I’m always trying to find paper that I can print on a laser or ink jet printer and then letterpress. Lots of paper for ink jet and laser printers isn’t cotton or archival or it’s coated. Text weight letterpress paper for books is often expensive per sheet and usually (at least for where I live) has to be mail ordered.
For this book I did of a friend’s poems, he wanted to include both photographs and letterpress. After some experiments, I found that the photos reproduced well on Mohawk Superfine using a color laser printer. I’ve used Mohawk Superfine for other letterpressed books, and it’s reasonably priced. Plus, I could get parent sheets from a local Kelly Paper, rather than mail order.
Making a hard bound book was going to be too expensive, so to make the binding special and affordable, we decided to sew the sections through the cover onto tapes and then weave the tapes into the front & back.
In my quest for finding appropriate printing methods for my books and broadsides, last fall I took Maia de Raat’s “Introduction to Linoleum Block Carving”, at the San Francisco Center for the Book. I’ve carved linoleum blocks before, but Maia had a set of Japanese wood carving knives that she let us try. Wow! So much easier than the cheap Speedball knives I bought at the art store. She suggested we get knives at 
