To Experience Historic Printing Technique, ‘Press’ Here

Deep in the bowels of Hornbake Library, 2 tons of recently acquired iron are both a callback to the past and a glimpse into the surprisingly enduring world of what many think of as a lost art. 

The Hornbake Library Letterpress Studio, which officially opened this semester on the building’s ground floor, is home to two printing presses, circa 1870, that were donated to the University of Maryland in February. The equipment uses the technique of relief printing, in which raised surfaces are inked and then pressed onto paper, and is available to classes and students who want a tactile experience creating hand-printed pamphlets, small books or other ephemera. 

“We show students rare books and we talk about how these were printed by hand, and they don’t have any idea what that means, because for them, a printer is a machine that spits out stuff—it’s not a person working at a very different-looking machine,” said Douglas McElrath, director of Special Collections and University Archives. “We thought this would help us talk about what the process was to go from an idea to something in print that could be circulated.”

A member of the Chesapeake chapter of the American Printing History Association, McElrath was acquainted with local printers and collectors. Among them are Christopher Manson, owner of the Crooked Crow Press in Rockville, Md., and his wife, Patricia, who donated one of the presses. It had been previously owned by printer and designer Roland Hoover, who died in 2018. The other press was a gift from Ellie Denker, whose late husband, Michael, owned Stoney Creek Press in Potomac, Md. 

Both presses were manufactured by R. Hoe & Co. of New York and London. Each weighs roughly a ton, and would have been operated by two people: an inker, who would set the type, apply ink to the letters placed inside the machine and line up the paper, and someone who would pull down the platen, or the flat part of the press that applies pressure and causes the ink to leave an impression.

Rebecca Lukachinski MLIS ’25, who worked in Hornbake last semester as a graduate assistant, produced Kermit the Frog-themed keepsakes for commencement in May using the printing presses. Amber Kohl MLIS ’12, curator of literature and rare nooks and manager of the Hornbake Library Letterpress Studio, made a wood engraving of Kermit, and Lukachinski chose and set the type, which quoted a segment of Kermit’s 1996 commencement speech at Southampton College. 

Hornbake has a vast array of metal and wood type and printing blocks—including numbers, animals and emoji-like symbols—that can be arranged on the presses to create prints. The letters and symbols must be placed upside-down and left to right to create a mirror image of the words that will appear legible when printed, a quirk that can often lead to errors on someone’s first try. 

“We had to do at least one print to check for typos, which was really helpful because at one point we accidentally had it saying ‘tebbir, tebbir,’ instead of ‘ribbet, ribbet,’” said Lukachinski.

Lukachinski’s playful memento is an example of the breadth of work the presses can produce. “There’s a lot of opportunity for people to play with graphic design and a lot of opportunity for people to do historic work, but also do creative work,” said Kohl. 

McElrath noted that though letterpress printing is largely a relic, there are still studios and book arts centers in universities highlighting the art of letterpress. Many are open to the public, including Pyramid Atlantic Art Center in Hyattsville. People learn letterpress printing for sentimental items like wedding invitations and personalized stationary, but for others, the craft is an opportunity to create signs, books and pieces of art expressing personal and political opinions.

“Historically, the printing press has been an agent of change,” said McElrath. “It’s the way new ideas or protest spread.”   

Lukachinski hopes that the value of the printing presses will become apparent across campus. “You can have English classes come in and learn something from this, or history classes, or STEM classes because it’s a machine,” she said. “It’s not just a benefit to the rare books collection—it really is a benefit to the whole university that we have this.”