Artisans of Dartmoor - Book - Page 179
THE LETTERPRESS PRINTERS
It’s time-consuming, finicky and hard to make economically viable, but for
Emma Hogbin and Jon Palmer, letterpress printing is a deep-rooted passion
T
here is an atmosphere of intense concentration
in Princetown Press’s studio. Jon Palmer – JP – is
typesetting a greetings card and, silently, studiously,
selects tiny metal letters from compartments of
a wooden tray, then slots them one by one onto a
composing stick. As the text grows, with letters back
to front and words in reverse, the task demands his full
focus. When each line is finished, he carefully transfers
it to a special metal frame which, once complete, he
loads onto a press to be inked and printed. Two hours
after JP began this design, the first copy of his 50-word
card is deposited with a gentle clunk from the belly of
a vintage letterpress.
“It’s not quite as easy as pressing ‘print’ on a
computer,” jokes JP, who, with his partner Emma
Hogbin, creates bespoke, eco-friendly stationery,
posters, and short-run publications at their studio
in the village of Princetown, on the high moor.
“Invariably there’s an upside-down letter, or a b
instead of a d. Getting the spacing right, checking
and double-checking, takes a lot of time. You have
to be extremely precise, but there’s something
incredibly meditative about it,” he says.
JP and Emma moved to Princetown from Yeovil
in 2020, drawn by a love for Dartmoor ‘letterboxing’
– an outdoor orienteering and puzzle-solving game.
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