We’re excited to share an event that Smudge Ink (one of our long time letterpress friends) is putting on next week. They’re teaming up with local vendors to put on a holiday sale, and will be donating a portion of the proceeds to the Greater Boston Food Bank! The Holiday Sip + Shop event will take place on Thursday, November 3rd (that’s a week from today!) from 4-8pm at their shop in historic Charlestown, Massachusetts. Because we think it’s so cool that Smudge Ink is supporting their local food bank with their event, we donated the plate for their letterpress posters, and we’ve gotta say — they came out pretty awesome, don’t ya think?

If you’re in the Boston area, be sure to stop by! There will be a drawing for a gift basket filled with awesome prizes like a calendar, gift wrap, boxed notes, holiday cards and coasters from Smudge Ink; a 2-box subscription from Boston Organics for home-delivery of organic produce; a soy candle from Crash, plus soap goodies from Stella Marie, a few bottles of craft brews from Pretty Things Beer + Ale , and a special gift from 2-Fresh-Threads!

Smudge will also be giving away a 4-pack of these amazing letterpress coasters to their first 50 customers, so be sure to stop by and support these local businesses!

Having a cool letterpress holiday event at your print shop? Let us know and we’d love to help promote it!

You may have guessed that we really love (letterpress) printing around here. We also love seeing our name in print, so we were honored when the Wall Street Journal contacted us a few months back to talk letterpress.

Felt & Wire also interviewed Harold, one of Boxcar’s owners, about the revival of letterpress — it’s pretty neat, check it out!!

We’re psyched when we see some of our customers in the news, too — in August, Norman’s Printery was featured in a really nice post on the Gutenblog. The post also links to their Flickr photostream, which is pretty incredible…take a look!

We’re preparing to move our website to a new server Tuesday night. As a result, there will be some instability on boxcarpress.com on Wednesday, August 31. You may experience a lag time in requests to our website and even in our email correspondence due to DNS caching.

If you are in need of new photopolymer plates or other supplies within the next few days, we strongly recommend getting your order in by the end of the day tomorrow – Tuesday, August 30. Things ought to settle down by Thursday, September 1.

Printing customers: The server change will not affect you beyond the delays in correspondence mentioned above. We’re always available via phone.

Platemaking customers: During this time, we’ll be wiping all credit card information, so don’t be alarmed when you make a new purchase & your information is gone. The platemaking ordering process has been re-written from the bottom up, but you should not experience major changes otherwise. Let us know if you have any problems submitting orders!

Supply customers: We will not be able to process credit cards initially, but we will still take your order through our shopping cart. We will touch base offline to work out payment details. You can call us at 315.473.0930 & provide payment information over the phone.

We apologize in advance for the disruption, but rest assured that our IT team is working to make this transition as painless as possible. So don’t forget to grab a bag of popcorn and check the @letterpress on Twitter for real-time updates for the exciting transition!

I am still on a letterpress high after attending the Ladies of Letterpress Conference in Asheville, North Carolina during the first weekend of August.  It was a well-done first attempt to bring together a group of people who had one thing in common – they love putting ink to beautiful paper.  Some do it with lead or wood type, others with polymer or linoleum, a few screen print – but we all felt an immediate kinship with each other.

The presentations and demonstrations only served to bond us more. Events were either at the conference center of the hotel, or at Asheville Bookworks.  It was all energizing. Some highlights for me included a handmade paper making overview with Frank Brannon,  and the making of the Dead Feminists Broadsides with Jessica Spring and Chandler O’Leary.  And I was delighted to watch Kelly McMahon give a ton of instruction during ‘Getting to Know Your Table Top Press’.  It was concise, thorough and loaded with great information so bravo to Kelly.  People were writing down notes feverishly.

The panel discussions were all applicable and interesting.  They covered topics such as Letterpress as a Business, Using Social Media to Promote Your Business, Community Print Shops, and the Future of Letterpress.  Long after the discussions ended, people gathered to talk over what they heard or ask more questions. We were immersed in letterpress the whole time and it never got dull.   And the personal interactions were the best part.

Thank you to all of our Boxcar customers who introduced themselves to me.  It was a treat to greet you all, friends old and new.  We’ll always have Asheville!

Take a look below at some of my favorite photos from the trip!

The colors of handmade paper are splendidly beautiful to the eye as they “hang out”

First look at a Hollander beater:

Raw materials in the handmade paper process

Everything you need for printing on a table top press:

A community print shop – Asheville Bookworks

Boxcar Press represented at the Printers Fair

Amy Rau of Greengirl Press and Chris Charles of Fly Rabbit Press stopped by!

We’re so thrilled to see how many people participated in our Facebook contest last week – we had over 70 entries, and a lot of really great guesses! It came pretty close, but we found a winner: Jillian Contreni Sokso!

Jillian is a printmaker -  not exclusively letterpress, but mixed media prints, usually making one-of-a-kind works of art. She teaches printmaking in the art department at Houghton College, which is in the southern tier of New York state.  She also makes quite a few artist’s books, too – check out her website to see some of her amazing work!

Congratulations to Jillian, and thank you to everyone who participated!!!

We’re constantly finding cool things around Syracuse, and we love to see exciting new things happening in the area. Lots of independent businesses are springing up, there’s a great push to buy local products, and some new public art displays are just a few of the things we’re diggin’ these days.

So, needless to say, we were beyond psyched to find out that Syracuse First – a local nonprofit dedicated to getting the people of Syracuse to think, buy & be local by supporting independent businesses within the community – did a great feature on us here at Boxcar Press! Visit the Syracuse First Blog to see the full profile, and check out their website to find other great businesses around here.

We thought we’d share some of our favorite Syracuse First businesses – if you’re in the area, check them out!

• Freedom of Espresso: A great coffee shop – they supply the coffee that keeps our company moving!
• Farmshed CNY – A great app for your phone that puts local CNY food producers at your fingertips.
• Friends of the Rosamond Gifford Zoo – The zoo is a popular hangout for the Boxcar babies!
• Lilipad Creations – A line of funky handmade bags (and one of our neighbors in the Delavan Center!)
• Syracuse Soapworks – Fantastic soaps made just down the street.

Big thanks again to Syracuse First for the awesome feature!

By now you’ve probably heard about the open studio event we’re throwing this Saturday, December 11. We hope you have and we hope you’re planning to attend! We’ll have tours of our newly expanded print shop, printing demos, refreshments, giveaways, goodies and fun activities for kids, and loads of letterpress fun. You don’t want to miss it. We’ll see you on Saturday between 10am and 4pm. The Boxcar Press Open Studio is on!

This fall Boxcar Press got a lot larger and moved into some new digs. Our expansion (17 letterpresses, 55 employees, 24,000 square feet) makes us one of the largest letterpress shops in the country. One thing that hasn’t changed – we still have an insane attention to detail, an overbearing enthusiasm for letterpress, and the same old mushy hearts. Come visit us this Saturday and let us show you around!

Boxcar Press mourns the sudden loss of our beloved Office Manager and Client Coordinator Carrie Reagan. Her obituary appears here.

Boxcar Press initially hired Carrie as an Administrative Assistant in 2007. She earned a promotion to Office Manager in 2008 and was continuing her advancement this year into a role as a Client Coordinator, managing our custom printing jobs. Her work was exemplary and always in sync with our mission and values at Boxcar Press.

We will always remember the tireless energy that Carrie devoted to her job. She touched many of our customers and vendors through detailed phone support over the past three years. She was conversant in all aspects of our business, and patiently explained ink choices, file formats, paper sizes, press mechanics, everything. Everybody turned to Carrie for an answer, myself included. In addition, Carrie organized many of our environmental and social initiatives, from company-sponsored organic agriculture to employee-powered neighborhood cleanups.

Carrie’s upbeat, positive, constructive personality helped carry our employees through the past three years. We are all grieving her departure. In her memory, we ask that you consider her 4-year old son Eamon. This “little man” (who likewise brought joy to our life over the years visiting our office and printshop) now has suddenly lost both of his parents. Please consider a memorial contribution to the Eamon Willoughby Trust Fund, c/o Geddes Federal Savings & Loan, 2208 W. Genesee Street, Syracuse, NY 13219.

Our deepest sympathy goes out to Carrie’s survivors.

Have a letterpress question you’d like to run past us? Check us out on formspring where Boxcar Press founder Harold Kyle has been answering a number of printing-related questions. Submit your question and he’ll be offering up his insight to help you tackle your letterpress challenge of the moment!