Letterpress Printer

Bradley Hutchinson

Bradley Hutchinson established his letterpress print shop in January 1995 under the moniker of Digital Letterpress and still operates in the same modest workspace on the east side of Austin, Texas, using equipment unchanged for the past two and a half decades: a pair of trusty Heidelberg flat bed cylinder presses and a Vandercook SP-20, an ancient Italian guillotine paper cutter, a sturdy photopolymer platemaker, and a compact type foundry consisting of a late-model English composition caster and two Thompson casters for making display type.

The name was intended as an ironic play on words because there is, in fact, very little that is “digital” about this work in the current sense save the use of pdf files to create the high-contrast graphic arts negatives used in making relief plates. In most respects the process remains fundamentally the same as in the 1950s, or the 1850s for that matter: an inked typographic surface transfers an image to paper under mechanical pressure.

Bradley Hutchinson brings over 40 years of experience in letterpress printing and the allied book arts to the production of fine books and distinctive commercial printing, always with an eye towards quality, consistency and efficiency. “To make work better for its purpose than was commonly thought worthwhile” was the goal of D.B. Updike and his Merrymount Press, and a century later that understated objective still resonates at this printing office.