Why did you decide to leave the fast lane in Manhattan for upstate New York?

We needed a change. The high-paced lifestyle was all-consuming. Christina was a creative director at Foot, Cone and Belding and I was VP Creative Director at IconNicholson and we both felt like we’d moved away from our roots, a love of typography, paper and creating beautiful things that people cherish and covet. We felt removed from our craft and wanted to get back into the hands on process of designing. In June of 2006 we moved to our country house near Jeffersonville fulltime.

What drew you to the noble art of printing?

A love of letters and paper. We both learned letterpress as part of our design training (typography as we know it today really started with the invention of movable type c.1440). We are both type nerds and can spend hours fussing over typefaces, leading, kerning and the endless machinations that come with a love of letters. We are kind of snobs when it comes to printing. If it’s not letterpress we rarely get excited.

How did you acquire your equipment?

Christina quit her Job on January 1, 2006 to start the process of setting up our new business. She began researching presses online, spending a lot of time at Briar Press (www.briarpress.org), a great resource for letterpress aficionados. We learned a lot about what we really needed to get started. Every week we would look for auctions on eBay, or presses for sale on Briar Press. We realized that we had to find a press that wasn’t too far away as moving it would likely cost as much, or more, than the press itself. While looking for a single press to start out on we found an amazing auction: it was an entire shop. The pictures looked too good to be true. We started asking the seller questions and found out the auction was actually for two Chandler and Price platen presses, a paper cutter, and lots of type. We watched it for days and waited until the last day to bid. The auction was to end at 8 am and the free open wireless internet that we relied on in our apartment was down so Christina had to run to the local coffee shop to place our bid. I had a client meeting uptown so I wouldn’t know the outcome until hours later. Christina left me a flat message on my phone to call her for an update on the auction. Of course I assumed we were outbid at the last second, but she was only baiting me for a big surprise.

We won the auctions for just over $4100. Two weeks later we drove to Auburn, MA and found, to our surprise, a two level backyard print shop packed to the rafters with equipment and paper. With hardly enough room to walk around, we started the process of loading up our very large U-Haul truck.

What we actually found under the boxes of paper and ephemera was: two 8 x 10 Chandler and Price Old Style platen presses (circa 1901 and 1904), a Kelsey Star 5 x 7 platen press (circa 1901), a very small table top Kelsey press, a 19.5 inch Oswego guillotine paper cutter (c. 1890s), 100+ drawers of metal foundry type, 28 drawers of wood type in various sizes and fonts, a saddle stitching machine (circa 1910), and all the essential tools of the trade one needs to run an authentic letterpress shop. We felt very lucky.

After two long and exciting days of discovery and packing we were almost done. The third morning we tied up the load and drove to Liberty, NY where we stored everything. We left the presses and paper cutter behind, and hired a rigging service to move them three weeks later. Total moving costs were just over $4000. We saved thousands moving all the type and small equipment ourselves.

For those who are not familiar with the hand printing press process, bring us through a typical job from beginning to end.

Letterpress is a process of creating a relief image and pressing it into or onto a surface—much like a rubber stamp. Typically you need to set the type one letter at a time (backwards and upside down), locking up the type into a chase (a metal frame). Any artwork to be printed must be made into a relief image as well (either using magnesium or photopolymer plates). Once everything you want to print is locked up it is called a form. This form is placed into the bed of the press. Here the press rollers will ink the form and transfer the image onto the paper. Before printing one must set gauge pins (also called quad guides) on the press platen to keep the paper aligned with the form. Once the alignment is set the pressure of the press must be adjusted (according to the paper weight and the size of the form to be printed). This is called makeready. Paper packing on the press must be adjusted to create an even impression over the entire printed surface. Once the makeready is done the job is ready to print, one sheet at a time. The average makeready process usually takes about 10-30 minutes, but sometimes we can spend hours getting it just right.

Of course if the job is more than one color this process must be repeated for each color. Printing on both sides of a sheet also requires multiple passes through the press, and a new makeready process.

What type of work are you doing now?

Our presses are on the small side (8 x 10 inches), so we are limited to smaller works. We design and print wedding invitations for clients around the world (recently completed jobs were for weddings in Cape Cod, West Point and Singapore). We also have our own line of greeting cards that we sell in our stationery store. We will begin selling wholesale greeting cards later this fall. High-end business cards and birth announcements also make up a smaller portion of our monthly work. We also print woodblock posters (10 x 16 max size) on a limited basis because we need to print them in two halves. We’re in the discussion stage with a few authors to create a series of chap books this winter.

Do you advertise, or is word of mouth enough?

We do not advertise. Most of our work comes from word of mouth or passersby in Jeffersonville. The stationery store is a loss leader for us—it barely breaks even, but it gives us a lot of visibility on Main Street. The past year we had invitations featured in two national magazines: Martha Stewart Weddings and Real Simple Weddings. Obviously this kind of exposure can really kick start your business. We are quite sick of printing these featured designs at this point.

Tell us about your favorite papers and typefaces.

Paper: Crane Lettra. It’s the only paper DESIGNED for letterpress. It’s a super fluffy 100% rag paper that takes a really nice impression. It’s made from textile scraps and cotton left in the seed pod, and it’s (sort of) local. The mill is in Dalton, MA and is very eco-friendly. It’s also relatively inexpensive compared to imported Italian papers.

Typefaces: We love the classics. News Gothic, Garamond, Caslon, Frutiger, Helvetica, etc., but we also use some of the newer typefaces. We’re purists, but we’re not THAT pure when it comes to type. We’ll even use a drop shadow when we need to pump up the kitsch factor!

Do you create your own design work plates?

No, we use two plate makers. Boxcar Press in Syracuse for photopolymer plates and Owosso Graphic Arts for metal plates. We email our work out and the plates arrive two days later. It’s not worth it to have all that plate making equipment.

Although your operation is starting to get into full swing, and you bring a real graphic design edge to the business, it must be frustrating sometimes puzzling over techniques that were commonplace back in the heyday of hand presses. Are there any modern day expert practitioners you can turn to, and do you belong to any fine press organizations?

This is a big problem. All the old practitioners of letterpress are either dead or getting up there in years. We’ve met some old timers in Sullivan County and we call on a few of them for help when we feel stumped on a job. We’ve also been in correspondence (via snail mail) with the former owner of our presses. He’s taught us some ‘tricks’ over the years, although his eyesight is failing and he’s going into a nursing home. He’s 90 years old and started printing when he was 16. He ran his backyard print shop for over 50 years. He’s a wealth of information that we’re going to miss. We hope that one day we can teach someone else what we are learning now (our four month old son will no doubt be our first target).

Sullivan County is my ancestral home, and I found your business while doing some preliminary research on who might publish a compilation of local Civil War letters I purchased at auction. Have you tackled any books yet?

Not yet, but as I previously said, we are working on a project to create some chap books of poetry this winter. It’s a very cool project. We are looking for a larger press which will put us in a better position to tackle books. Christina has some experience in book binding that she’d like to get back into. It’s something we’d like to offer, but letterpressed books can be very expensive to produce.

Your print shop is right on Main Street in Jeffersonville, NY. Tell us about the town, and about the Segar Building.

We purchased our building in August, 2006. It was a 1950s Sinclair gas station, home of Segar Oil, a family run business that closed in the late ‘80s. It’s an American classic with a porcelain enamel facade. The building was vacant for 18 years when we purchased it from the Segar family estate. For the first time since 1883 the property changed hands.

The building needed a lot of work, but we wanted to restore it rather than remodel/alter. After six months of work we moved the presses in and started setting up shop, which took another six months. We opened to the public on September 1, 2007.

The building sits at the end of Main Street in Jeffersonville, NY, a small Catskill village of about 350 souls. It’s a sleepy little town that comes alive on weekends due to a large second home market. We’re certainly the most unique business in a town full of eateries, home décor and antique shops. Jeffersonville is only two hours from Manhattan, so we can run down for a quick ‘city fix’ which usually involves a meal at our favorite sushi restaurant.

Thanks again Robert. Best wishes with your growing family and wonderful business, don’t work too hard, and save some time for trout fishing.

Robert and Christina Fisher run Echo Letterpress in Jeffersonville, NY and can be contacted at http://www.echoletterpress.com.

#publishers

Embracing the Unexpected

One of the best things about being in the used book business is that you never know what to expect. When you get up in the morning, you can never predict what the day will bring. Usually, the first thing I do when I get out of bed is check my e-mail for orders that came in overnight. Earlier this year I noticed a pattern that most of the orders were coming in at the beginning of the week. By Thursday, the orders slowed down to a trickle, and the weekends were pretty quiet. Now that I am used to this pattern, it has begun to shift, and lately the opposite has been true. The early part of the week is slow, and the bulk of my sales are Thursday through Sunday. I know that as soon as I adjust to this it will change again.

The same holds true for book scouting while traveling. The one thing I have learned in all of my travels is that I never know what to expect from a day on the road. Here, then, are a few examples of Great Unexpectations.

Sometimes good things happen when I have no expectations whatsoever.

A few weeks ago I was on vacation with my wife in rural Texas. We were driving from El Paso to Big Bend for a river trip, and my expectation was that this would be a bookless holiday. We stayed overnight in Fort Davis so we could go to the “star party” at the McDonald Observatory, and the next morning we stopped for late breakfast in town before heading on to Big Bend. As we drove up and down the small main street looking for a place to eat, I saw a sign that said “BOOK SALE.” I instantly learned two things that morning about rural Texas. First, you can’t get breakfast anywhere after 11 A.M., and second, sometimes you find books where you least expect them. My first meal that day consisted of barbequed brisket and biscuits, which I ate quickly so I could head over to the bookshop.

The shop, Bookfeller, was small, and all hardcover books were $3 each. I did not have as much time as I would have liked to peruse the stock, but I did manage to find half a dozen nice books to bring back for re-sale. The owner told me he had been in the book business in larger cities, and when he retired back to his home town, the community persuaded him to open a shop.

Naturally, on the river trip through Santa Elena Canyon, there were no bookshops in sight. I did not even bring any reading materials with me, which turned out to be a good thing since they would have been soaked along with the rest of our things when the canoe we were in overturned during that long, last mile before we reached the end of our journey.

En route from Big Bend to Austin we stopped in Fredericksburg, at what looked to me like a tourist information center that turned out to be the local historical society. We had a long chat with the docent, and left with a lot more information than expected, along with some of the local histories that were for sale in the rather extensive bookstall.

Unfortunately, not all unexpected events are positive.

When I was in Cleveland last month, I organized an evening around a visit to Half Price Books, a used book chain that I had visited with much success in Austin last fall. My first disappointment was the size of the shop. In Texas, the stores are as big as supermarkets. In Ohio, they are more the size of a drug store. I found quite a few books I wanted, but when I asked to have the items shipped, I was told that the store did not offer shipping. When I mentioned to the manager that the Austin stores shipped books for me, he replied, “You have seen the size of the Texas stores. We are a much smaller operation.” I was traveling all carry-on and my bags were already stuffed, so I sifted through my selections and left about half of them on the counter.

“I guess sometimes bigger really is better” I told him as he rang up my purchases.

Cleveland may bill itself as the capital of rock ‘n roll, but when it comes to books, it does not rock ‘n roll like Austin does.

At other times, things happen that are just as good but totally different from what I am anticipating.

On President’s Day we were driving back to New York from Vermont, and I wanted to stop at a bookshop I had been to a few years before in Western Massachusetts. It was in an old New England building off I-91 with a lady proprietor and it contained stock from multiple dealers. I had remembered buying some really good books there. I had the MARIAB booklet, and looked up the name of the shop. I saw Meeting House Books, it was in the right area based upon a rather rudimentary map, and the proprietor had a female name. The shop was normally closed on Monday, so I e-mailed her earlier in the week to see if I could stop by, and she graciously offered to open the store for me. I printed off the directions from the internet, but as soon as we got off the highway and my wife began directing me, they did not seem correct. The place I remembered was right off the highway in the midst of farmland. I was being directed to a small New England town. When we arrived, I realized that this was the wrong shop. I had to go in because I had an appointment.

The shop was aptly named since it is located in a former church, and when I told the owner I was interested in literature, she guided me upstairs. I think this room had originally been the main sanctuary, and it was filled with wonderful, well-priced books. I bought quite a few items, and sold a number of them the following week at the Greenwich Village Book Fair. I now know two interesting shops well worth a stop in that part of Massachusetts.

Last but not least, sometimes I expect good things will happen and something even better happens.

This past year I have spent a lot of time in Minneapolis. On my first few visits, I spent most of my free time at the bookshops within easy reach of downtown. Eventually, I began venturing further out, and into St. Paul. I found a wonderful shop—Midway Books. It was a half hour bus ride, but its three floors crammed with books made it well worth the trip. I always managed to find at least a carton of books to ship back home. I usually went there on Sundays because that was the one day that I had the time to book scout. The last time I was in the Twin Cities, the only free time I had was Saturday evening. The shop was open, and when I introduced myself to the “new” man at the register he told me that he was not new, but the actual owner of the store. I systematically went through each floor, stopping periodically to bring him stacks of books to set aside for me. As I handed him the last stack and pulled out my checkbook, he said to me, “Has anyone ever showed you where the better books are?”

“Better books?” I replied. “Not that I know of.” He guided me through some narrow corridors, then up a back stairway, and pointed to a long hallway I had never been in before filled with bookcases of modern first editions. “Take your time, Ill be downstairs,” he said. I spent quite a long time going through the shelves until I had selected another armful of books and found my way back to the main floor after only a few wrong turns.

After I handed him the pile he led me through another corridor, this time leading to an immense basement, again filled with books. This was the stock used for the internet and book fairs. Again, I returned to the counter with more books. While I had been to this store several times before, unknowingly, I had only scratched the surface of its inventory.

In short, book scouting is not for those who relish the tried and true. I have a Wall Street colleague who spends his vacation every year in the same hotel in Disney World. A week before he leaves he makes restaurant reservations and pre-orders his meals. He leaves nothing to chance. He could never be a used book dealer.

There is an old Yiddish expression that translates as “Man plans, God laughs.” While some may find this troubling, for me, it is part of the fun and excitement of the hunt. One of the things you quickly learn when you become a book dealer is to embrace the unexpected.

Joe Perlman operates Mostly Useful Fictions out of East Northport, NY and can be contacted at http://www.mostlyusefulfictions.com.

#bookscouting #standard

Letter to the Editor: Thank You

Dear IOBA,

I am writing to thank you and the board members of IOBA once more for granting me a scholarship award to this year’s Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar. What an incredible experience! We covered an enormous amount of material in such a short time. I feel like my brain has been expanded a hundred-fold. Equally energizing and beneficial was the opportunity for meeting other booksellers from across the country (including our group of IOBA members). The faculty and participants had such a variety of experience levels, interests and specialties, and stories of their own journeys along the many roads of dealing in books. Having this new network of colleagues is wonderful!

Serena and I have been pouring over my seminar notes and handouts and discussing ideas to shape and improve ourselves as booksellers. We are making plans to attend book fairs and create our first catalog. (Our first perhaps will be of a lesser-known female sci-fi/western author’s collection, including books, manuscripts, fanzines and ephemera, which we acquired over a year ago.) We are acquiring new reference materials, communicating with some of the seminarians I met, and working on ways to find better books and improve our catalog descriptions. The list goes on.

Thank you again for your generous support. The IOBA scholarship award was a tremendous help to us. And not only financially, but also in terms of collegial support—introducing us to and welcoming us into a fabulous network of colleagues that we hope to get to know more and work with over many years to come. Thank you!

Best Regards,

Cathy Graham Co-Owner, Copperfish Books, LLC