WASHINGTON — In the basement of a brick building on O Street in Northwest, Emily Doenlen, 26, fires up a roughly 1,400-pound, 1960s-era Vandercook cylinder letterpress machine. The machine screeches and creaks, much like a roller coaster approaching its summit.
“She’s just a little rattly today,” Doenlen says.
Doenlen is one of the three co-owners of Typecase Industries, a District-based letterpress and design studio. Founded in 2012 with Alessandra Echeverri, 27, and Stephanie Hess, 26, Typecase Industries designs and prints everything from custom posters and coasters, to cards and wedding invitations.
But in a digital era where “fast” and “mass” are often the default for everything, including design and production, Typecase takes a different approach. The company uses traditional printing techniques and machinery to create modern and edgy designs. Letterpress is a relief-printing process, meaning a plate with raised designs is covered in ink and pressed into the paper.
“It’s a physical printing process. The paper and the plate get pressed together in an opening and closing motion,” Echeverri says.
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Stephanie Hess, Emily Doenlen and Alessandra Echeverri founded Typecase Industries in 2012. (Courtesy TCI)
The ink for the designs is hand-mixed and the paper is hand-fed into what Echeverri describes as a “cast iron, indestructible” 800-pound platen letterpress from the ’20s and the larger, more modern, Vandercook.
So why do Doenlen, Echeverri and Hess go through the trouble of cleaning, oiling and maintaining old machinery instead of pressing a button and retrieving a job from a lighter, and much less expensive, machine?
“It’s real easy to print something off the computer. It may not be real pretty — maybe it is, you know. But there’s a lot of stuff that gets made that’s really fast and quick and not a lot of thought goes into it,” says Echeverri, who studied fine art and design prior to starting Typecase. “So I think people, when they see nice things, they really appreciate it.”
In addition to the demand for high-quality design, a surplus in the country’s old printing presses, formerly owned by newspapers and other print shops, have fueled a comeback in letterpress. Small design start-ups and schools are purchasing the forgotten machines and giving them new purpose.
“There’s a lot of letterpress equipment in the U.S. … People aren’t printing newspapers on them anymore, you know, so they’re using them for a different type of printing,” Echeverri says.
Typecase obtained its first press, the Vandercook, five years ago, when Hess and Echeverri were still in school.
“We were perusing, always perusing for equipment back then, and we saw it as were like,
