Giving thanks for….letterpress and you!

Harold spent a few hours downstairs in the letterpress shop today taking some really great atmospheric photos of our presses and our printers. Nothing looks better to us than bright ink on a Heidelberg Windmill under dramatic lighting conditions! We’ll be posting more pictures from our shop’s photo shoot to Boxcar’s flickr account in the next week or so. In the meantime, Happy Thanksgiving! Today we’re being grateful for the creation of letterpress and cast iron, and also for you, all of our awesome letterpress-loving customers. We’ll be thinking of you all as we eat our tofurkeys! (By the way, our offices are closed Nov. 27, Thursday, and Nov. 28, Friday).

Everson Museum letterpress holiday cards & snow



We love it when we get to letterpress cool things for Syracuse folks, so we were so excited to letterpress up these cards for the Everson Museum, our local art museum. They’re designed by the fabulous folks at Eric Mower & Associates, whose designers are just bright baubles of joy to work with. The cards are available for purchase via the Everson. Since, over the weekend, Boxcar Press & Syracuse finally got its first substantial snow fall (hooray!), it seemed the perfect time to post pictures of these letterpress holiday cards that make us feel all warm and cozy.

How to eco letterpress (hint: join a CSA!)


Boxcar Press subsidized a CSA organic farm subscription for Boxcar employees this year. It was an amazing experience (and really yummy too!), and we loved feeling connected to our community in this very real way. The growing season in CNY finally ended, and so our 20 weeks of organic vegetable delivery came to an end. Carrie, our officer manager who found a way to make our CSA dream work, has these thoughts.

“Besides yummy veggies and fruits, what did Boxcar Press take away from our first annual CSA participation? This is the question I asked myself more than once over the past 20 week growing season. Sure, the veggies are good, but was it worth the hard work organizing, maintaining, safeguarding and cooking 20 shares of veggies (well, we each cooked our own shares, but it was still lots more cooking than I’m used to!)? The short answer is a resounding yes!”

“Being involved with the CSA was a direct opportunity for Boxcar Press to become involved in our local environment. It allowed us to use our spending power to support local farms that practice farming techniques which take a stewardship of our land and create hope for a safe planet for our children and their children, too. For some of us, it introduced us to vegetables we had never experienced before and for others it reminded us of the wonders of nature and the bounty our very own upstate New York land can provide. Best of all, it allowed Boxcar Press to enrich the community by providing Syracuse with its first every downtown POD (Point of Delivery), which made veggie pickups convenient enough to attract 13 new CSA members this year! When it is all said and done, bringing goodness to many is what we’re all about. Now go eat your veggies! (P.S. If anyone out there wants to know how to organize something like this, I’d be happy to share)”

Boxcar Base & letterpress plates spotted


We were excited to see the Boxcar Base spotted in some cool places in the blog world lately:
*at Heart Fish, who used our base and plates in a letterpress class she’s taking (the photo on this post is from Heart Fish’s blog — a nice picture of our printing plates in action!)
*check out Marin Press, who used our base and plates to print invitations to “A Most Excellent Midwinter’s Feast,” hosted by the Ottawa Chapter of Canadian Organic Growers to promote their Growing Up Organic Project (how cool is that!);
*Lead Graffiti, who used our plates to letterpress certificates for the Art Directors Club of New York Grandmasters Award ceremony.
Thanks to you all for the Boxcar shout outs! Go letterpress!

Letterpress stationery + edge painting = love

We love edge painting (by hand) our letterpress printing! Especially in really bright, vibrant colors. Once you start looking at enough edge painting pieces, paper just looks naked without its edges all gussied up in color. The design and color dreaming of this job comes from Pickett’s Press. Kate @ Pickett’s Press was sweet enough to send one her fabulous ribboned boxes too, so we can see how great a presentation she’s created for the notecards and stationery that we letterpress printed for her.



Boxcar Base spotted: Brendan Monroe letterpress art print

Some nice pics of the Boxcar Base + plates in letterpress action at OMG Posters in a post about Brendan Monroe’s really cool new letterpress art print. You can see Brendan’s other letterpress prints here. (This spotting was sent in by Boxcar’s original employee Ben Whitla.) (Photo is from OMG Poster’s blog post)

Vote right now!

Letterpress sure makes beautiful wedding invitations — but we love when letterpress uses its cast iron muscle for the political realm too. We fell in love with this broadside when browsing on Springtide Press’s web site, and we were super excited to learn that our Boxcar Base and Boxcar plates helped out in the printing. It features a quote from Elizabeth Cady Stanton, champion of women’s voting and civil rights. Here is what Jessica from Springtide Press had to say about the letterpress printing:
“Boxcar base and plates and platemaker and adhesive all done here! Chandler O’Leary is the talent portion of the project–she did all the handlettering then it was scanned and printed. We used 94FL plates on the largest base in my Vandercook Universal 1. The file was output as one plate and we used the “puzzle piece” technique to print in two colors. The paper is a fairly new recycled sheet made from 100% cotton rag.”

If you need more reasons to vote, check out Good Magazine’s 1,565 reasons to vote in their latest issue.