The crafts of letterpress and bookbinding

At Seedlings, all of our products involve our hands. Our prints are pulled on a range of letterpress machines: a Vandercook, an Arab platen, or our Commor galley press. Our pamphlets are bound by hand with needle and waxed thread. We believe this makes what we produce unique: every item will have its own story, every page of every pamphlet is printed in a particular way, on a particular paper, a collaboration of many hands.

We must note though that these means no product will be ‘perfect’. Since our foundation in 2023, we’ve handprinted thousands of copies of hundreds of prints of poetry and prose, and every single print has its own nature: variations in inking, marks, registration, alignment, typos, etc. Of course, off a commercial digital printer such marks and movements you might call ‘defects’ but at Seedlings, we cherish each difference as proof it was made by humans.

Throughout our projects, we’ve trained dozens of printers in typography, letterpress printing and binding. Much of this training was free, in exchange for help making our editions, though we also run workshops and sessions for people to learn printing and print whatever they want to!

The Heritage Crafts Red List explains how letterpress printing and bookbinding are both endangered crafts, with fewer materials and practitioners every year. Our team are all in our 20s and we’ve trained printers from age 7 to over 60, trying to protect our beloved crafts while celebrating nature with the writing we produce.