This document provides an overview of the letterpress printing process and discusses how two Toronto printing companies, Flash Reproductions and Anstey Book Binding, have maintained letterpress departments despite the decline of letterpress in commercial printing. Both companies find that letterpress allows them to produce high-quality, specialized work and that there is a growing interest in letterpress among younger designers and consumers interested in craftsmanship. The document also profiles a book artist, George Walker, who continues to use letterpress in his studio.

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2. AS OFTEN HAPPENS WHEN A SON
takes over his father’s business, Rich
Pauptit, President of Flash Reproduc-
tions since 2009, could have decided
to modernize the most antiquated
aspect of his 35-person shop, its letterpress
department. Based in Toronto, Flash runs an
advanced mix of offset, toner and prepress
technologies required to compete in one of the
world’s largest and most aggressive print mar-
kets; but the company’s letterpress department
brings something exceptional to the table.
This segment of the business employs two
people and essentially the same relief printing
process with cast-metal type (or alternatively
molded plates) that Johannes Gutenberg first
commercialized in Germany in 1440. In mod-
ern times, owing largely to the skill and time-
intensive makeready letterpress requires, it has
mostly fallen out of commercial use in favour
of faster, cheaper processes that do a reason-
able job – at least to the untrained eye – of sim-
ulating letterpress results.
Yet alongside Flash’s versatile offset, screen,
and toner machines, the company’s letterpress
department continues to function five days a
week and generates around 10 percent of the
company’s total dollar volume in revenues.
Similarly, President Neil Stewart of Anstey
Book Binding, a company of 15 people, also
based in Toronto, says the ancient process of
letterpress contributes significantly to achiev-
ing the company’s goals and represents about
10 percent of their business. Tracing its roots
back to 1882, Anstey was recently purchased
by Specialties Graphic Finishers, which is
owned by Norm Beange – one of North Amer-
ica’s leading experts in finishing, who has
always focused on the business potential of
craftsmanship.
Both Pauptit and Stewart perceive a growing
interest in letterpress printing among both
their customers and the general populace. The
process tightly fits today’s burgeoning craft-
focused brand of consumerism, in which indi-
vidualism and specialization have supplanted
the bygone days of mass communications, in
which inboxes are crammed with spam and
multi-media messages are lost in a sea of
unspecified advertising. Behind the
reborn romance of letterpress, which
is engaging a new craft-conscious
generation, Stewart, Pauptit and book artist
George Walker share their secrets of the
ancient process’ commercial viability today.
Flash Reproductions
“My dad, Carl, started our company in 1969,”
recalls Pauptit. “He taught me everything I
know, and when I started working with him
about 15 years ago, I thought letterpress print-
ing was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. It was
the Norman Rockwell painting that everybody
wants to live.
“It would be very easy to say my dad’s ap-
proach was antiquated, and we should forget
about letterpress. But that wouldn’t work for
me. We need to find our niche with the people
who still care about what printing was in the
old days, not just a means to an end.”
Recent examples of Flash’s letterpress work
include foil-stamped business cards made
“ridiculously thick”by duplexing several layers
of different-coloured substrates together. One
such spectacular job featured eight multi-
coloured layers die-cut with a window enclos-
ing a loose cubic zirconium diamond. The top
layer was clear plastic, allowing the viewer see
down through six intervening layers to the
chrome-mirror-finished base.
Another recent job was a letterpress invita-
tion to a high-end hotel, elegantly packaged
and shipped with a wooden diorama box con-
taining an exact dollhouse-sized replica of one
of the hotel’s deluxe guest rooms.
Pauptit says the rationale behind both prod-
ucts was to give their recipients the satisfaction
that comes from owning beautiful, well crafted
items: “Nowadays printing is not usually the
most efficient means to give somebody infor-
mation. Usually you do that digitally. So at this
stage in history, if you don’t love something
you’re printing, I almost do not see the point
in printing it. Of course, this is an overstate-
ment, but I do not want to do throwaway print
but rather things people really care about and
cherish.”
Pauptit explains how letterpress is not only
consistent with these values but also why its
rarity makes it fit as an integral part of his cur-
rent business model:“Although the print mar-
ket is obviously shrinking, no one in their right
mind thinks print will shrink to nothing. At
the same time, only certain companies will
survive – the ones who are best at serving the
market segment they’re in. Companies with a
lot of press power will do all the large-volume
print, because they’re the cheapest and fastest
at it. Companies like ourselves will never be the
cheapest or the fastest or have the most capac-
ity, so we have to be something else.
“Instead, we are focused on collaborating
with creative designers and advertising agen-
cies to produce specialized, high-quality work
–things other printers view as a complicated
pain in the butt. A significant percentage of
our business also consists of doing hard stuff
for other printers – and we’re comfortable
serving that niche of the market. Our motto is:
‘If someone else can do it, then someone else
can do it.’”
Another factor encouraging Pauptit’s inclu-
sion of letterpress in Flash’s business model is
his own subjective reaction to the digitizing of
print, which he thinks takes all the fun out of
printing by dumbing down the specifics of
each job. Clients, for example, can only choose
the type of stock they want from a limited
number of qualified substrates:“Digital print-
ing turns a printer into a logistics company
concerned with how quickly and cheaply the
product can be delivered. It takes all the cre-
ativity and craftsmanship out of printing, all
the little items of flair you can add to a job.
Every project gets boiled down to four-colour
process on either something glossy or some-
thing matte.
“In the end, you’re just pushing the green
button and something comes out the other
end,”continues Pauptit.“I’m not going to be a
proud member of this industry if I have the
most green buttons to push.”
In 2011 Pauptit specifically chose an MGI
Meteor DP60 Pro because of its versatility and
unique production capabilities relative to
other toner machines on the market. His com-
pany can order and install parts themselves
and tweak the press mechanically to handle an
unusual variety of substrates – unlike equip-
ment made by other manufacturers, who re-
quire users to restrict their stocks only to
qualified brands on pain of voiding their war-
ranties or service contracts. Even the rules gov-
erning the operating systems of some toner
equipment can leave printing companies stuck
in cycles of unwanted investment.
Letterpress
JUNE 2013 • PRINTACTION • 17
REVIVALStory by Victoria Gaitskell
Continued on page 18

3. “Service contracts that won’t let you
take apart the equipment and put it back
together yourself prevent you from
knowing the machine as well. These types
of limitations don’t allow you to be cre-
ative,” says Pauptit. “We consider our-
selves craftsmen and presses the tools of
our craft. We’re dead set on keeping that
alive.”
Anstey Book Binding
Anstey Book Binding is based on similar
principles of craftsmanship and sensory
gratification.“Anstey Book Binding is the
epitome of low-tech and old-fashioned,”
reads the company’s homepage. “We
know that flawlessly finished print is a
medium that emotionally resonates with
audiences because what they hold in their
hands connects with their mind and tac-
tile senses.”
In 1994, Neil Stewart bought and grew
the company in partnership with C.J.
Graphics owner Jay Mandarino and later
a third partner, then sold it to Specialties
Graphic Finishers in 2010. Stewart, who
originally studied Fine Art at one of Que-
bec’s general and vocational colleges, fol-
lowed by printmaking at Lake Placid
School of Art (New York) and design at
the Ontario College of Art and Design
(OCAD, Toronto), remained President of
Anstey after the sale.
After his studies, Stewart’s first enter-
prises in the 1980s were a hand paper-
making mill and a letterpress shop he
established in Toronto. His interest in
commercial letterpress developed after he
became disenchanted with the devalua-
tion of typesetting that coincided with
the rise of computer-generated design, as
well as the regular huge financial outlays
for technology that the digital alterna-
tive required. He says in those days he
could obtain letterpress equipment
easily and cheaply because commer-
cial printers were ditching and re-
placing it with newer technologies.
“Initially I was designing a lot
of promotional material for pho-
tographers,” recounts Stewart.
“Posters were trendy back then,
so I suggested to my clients
that, for the same amount
they were paying for 1,000
posters, most of which
ended up in a stack collecting
dust under their bed, they could pro-
duce five beautiful books instead… give
them as promotions to their five most
important clients, and perhaps expect to
receive two new jobs out of the five.
“This idea proved successful and led
to one of the approaches we still follow
today: Using letterpress to embellish fine
book binding. The combination pro-
duces showpieces that achieve a pretty
deep penetration with clients because
they are so beautiful to feel and look at.”
Today Anstey’s letterpress equipment
comprises three cylinder and three platen
presses (mostly Heidelbergs), plus two
proof presses (both Vandercook). “Be-
cause letterpress is very finicky, we have
always had more capacity than actual
work,”Stewart admits.“Even for the most
experienced operator, letterpress requires
a lot of trial and error. In the commercial
arena, time is the thing you have the least
of, so it’s very challenging to do letter-
press commercially and do it well. It’s also
especially hard to scale it up in Canada,
where the market is 10 to 20 times
smaller than in the States.”
Most of Stewart’s current letterpress
clients are corporations located in the
Greater Toronto Area (GTA), and some
in the United States. He says the Ameri-
can clients love the fact that so many
diverse graphic-arts services are concen-
trated in the GTA, whereas in their own
country they might have to farm out each
of the various processes required for a
special project – say, letterpress, binding,
and foil stamping – to several different
businesses, each in a different state.
For Stewart’s operation, letterpress
serves both the functions of decoration
and problem-solving. For example, for a
set of 25 slipcases, Anstey might letter-
press the labels because they would be
harder and cost more to print in litho. Or
if they are producing a small number of
books for a bank or real-estate agent,
Anstey might use letterpress to produce
a decorative end paper, divider page, or
box liner to enhance the piece.
Stewart says that, although letterpress
stationery has declined in popularity, the
company still produces business cards,
some part of full stationery programs
with letterhead and envelopes, for clients
like financial firms, architects, and inte-
rior designers, for whom a strong first
impression matters. Their other letter-
press stock in trade includes personalized
diplomas for a prestigious college and en-
graved invitations costing $15 to $20 a
pop for high society and corporate events
and product launches.
Youth movement
For about the last five years, Pauptit has
observed the rise of an urban subculture
interested in craftsmanship, a movement
that is also prompting a renewed interest
in letterpress. At age 37, he says he is
about 10 years behind the people actu-
ally driving the trend, since his letter-
press clients tend to be graphic designers
of either gender in their twenties or thir-
ties, most of whom work at ad agencies
or studios but also have extra work on
the side.“And they are designing mostly
for a younger market, which makes it an
especially interesting trend,” he says.
Pauptit notes that, when local colleges
bring their students to Flash Reproduc-
tions on tours, although the students
are impressed by the company’s digital
interface and multi-million-dollar
presses, when they reach the letterpress
department, they get really excited.
He also concludes that people in general
are becoming more interested in tradi-
tional letterpress process simply because
lately his company is producing more
of it.
“People are bombarded with every-
thing as virtual reality on a screen, but
they don’t get as many opportunities to
hold a well crafted object in their hands.
As a reaction to the lack of real substance
in our world, some people are craving a
real connection to craftsmanship and
physical handmade objects,”Pauptit the-
In February 2013, to
better connect craftsman-
ship with the Canadian
design community, Flash
Reproductions partnered
with Unisource Canada
to launch Wayward Arts
magazine (waywardarts.ca),
a publication highlighting
the work of leading
designers. Each month,
a different award-winning
studio is given access to
paper and print craftsmen
to produce the magazine
of their dreams.
Rich Pauptit took over Flash Reproductions
from his father in 2009.

4. Continued on page 28
orizes. “For example, business cards are
overwhelmingly unnecessary in this age
of e-mail, yet people still connect emo-
tionally to them. They even fetishize
them a bit. Along with sewn hardcover
books with head and tail bands, they are
considered The Real Thing.”
Stewart is encouraged by the growing
number of young letterpress printers
who are working out of small studios in
their basements or garages. “I think it’s
great that younger printers are interested
in letterpress and forming their own little
economies, because we need a larger
market, even if it does push pricing down
a bit. When I was that age and going
around to print shops trying to get infor-
mation about letterpress, printers told
me it was a stupid idea, and no one
would help me. So I just did everything
myself. I even ended up building my own
machine to make polymer plates.”
However, Stewart hopes a market in-
flux of letterpress products by inexperi-
enced operators will not lower the
public’s appreciation for the quality of
the letterpress craft. He says that with let-
terpress it’s very easy for the uninitiated
to produce some kind of printed result
without knowing very much about the
process, but it actually becomes more dif-
ficult to do well when your knowledge of
the many variables and your eye for qual-
ity increase.
“Three practitioners will have five dif-
ferent approaches, and that is what makes
letterpress so interesting,”he says. For ex-
ample, Stewart’s own brand of finessing
the process includes adding multiple il-
lustrations, multiple colour overlays, and
exploiting the secrets of masterful
platemaking and ink distribution to en-
able the use of very small, fine type.
“Letterpress is a lot like offset used to
be in the days when you could re-
ally feel it, before all the computer-
controlled presses and aqueous
coatings,” he adds. “It is first and
foremost a craft. Craft takes time
and experience.”
The book artist
George Walker, who studied at
OCAD at the same time as Stew-
art, is now an accomplished Cana-
dian book artist, wood engraver,
and Associate Professor of print-
making and book arts at OCAD.
Besides supplying creative direc-
tion and editorial work for two
small Canadian presses, Walker
produces limited-edition books in
his garage letterpress studio,
equipped with a Vandercook proof
press, shelves of moveable type,
and book-binding equipment.
His recent works include two
wordless novels, each composed of
over 100 wood engravings: The Mysterious
Death of Tom Thomson (an influential
Canadian landscape painter who lived
from 1877 to 1917) and Conrad Black (ac-
complished by Internet collaboration with
the media magnate while Black was serving
a recent Florida prison sentence). The 13
signed, numbered, leather-bound copies
that Walker produced of Conrad Black sold
out to almost instantly to university, insti-
tutional, and private collections at a price
of $1,500 each.
Walker says that, although his college-
age students belong to the electronic age,
they also feel the fascination of printed
books as tangible objects: “They buy a li-
cence to read an e-book, but they are also
interested in creating and owning printed
books that hold special meaning for them.
A valuable resource for anyone wish-
ing to become reacquainted with the
marvels of letterpress printing is the
Mackenzie Printery and Newspaper
Museum, Canada’s largest working
printing museum, located in the
village of Queenston, Ontario
(five km north of Niagara Falls).
The jewel in its rare collection
of letterpress, typecasting, and
lithography equipment is a Louis
Roy Press dating from the 1760s,
Canada’s oldest press and one of
very few original wooden presses
remaining in the world.
The museum occupies the
restored Georgian home and print
shop of publisher and political
activist William Lyon Mackenzie,
who lived and worked there from
1820 to 1824. The building was
officially opened in 1938 by Prime
Minister William Lyon Mackenzie
King, Mackenzie's great-grandson.
The on-site museum came later,
in 1990, through a joint partnership
between the Niagara Parks
Commission, that owns and oper-
ates the facility, and a seven-person
volunteer Printery Committee, that
maintains the collection and secures
the necessary operating funds.
PrintAction Publisher Sara Young,
who has served on the Printery
Committee for over 12 years, wrote
me in a recent e-mail: “I do believe
that it is very important, perhaps
even more so today, to preserve
antique presses and the ancillary
equipment that pushed our industry
forward and allowed the Canadian
printing industry to flourish in Canada
from the time of the war of 1812.”
From May until Labour Day, the
Mackenzie Printery is open from 10
a.m. to 5 p.m. daily (last tour at 4:30
p.m.). After Labour Day, it operates
only on weekends until it closes for
the season in October, either right
after Canadian Thanksgiving or
Hallowe’en, depending on its
volume of visitor traffic.
Besides special exhibitions and
a dedicated library, the Printery
museum offers all visitors not only
a tour of the facilities but also the
unique opportunity to try their hand
at setting type and operating two
of its eight antique presses. Each
visitor also receives a free poster
and bookmark. In all, it’s good
value for the nominal admission
price of $5 (less for children under 12.)
Additionally, for the second year
running, in response to growing
interest, the Printery offers two
full-day, professionally oriented,
hands-on letterpress seminars for
$96 (less for students), six people
per class.
The museum is always collecting
names of people who are interested
in participating in their teaching
programs with a view to expanding
their offerings. The contact for this
purpose is Harold Meighan:
905-684-7672 / haljan@gmail.com.
For general information about the
Printery, contact: 905-262-5676 /
printer@mackenzieprintery.org
A LETTERPRESS EDUCATION:
The Mackenzie Printery and Newspaper Museum
Neil Stewart, President of Anstey, has a
fine-arts background from schools in
Quebec, New York and Toronto’s OCAD.

5. and can appreciate it better, especially
when it’s well done.
“Letterpress is the pinnacle of this
phenomenon because the actual process
of making it is beautiful. The ritual of set-
ting type has something calming about
it,”says Pauptit.“People like it in the same
way that there’s a huge popular interest
in coffee shops. Instead of just grab and
pour, there’s an interest in the special ma-
chinery and all the steps, craft, and
human connection involved in produc-
ing a physical, aesthetically pleasing thing
created Just For Me.”
Pauptit believes that other social fac-
tors prompting a revival of interest in
printing and letterpress are changes in
our interactions with electronics and in
the workplace:“When I was a kid, every-
body’s parents were hung up on making
sure we understood computers and
emerging technologies. Everybody was
pushed into university with the goal of
landing a white-collar job that made
money by sitting at a desk, not sweating
on a production line like me.
“But now we’re ruled by electronics.At
work many people sit at a desk and inter-
act with a computer, and their jobs have
become complicated and abstract. If
somebody says they’re a software QA en-
gineer, many others probably don’t even
know what that means. Now people see it
as desirable thing to do a job like printing
that produces a beautiful, tangible object.”
“I don’t want to turn into a crusty old
geezer lamenting the loss of the good ol’
days,”concludesStewart.“Ijustwanttoshare
what I know to help people understand let-
terpress and use it most effectively.”
28 • PRINTACTION • JUNE 2013
Gaitskell
Continued from page 19
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“Having a signed copy of a book by an
author who has influenced us but has
passed away helps people feel a closer
human connection to that author. That
connection is lost if we just look at a
Webpage. The simulation is not as good
as being in the presence of the primary
source. That’s why original objects like
Michaelangelo’s Sistine ceiling persist in
culture. The colours and spacial relation-
ships of the original cannot be repro-
duced in the same way.”
Walker predicts it will become more
and more expensive to produce fine
books, allowing the gulf to widen
between e-books and cheaply
printed paperbacks versus hand-
crafted collectors editions created
to last and be handed down to fu-
ture generations. As someone
who produces the latter,Walker is
in an ideal position to vouch for
the printed book’s ability to pre-
serve the past.
He points out that the world’s
archives still possess incunabula
(books made before 1501) that
look like they were printed yester-
day.“Unlike electronic communi-
cation, the book is a proven
vehicle to travel through time,”he
emphasizes. “But I think you
would be hard pressed to find
anyone with the equipment to de-
code and run a book stored on an
obsolete five-inch floppy disk.
And the entire U.S. 1960 cen-
sus was lost because it was
archived on magnetic tape and
moisture corroded the tape.”
Along similar lines, Stewart
recalls how in the past century
the manufacturers of micro-
fiche data-storage equipment
succeeded in persuading pub-
lic libraries and governments
that microfiche was the best
way to preserve their archives;
but because microfiche records were later
found to deteriorate and the equipment
proved expensive and cumbersome, the
microfiche process has largely been re-
placed with digital-data storage systems.
Popular appreciation of letterpress
Pauptit believes people like the experi-
ence of holding a piece of analogue let-
terpress printing in their hands, because
the antique process’ slight embossing ef-
fect allows them to understand quickly
how the letters were pushed into the
stock. Walker agrees that the appeal of
modern letterpress includes the tactile
quality of the type. He says, although old-
time letterpress printers laboured to
make the type just kiss the paper, con-
temporary letterpress printers push the
impression deeper into the substrate so
viewers will recognize that it’s created
with letterpress. (On a technical note,
Stewart recommends that practitioners
avoid Bold Slab type if they want the im-
pression to remain visible.)
Pauptit identifies one social factor con-
tributing to a new appreciation of letter-
press as the fact that in relative terms
consumers are no longer bombarded
with unwanted print. Consequently, he
says, consumers are not as sick of print
PhotobyMichelleWalker