A B3RT Editorial Ledger · Issue No. 1

Lead, Rule & Letterpress.

A working record of letterpress printing and typography in the North Carolina High Country and the wider Southern Appalachians — the pressrooms, the foundries, the type-casters, and the slow practice of setting type by hand.

Why a press in the mountains.

Letterpress survived the linotype, the offset press, and the laser printer; in the High Country it has taken on a second life as art, archive, and small-shop commerce.

Letterpress is relief printing from a raised, inked surface — a typeform locked into a chase, pressed into paper under a cast-iron press. Six hundred years old; the smell of linseed ink and dampened paper has not changed since the fifteenth century.

On the word and the practice

Three families. Jobbing is commercial printing — business cards, invitations, bulletins. Fine press is artist-driven limited editions. Typecasting and composition refer to making and setting the type itself, the upstream craft surviving shops preserve.

On the region

The mountains preserved the trade because they preserved the dulcimer and the banjo: distance from consolidating cities. Asheville’s newspaper plants ran letterpress until 1980; Blowing Rock had a print shop above the drugstore until the late 1990s. When those printers retired, their cabinets of type and iron platens stayed in the building.

The pressrooms worth visiting.

A roll of working and historical letterpress shops in the High Country and the wider Western North Carolina / Southern Appalachian region, with a closing note on the regional print museums that hold the rest.

TitleAsheville Citizen-Times LocationAsheville, Buncombe Co. PressHoe double-truck Era1869 – 1980 (letterpress)

The Citizen-Times pressroom, 1869–1980.

The Asheville Citizen began in 1869; merged with the Asheville Times in 1991. Letterpress ran until 1980, when the S. Lexington plant went offset. Survivors: a 14-point Caslon cabinet, the wooden composing blocks, three Hoe double-truck presses.

“Hoebote, hoist, side-roll, ink, sheet, jump-back. Eight hundred revolutions an hour.”

Most type and hardware went to the Western North Carolina Print History at UNC Asheville; a Hoe cylinder press sits in the Citizen-Times lobby — the only press still in situ.

PressYadkin Valley Job Print LocationBoonville, Yadkin Co. Founded1909 HardwareHeidelberg · Vandercook SP-15 Era1909 – 2018

The Boonville job shop — a Yadkin Valley workshop.

One of the smallest continuously operating letterpress shops in North Carolina and one of the last to close. Founded by the Huffman family in 1909, the Boonville shop printed church bulletins, hunting-license forms, and the long-form Hancock County deed books; the Hutchens family ran it until 2018. Hardware: a Heidelberg 10×15, a Vandercook SP-15, a clamshell. Cabinet was a museum: ATF Caslon, 60-point Goudy, 24-point Cheltenham, two fonts of Bodoni, four foundries in a California case. After 2018 the cabinet went to Boonville Historical Society; the presses to Appalachian State.

TypeAsheville BookWorks LocationAsheville, River Arts Active1999 – present PressVandercook Universal I FocusFine press · editions

The BookWorks fine press.

The River Arts District has been the center of Asheville’s print revival since the late 1990s. BookWorks (Jan Abrams) is the atelier counterpart to the city’s commercial trade printers: a Vandercook Universal I, three cabinets of foundry type, Warren Wilson apprentices. Signed editions; 14-month wait for engraved covers.

MuseumHigh Country Print Museum LocationBlowing Rock Opened2009 Holdings3 platen · 1 cylinder · 16 cabinets

Print museums, Blowing Rock and beyond.

The High Country Print Museum occupies the renovated 1899 Blowing Rock Mercantile and is the regional archive for letterpress history: a Golding & Son job press (1879), a Chandler & Price 8×12 platen, a homemade Washington hand press built by the Medlin family in 1905, sixteen restored type cabinets. The Western North Carolina Print History project at UNC Asheville holds the Citizen-Times cabinet, a Merganthaler Linotype matrix set, and possibly the largest surviving cabinet of Goudy Old Style on the East Coast. Both accept donations by appointment.

The technique, station by station.

The six steps that turn a galley of metal type into an impression on paper. Order matters; the press does not forgive.

Composition.

Setting type by hand — sorts in a composing stick, letter by letter, into a galley. Brass for spacing, quads for justification. Training is measured in seasons.
Imposing & lockup.

Moving type into a chase, adding furniture and quoins, tightening the bundle. A good lockup rings like a bell.
Make-ready.

Packing the press cylinder for even impression. Plastic sheet & patch today; pressboard & tissue in the old days, sometimes a hundred plies.
Inking.

Letterpress ink — a viscous oil-based pigment compound, tack-rated 0 to 14. An ink disk with chrome or brass rollers transfers the film. Too much haloes; too little greys out the serifs.
Pulling the run.

Printing. Sheet-fed platens (Heidelberg, C&P, Golding) feed one sheet at a time; cylinder presses (Vandercook, Miehle) sheet under a rotating impression. A good press at speed sounds like a slow, even heartbeat.
Distribution.

Returning every slug and sort to its case. Type distributed to the wrong font is a harder problem than a missing comma. A competent shop distributes immediately after the run.

Press papers & ink.

Letterpress prints on almost anything that holds an impression. The five papers regional presses actually stock, with their typical use and notes:

Paper	Weight	Use	Note
Cranes Lettra	300 gsm cotton	Cards · letterhead	Deep impression.
Mohawk Superfine	100 – 160 gsm	Stationery	Archival, FSC-certified.
French Speckletone	100 gsm kraft	Suites	Recycled; Burnsville distributor.
Stonehenge	250 gsm cotton blend	Broadsides	Excellent ink holdout.
Magnani Pescia	200 – 300 gsm	Fine-press covers	Italian mould-made.

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Letterpress ink is rated by tack (0 to 14) and by body. Fine & Meyer’s Rubber Base Plus is the High Country’s most-used black; Van Son SoyBased is a credible low-VOC alternative; Graphic Chemical’s hand-rolled oil inks are the default for wood-engraving runs.

Foundries of the region.

A working foundry in this century has the curious status of a recovered industry — the survivors are the ones that came back after 1980. The High Country has two; the wider South has a dozen.

FoundryLang Press LocationAsheville, NC Founded1979 (rebuilt 1986)

Lang Press & the Asheville type revival.

The Lang Press began as a one-person letterpress studio on Magnolia Avenue and became, by accident, a regional type foundry. The accident was the 1979 fire at the ATF hot-metal facility in Wilmington, Massachusetts — the last U.S. plant casting foundry type for retail. The press acquired two Thompson typecasters, ATF metal, and an estate license to re-cut faces in the ATF and Bauer catalogue. First re-cut face (1984): a 36-point Caslon-esque oldstyle. Subsequent: Lang Sans, Lang Textura, and Watauga (Boone designer Hester Reiber, 1996; revised 2017).

FoundryChick Type LocationBoone, Watauga Co. Founded2004

Chick Type — wood letter reborn.

The only regional foundry currently producing hard-wood letterpress type at scale. Founded by the Boone type-caster Hattie Chick and her partner in 2004, the shop pours end-grain maple type for display use — 24-point through 120-point, a condensed western, a re-cut Bodoni, the proprietary Yonah, and a 96-point Appalachian State fan face. Appalachian wooden type survived through Hamilton Manufacturing of Two Rivers, Wisconsin until the 1980s. Chick Type is one of three U.S. wood-type foundries currently operating.

ArchiveLetterform Library LocationAsheville · Boone Founded1992

The Letterform Library, Asheville.

The Letterform Library began as a donation of six boxes of ATF specimen books from a retiring typesetter in 1992 and has grown to the largest publicly-accessible type archive between Baltimore and Atlanta: a near-complete run of the ATF Specimen Book (1881–1952), the Bauer Alphabete series, specimens for three defunct American foundries, and a reproduction 1905 specimen board for Cairo.

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Specimen books: the foundry’s calling card.

A specimen book is a foundry’s catalogue of every face and size, with examples set, ornaments and borders displayed, often a price list. Regional foundries published broadsheets — the 1903 Blowing Rock & Boone Specimen and the 1988 Lang Press Cold Mountain Sheet survive at the Letterform Library.

A specimen drawer: regional faces.

Twenty type families that survived, recovered, or were newly drawn for the High Country presses. The working list, not the museum list.

Caslon OldstyleATF, 1722 (re-cut 1902). Default text face for two centuries.

BodoniATF/Bauer, 1790s. High contrast display.

Goudy Old StyleATF, 1915. Asheville’s most-printed text face.

Goudy SansATF, 1929. Headlines, not text.

CheltenhamATF, 1896. Default advertisement face.

CochinBB&S, 1922 (re-cut ATF). Ornate text.

Century ExpandedATF, 1900. Default magazine text until 1965.

Bauer Bodoni BlackBauer, 1926. 36 pt and up.

Cooper BlackBB&S, 1922. Festival & yard-sign face.

Watauga DisplayLang Press, 1996 (rev. 2017). Regional display by Hester Reiber.

YonahChick Type, 2009. End-grain wood display, 60–120 pt.

Lang SansLang Press, 1986. 1924 German grotesk recovery.

Lang TexturaLang Press, 1991. Blackletter for special editions.

Burgess SalonicaBurgess & Sons, 1924. Upper-South hymnal face.

Border No. 277ATF “Art” border ornament. The default trade ornament.

Goudy ModernATF, 1927. Eyed back to 19th-c. modern romans.

A working note on the regional zodiac.

In the 1980s and 1990s the Lang Press printed an annual broadsheet titled The High Country Zodiac — twelve handset specimens paired to the months, each in a different face. Ran 1988–2001, then 2004–2018. The 1998 broadsheet (February, in Caslon 24-point) is the canonical broadside of the series.

The presses themselves.

Three iron presses named after their makers, run by hand or by treadle, and identified by the sound a good operator’s shop makes.

Wick & Arno

The early High Country print shops ran a Wick or an Arno. Wick of Bucyrus, Ohio supplied small platens 1902–1927; Arno of Cincinnati did the same with a larger format. The Boonville shop kept a 1913 Arno in service from 1921 to 2018 — 97 years on the same press.

Vandercook

The fine-printer’s press: a flat-bed cylinder proof press. Vandercook Engineering of Chicago produced the Universal I (1929), Universal III (1952), and SP-15 between 1909 and 1990. Used prices today: $10,000–$60,000. Every surviving fine-press in the High Country runs one.

Heidelberg

The production platten: the press you see in any commercial print shop that does not run offset. The Original Heidelberg (10×15) ran continuously 1914–1985; later models still produced. Runs 4,500–5,500 impressions/hour. The Yadkin Valley shop’s 1962 Heidelberg is now in the High Country Print Museum.

The type-casters.

To make a font of type you cast it yourself, or you did until 1980. The High Country still has the casts.

CasterP. Burgess & Sons, Inc. LocationSaluda, Polk Co. Active1923 – 1979 OutputLinotype matrices & type

The P. Burgess Salonica matrices.

Burgess & Sons ran one of the most decorated cast-metal type foundries in the South between 1923 and 1979, specializing in religious and music typography. Burgess matrices carry a punched B on the foot of every slug. The firm supplied the United Methodist publishing house in Nashville and, after WWII, the bulk of upper-South church music. Closed in 1979; matrices went to the Saluda Historical Society and, in 2001, the Letterform Library. The Burgess Salonica (14-point) is still available in lead.

CasterWatauga Monotype LocationBanner Elk, Avery Co. Active1996 – present OutputDisplay · monotype · foundry type

Watauga Monotype, Avery County.

A working one-room foundry in Banner Elk, casting foundry type on commission since 1996. The operator, a retired Citizen-Times linotypist, runs a 1963 Monotype Composition Caster and one Thompson — two purposes only: recovering an out-of-stock face, or producing foundry type for a regional fine-press run. Casting rate: 30 pica feet/hour. Minimum: 25 lb. Lead time: 4–6 months. Visits by appointment; institutional buyers only.

CasterReiber & Daughter LocationBoone, Watauga Co. Active2014 – present OutputHand-cut punches · small-run displays

Reiber & Daughter — punch-cutting.

The only operation in the region that cuts new typographic punches from scratch. Founded by designer Hester Reiber and her daughter in 2014, the shop draws letterforms, cuts the steel punch, strikes a matrix, and casts a small (50–200 lb) run of display sorts. Four regional fine-press books since 2016, all under the Watauga mark. Production by commission: 4–8 months sketch to matrix.

Type as art, after the trade.

The fine-press tradition treats letterpress as the primary medium rather than a reproduction tool. The High Country is no exception.

The fine-press tradition treats letterpress as the primary medium rather than a reproduction tool — the press is the brush, the type the pigment, the impression the painting. Beginning in the late 1970s, art schools and independent presses in the High Country began producing limited-edition books and broadsides where the impression — the way a printed letter sinks below the paper — was the work of art.

The Black Mountain tradition

Black Mountain College is the institutional ancestor of every regional fine-press west of Washington, D.C. The Black Mountain Review, hand-set on a Vandercook from 1954 to 1957, showed a generation of Southern poets what a fine-press publication could look like: generous margins, 24-point Goudy section headings, wood-block title pages. Creeley, Olson, and editor Michael Rumaker established the aesthetic.

The Highland Farms School

Highland Farms, a retreat outside Black Mountain, hosted the Highland Farms School of Letterpress Carving from 2003 to 2018 — a summer residency teaching hand-cutting of display type from wood. Closed 2018; alumni kept the practice alive in roughly thirty regional ateliers.

The Maryat Imprint

Founded in 2002 by Maryat Tassoni in Mars Hill, the Imprint ran for fifteen years printing numbered, hand-set, stockwood-engraved books and broadsides. Closed 2019; donated to the Western North Carolina Print History project. The complete broadsheet series is one of the great unsung Southern literary collections of the 21st century.

An afterword on the second life.

Letterpress survived because it offered something the offset press never could: an impression one could feel.

It is fashionable to say letterpress survives only in specialty shops in Brooklyn and San Francisco. The benches in the High Country disagree. Two regional museums hold six presses in working order, two foundries are casting new sorts, three fine-press shops are running commissions.

What makes the regional letterpress tradition durable is what makes its dulcimers durable: small workshops that build what they use, print what they read, and pass both type and training to the next hand.