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!

Here at Boxcar Press we love hearing stories of letterpress doing good! We were honored when asked to donate our photopolymer plates to a letterpress printing project headed by the School of Visual Concepts in Seattle. The School of Visual Concepts teamed up with Seattle Arts and Lectures through their Writers in the School’s program. Working with a local children’s hospital they planned to create poetry broadsides with children who are terminally ill. We were privileged to be included and gladly donated our photopolymer plates. It’s an amazingly moving project (try reading over the poetry and keeping your eyes dry), and it reminds us of how cool the letterpress community is, and what great things we can all accomplish together.

The children wrote poems as part of a legacy project. The poems were printed as letterpress broadsides and included in a portfolio. Everyone pitched in on this project, from 12 letterpress printers volunteering their time, Mohawk Papers donated the paper, and a book cloth company (Ecological Fibers) donated materials for creating the actual portfolio.

Each child’s family will receive several copies and the others will be distributed to local children’s groups and hospitals to be auctioned off as a fundraiser. There is a limited edition of 75 on each.

Many thanks to all who were involved: Seattle Arts & Lectures,  Seattle Children’s Hospital, School of Visual Concepts, Mohawk Fine Papers, Puget Bindery, Ecological Fibers, Boxcar Press.

This past weekend we held our traditional Earth Day Clean-Up, rounding up the troops to spend a bit of time cleaning up the area around our building in downtown Syracuse and the local neighborhood. Armed with sunny skies, brooms and trash bags, the crew was off and cleaning! Nothing says spring like a little spring cleaning. Big thanks to our youngest helpers, Francesa and Max, for spending the day with us and making this year’s Earth Day Clean-Up so much fun.

We hope you enjoy this new movie of Boxcar Press’s printshop, beautifully filmed and edited last week by Daylight Blue Media. Music is by local composer Marc Mellits.

Last Friday night we packed up and headed out for a night of bowling. There were color-coordinated shirts, lots of trash talk, fake mustaches and ample fun to be had for all. With catchy team names like Gutter Down and Split Happens, we brought our finest bowling skills to show up the local competition.

The rumors are true. Carrie – the most senior member of our printing team – can often be found sporting a cape after hours. Perhaps not coincidentally, she can also be spotted hanging out with Cathy, our esteemed platemaking account manager, on a regular basis. Cool people tend to hang out together, we’re told. (Cool people? Super heroes? You be the judge.)

Two newer members of our team, graphic designer Racheal and client coordinator Erica, survive their first Boxcar Press outing! Turns out, Racheal is a rockstar bowler. (Former varsity bowling team rockstar. For real.)

All in all, we enjoyed a rather cheerful night of innocent debauchery complete with one failed Orangemen attempt at beating UConn in OT in the Big East and a darts showdown to end all showdowns. Bowl on!

Hello and happy New Year! As we kick off another fun and exciting year, it only seemed right to share some photos from our recent open studio event. We invited the local public, media, clients, vendors, friends, family and anyone with an interest or passion for printing and the arts to come pay us a visit. In return, we had printing demonstrations, tours, giveaways, an excess of sweets and goodies from a local bake shop and loads of letterpress fun. A huge thank you to our friend and awesome photographer Alice G. Patterson for capturing these moments from the festivities. We can’t wait for next year!

To everyone who came out to see us (all 300+ of you!) – you rock. Thanks for making this day so much fun and a huge thank you to Alice for being here to grab these incredible photos. We are honored to have the friends that we do and we look forward to making this an annual event. Stay tuned for 2011!

{Photos by Alice G. Patterson.}