You don't have to be a doomsday alarmist to hold with those who think it's wise for people to know how to do things for themselves, instead of relying on enormous, soulless corporations to wipe our butts. Besides, handmade items have a tendency to be more beautiful and more lasting. A few years ago, an increased interest in handcrafting met a growing audience of enthused buyers, and along with clothing, jewelry, and pottery, letterpress-adorned goods began to fill craft show stands.

Letterpress is a form of printing of text and images using a press and moveable lead or wood type, in which a reversed, raised surface is inked and then pressed into a sheet of paper. Invented in the mid-15th century by Johannes Gutenberg, this process was the predominant form of printing text through the second half of the 20th century, when more convenient modern means of printing replaced it.

Five years ago, City printed a story on the resurgence of letterpress culture, and since then the presence of letterpress businesses and demand for goods has grown in Rochester to include at least two teaching centers, a handful of indie presses, and more than a dozen artists who utilize letterpress in their artwork in one way or another. In the current culture where convenience, efficiency, cleanliness, and high-tech toys are king, why take a seemingly backward step toward a very slow, messy, time- and money- consuming process?

"I think what people dig about letterpress is the deliberateness of it, the contemplative-ness of it, and the pride in having created something in a fast-paced, mass-produced world," says Mitch Cohen, director of the Printing & Book Arts Center at the Genesee Center for the Arts and Education on Monroe Avenue. Cohen is an artist and an educator, whose interest in printing began in high school, when he worked as a sign printer for the department store, Epstein's. He then attended RIT for photo marketing and chose printing for his vocation.

"We were sort of on the tail end of lead [moveable type]. Lead was dying, lead was dead. Although we never thought so." Cohen graduated from RIT in 1976, at which point "the streets were littered with typesetting equipment: linotypes, monotypes, intertypes. They were on the curb, they were being junked. At that time nobody really cared," as the world quickly moved on to offset printing, he recalls.

Primarily a teaching center, the Genesee Center's Printing & Book Arts Center has a commitment to preserving creative craftsmanship and to promoting these endeavors in all people. It also has row upon row of type cases, as well as eight antique presses for student and artist use. These "functional dinosaurs," as Cohen calls them, include a Vandercook No. 3, and a motorless Vandercook No. 4 (Vandercook & Sons was a manufacturer of the first, and most widely used, proof presses, which didn't rely on gravity for the force of their impression, resulting in an easier and more precise operation). Call them obsolete if you will, but Cohen praises the latter press' ever-usefulness: "When it all hits the fan, when the big judgment day comes, and there is no more electricity, that one, that press will totally be in demand."

Local printmakers like Laura Wilder and letterpress artists like Geri McCormick, who is also the chair of the Genesee Center's board, print their work there, and often guest-teach classes. What sets the Genesee Center apart from other local letterpress businesses, says Cohen, is that artists can make their own paper there - gorgeously textured pages so thick and so packed with fragile items like petals, that letterpress is literally the only means of printing upon their cumbersome surfaces. The center also teaches techniques like paper marbling - a process of putting intricate swirls of color on paper for the inside covers of books - as well as bookbinding classes. You can literally create a whole book from start to finish at the Genesee Center.

Cohen sees three schools of thought and practice emerging in the letterpress world, the most traditional being purist printers who combine metal plates with hand-set type, who are "practicing tried and true dos and don'ts in terms of typography," he says. Another school is "sort of the Hatch, Yee-Haw, kind of distressed" style, that "just has that old Western, wood type look, which is very prevalent in a lot of advertising right now. Then there's the newer faction of letterpress people who are basically designers, who are designing digitally and then going photopolymer," he says.

The first thing a letterpress buff would notice upon visiting Pistachio Press, Rachael Hetzel's studio in Anderson Alley on Goodman Street, is the lack of the typical beastly type cabinets. In using the photopolymer process, Hetzel designs her work on a computer, creates a negative image of it, and sends that file out to be translated to a photopolymer plate. The negative image hardens after exposure, the rest is brushed off, and the plate is ready to adhere to the press and print. In the future, Hetzel plans to buy a plate maker and do her plate making in-house.

Photopolymer work "is very, very clean," says Cohen, "and the papers that are out there now, most of those folks are printing on Lettra - real soft, real cushy, you can just smack the snot out of it. Just crush those fibers. Looks great."

This textured, deep impression is the desired effect of modern letterpress prints, and is one element that sets it apart from mass-produced printing. "What back in my school days would have gotten me a failing grade, in terms of the impression, is now the desired effect," says Cohen. Now, "you can see it from across the room."

Hetzel, who also contributed to the beautiful collaborative 2011 calendar produced by the Genesee Center, is a University of Buffalo printmaking grad who moved to Rochester, but was forced to trek back to Buffalo to print until the Genesee Center's Printing & Book Arts Center opened in 2005. Her current space in Anderson Alley is shared with artist friends ("we underwrite each other, support each others' endeavors," she says).

Pistachio Press, which officially opened in 2007, is a small operation that involves two presses: a 1961 Vandercook SP-15, which is more compact, and is a good 500 pounds lighter than the Vandercook No.4, which is 15 to 20 years older than the SP-15. Pistachio also has an antique paper cutter, built to last in 1881. Because the business relies entirely on the functionality of these antiques, and due to a dearth of press mechanics, Hetzel's team has taken maintenance classes to learn how to fix and preserve the machines, and she follows the blog of Paul Moxon (vandercookpress.com), which is dedicated to the longevity of the machines, and contains a census of the known existing Vandercook presses.

I visited Pistachio Press during its busy craft show season, and while its team prepped for the Anderson Alley Holiday Gala. Hetzel works with her husband, Jake, and intern Emily Grzybowski, who help print, score, fold, and collate the work. In addition to creating custom work for wedding invites, greeting cards, limited-edition prints, and more, Pistachio also does three trade shows per year, geared toward gift-store retailers who place wholesale orders on their offerings.

"I work one-on-one with clients during the design process and handle almost all of the printing as well," Hetzel says. "Our designs have a minimalist quality that I believe helps our products stand out. We also produce some specialty items every season, like our calendars, and our customers return yearly for them. One of our most interactive pieces is a set of woodland animal masks that come with a set of crayons. Kids - and adults - can color the mask, cut it out and start playing. It's pieces like these that have the ability to be heirlooms," she says.

Hetzel adds that she believes people are beginning to tire of high-tech gadgets and slick, mass-produced goods. "There may be an immediacy to e-mail, but a handwritten thank-you note is appreciated so much more than a quick text message."

Perhaps the most ambitious commercial letterpress business in town is Dock 2 Letterpress in Webster. Just more than a year old, Dock 2 is co-owned by Tony Zanni and Dave Eckler, with support from a small team of assistants. Zanni studied graphic design at RIT, but his passion for letterpress began in 2001 when he met Mike Kopicki, owner of the Ermine Press in Webster. "Mike has a huge barn full of letterpress machines, type, and other goodies. From the moment I walked in the barn I was hooked," Zanni says. Shortly thereafter, he met Eckler, owner of the Weekend Printer printing service, who had started setting type when he was in 8th grade, and has been a serious collector ever since.

Another important member of the Dock 2 team is Ray Czapkowski, who though now in his 70s, worked as a type compositor in his early 20s. Czapkowski serves as Dock 2's "Introduction to Letterpress" teacher, and "has more knowledge about typesetting in his pinky than anyone else at the shop," says Zanni.

"What attracted me to letterpress was the hands-on approach to design you miss out on blasting through things on the computer," Zanni says. Zanni finds that he sketches more for hand-set work than when doing digital design, and likes that being limited to the tools of the trade that are available to him forces him to be more creative with design. "I can't just hit a button to make a type bigger or smaller," he says. "Thirty line French Clarendon isn't going to work if you only have 29 line to fit it in."

In addition to a staggering 150 cases of wood type, 600 cases of lead type, and a designer-drool-worthy collection of borders, cuts, and printable images, Dock 2 has 11 presses in total, but primarily uses three main machines, which Zanni and Eckler have restored and preserved. "Charlie" is a foot-treadle-driven 1894 Chandler & Price platen press that requires more coordination to operate than I could ever hope to summon. Mr. Wessel" is a 110-year-old iron hand press, like what you'd picture Ben Franklin printing on, "except ours is iron, not wood," says Zanni. He calls the magnificent behemoth "terribly time consuming, and fantastic," but claims his favorite press is "Isabelle," the 1937 Vandercook No. 3 Proof Press.

Besides serving as a teaching center, Dock 2 does design work and prints custom wedding invitations, music and theater show posters, as well as notebooks, greeting cards, posters, and other ephemera, which is sold in its shop, at craft shows, and on Etsy.com. Tactile, well-designed, memorable business cards are increasing in popularity.

Zanni's favorite project, which launched this past September, is called the Feedback Loop Notebook Project, and is produced by Felt & Wire Shop (feltandwireshop.com), a curated paper-goods shop by Mohawk Fine Papers. The project seeks to raise money and awareness for Design Ignites Change and its mentor program, School by Design, which "encourages design professionals and college design students to team up with students in underprivileged schools," with the aim of improving the schools "using problem-solving skills from a design standpoint versus conventional thinking," says Zanni. Dock 2's contribution is a notebook with a cover that's layered richly with text and shapes, has a Japanese stab binding, and a tear-off bookmark; 100 percent of the purchase price is donated to Design Ignites Change.

Hetzel from Pistachio Press foresees letterpress culture continuing to grow "as people become more educated about the process. There was a time when letterpresses were sent to scrap yards and relegated to basement storage in universities. Now, people like me drive across the country to pick up a press, spend weeks restoring and cleaning it, and then give it lots of love when printing," she says.

As popularity of letterpress culture and ephemera rises, availability of the elusive materials goes down - but not necessarily due to competitive hobbyists. Eckers is annoyed by wood type getting snatched up by artists who glue the pieces into coffee tables, and make collages. "We are losing the ability to outbid them," he says. The presses aren't being produced anymore; there is only a scattered cottage industry for creating lead type and wood type, the latter of which is now offered locally by third-generation woodturner Bill Jones.

We live in a throwaway culture. These days, we hardly manufacture a thing worth preserving for one lifetime, let alone handing down for generations to come. It's fascinating and refreshing to witness a small community completely geeking out over their tools, which they have lovingly learned to restore and preserve.

Last year, the Genesee Center for the Arts and Education screened "Proceed and Be Bold!," a film about Amos Paul Kennedy Jr., who gave up a steady, lucrative career in favor of the antique craft of letterpress. He now lives a very bohemian, soulful life as an artist. In January, Kennedy will return to Rochester to screen his film at the University of Rochester, give a talk at the Frederick Douglass Institute, and teach a brunch class at the Genesee Center. For more information, visit geneseearts.org.

ROCHESTER RESOURCES!

Local letterpress resources

Cary Graphic Arts Press, RIT

90 Lomb Memorial Dr. | carypress.rit.edu

Dock 2 Letterpress | Tony Zanni, Dave Eckers

855 Publisher's Parkway, Dock 2, Webster | dock2letterpress.com

Pistachio Press | Rachael Hetzel

Anderson Alley, 250 N. Goodman St., 4th floor, Studio 4-7, | pistachiopress.com

Fly Rabbit Press | Chris Charles

200-6491 | flyrabbitpress.com

greengirlpress | Amy Rau

greengirlpress.com

Printing & Book Arts Center at Genesee Center for the Arts and Education | Mitch Cohen

713 Monroe Ave. | geneseearts.org

Singletree Press | Emily Sterling

208-1827 | singletreepress.wordpress.com

Virgin Wood Type Manufacturing Company | Bill Jones

virginwoodtype.com

If you're involved in letterpress arts in Rochester or the surrounding area, contact City and we'll add you to the online version of this list on rochestercitynewspaper.com.