Letterpress at the Minnesota State Fair

Last week’s trip to the Great Minnesota Get-together included a visit to the Minnesota Newspaper Museum in Heritage Square. This out-of-the-way building houses an assortment of traditional letterpress equipment, including a Chandler & Price platen press, Linotype machine, C&P guillotine cutter, Miehle printing press, and folder.

Because I’m a letterpress printer, the MNP is an obligatory stop each time I visit the Fair. With the heavy metal machinery, the sounds, and the smells, it’s appealing like 1970s living room furniture and technicolor Betty Crocker cook books. Irresistibly familiar & a bit of a time warp. I understand the action in that room better than most tourists wandering through. Yet, in the microcosmic world of letterpress printing, MNP and Lunalux couldn’t be more different. We are distant relatives, a cigar-smoking great uncle and a whippersnapper youth, connected by blood but with impossibly different personalities.

The MNP is about newspapers as much as it is about letterpress printing (it is, after all, operated by the Minnesota Newspaper Association). So we use the same physics, the same machines, aprons, fingertips, but to very different ends. They cultivate an interest in and appreciation for history, while we make make new art with old tools. I appreciate the work they do, it’s romantic and dirty and honest. Lunalux is a ghost risen from this graveyard of cast iron. We are standing on the shoulders of giants.

I was also taken by this wall hanging, assorted wood-type letters fit together like puzzle pieces to form a silhouette of Minnesota. In response to this, I felt mixed emotion; while it was lovely to look at and I would be happy to hang such a piece on my wall at work or at home, it’s sad to see all of that beautiful type taken out of the pool of useful printing materials and turned into a non-functional decorative piece.

In hopes of securing a volunteer position at the MNP at the 2008 State Fair, I handed out my business card to a couple of the guys working there. Maybe next year you’ll see me behind that out platen press, printing book marks and teaching fair-goers about the history of letterpress printing. You can volunteer there too, by registering on line.