Letterpress printing is the technology for reproducing text that gave the world everything from Gutenberg's bibles to the dinner menus on the grand ocean liners. It is the craft of pressing words and images, cast in metal or cut from wood, directly into paper. The letterforms leave their mark, adding a sensuous texture to the page and evoking things that last. Custom-designed letterpress printing from Woodside Press transforms everyday items -- personal stationery, invitations, announcements, certificates -- into objects to admire and save.
For personal stationery both formal and casual; as a distinguished gift to mark a birthday, a promotion, a new home, or to celebrate a child's learning to write or to equip an older student going away to school. For imaginative presents tailored precisely to the recipient: personalized index cards for the inveterate recipe collector; refined personal bookplates for the serious reader amassing a library; sumptuous "private labels" for makers of wine or preserves.
A stationery wardrobe or the complete printed suite for a wedding, commissioned directly from Woodside Press, is surprisingly affordable because our work is done in our printing shop in the historic Brooklyn Navy Yard, and our customers enjoy direct-from-the-maker savings. Woodside Press is also ideal for small-run jobs because unlike most printers and engravers, or minimum order is one printed piece.
Normally a custom commission takes four weeks to complete from the time a customer submits a text. Our methods are traditional and often include hand-set type and printing on antique presses. For the customer this results in a finished item that stands apart from the crush of high-speed production printing.
Woodside Press's holdings include hundreds of metal and wooden typefaces and classic ornamental material. Supply the wording, and we can provide design, typesetting, proofs, paper- and ink-color recommendations, and superior letterpress printing. Alternatively, we can work in colloboration with graphic designers to execute their work in letterpress quality. We also offer editiorial consulting to help you refine your message or apply the rules of etiquette to your social printing.
Woodside Press is New York City's leading facility for the Linotype, Monotype and Ludlow hot-metal typecasting systems. We have complete runs of sizes of many popular typeface families (Garamond, Caslon, and Optima for example) and many other distinguished faces (Palatino, Weiss, and Walbaum, to name a few) and decorative faces (Rivoli, Benedictine, Egmont as well as many others) .
We provide typesetting in solid, high-quality Linotype or Ludlow "slugs" for letterpress printers, foil stampers, rubber-stamp makers, leather-goods stampers, book binders, and artists.
Submit text and specifications for typefaces and sizes. We set, proof, and correct the text in Linotype or Ludlow slugs and ship you carefully packaged ready-to-print type. We charge a basic typographic services fee and an additional per-line rate, and we collect a fully refundable deposit for the return of our type metal.
Woodside Press has extensive holdings in fine American and European foundry-cast typefaces from the 19th and 20th centuries (including some classic Arabic and Hebrew faces). These types are irreplaceable, and many are in delicate condition, thus all are unsuitable for full-scale printing. Nonetheless, they may be used for single-proof reproduction.
"Repros" from Woodside Press allow designers to work with true-cut original type designs of classic faces instead of digitized versions. Also, letterpress reproduction proofs are the sharpest and clearest camera-ready typography available -- a special advantage when working with larger type sizes for titling and headlines. Where appropriate, our compositors letterspace type by hand for a perfectly finished look.
We own a wide range of antique and modern wood type ranging in height from under an inch to eight inches. These include an impressive variety of serif and sans serif styles in both one and two colors (outlines and tints). They are ideal for creating evocative headlines and can be reproduced in either a painstakingly precise style or in a quaintly "distressed" style.
Yes, we have the facilities and the experience to produce highest-level editions of wood engravings, woodblock cuts, linoleum block cuts, typographic collage, and relief monoprints. We can make "test" proofs of blocks of all descriptions for artists and collectors and can select and prepare papers for relief printmaking.