I always ask customers where they found my website or Etsy shop. Some answer, some don’t. And occasionally I get a nice surprise, as I did this week. Karla told me she saw my letterpress wood type collages in the June 2009 Better Homes & Gardens magazine. And not just one, but 3 designs and a coaster! [Sadly, they don’t mention my press name, but tell readers to “search etsy for ‘letters and numbers’”.]

Anton Marc’s “The Thread of Meaning.” An accordion fold book that is 3.75” x 5” when closed and extends to 12 feet when open. The colored photo reproductions of chairs are linked by hand-sewn black thread.

Forbes.com recently had an article about the revival of letterpress printing. They mention Hatch Show Print, a print shop in Nashville that’s been making entertainment posters (”show posters”) since 1979 (that’s one of their prints to the left, you can see more here).
It’s a breezy short article. And amusing in that it ends with a discussion of the debate on whether using photopolymer plates to print is really letterpress. Several of the commenters to the article say it isn’t letterpress unless the printer uses hand-set metal type. The Beast Pieces blog has a good counter-argument here.
At SFCB, our beginning letterpress courses all teach hand type setting — but that’s because, in a studio already stocked full of metal type, it’s the easiest, cheapest way to start learning. But anyone who continues usually wants to design pieces that can be difficult, time consuming and costly to print hand-set, so my recommendation for a follow-on class is always the Printing from Photopolymer Plates class.