When I started doing letterpress work, I knew that I wanted to combine the printing with my bookbinding. I’ve developed a number of ways to blend the processes (not least of which are the full-on books in the works!), and I just completed the first of many custom portfolios and slipcases.

This portfolio is for a photographer and is the beginning of a lot of intricate work that I’m excited to do! In addition to this relatively traditional design, where the letterpress printed customized piece is inset into the portfolio cover, and then again into the slipcase cover, I’m actually working on pieces where the text is printed directly onto the coverings I use for the books and cases, including decorative papers and leather.

In the not too distant future, I will have a brand new leather design ready to show off, that I’m very excited to share. In the meantime, I thought I’d share another of the many quotes I jot down in my jam-packed notebooks every day. This may seem somewhat unrelated, but there are a lot of thoughts and ideas that permeate the reasons why and how I do my work.

The following is an excerpt from a letter Sherwood Anderson wrote to Waldo Frank, and quoted by Wallace Stegner in his famed “Wilderness Letter”. I think it conjures a lovely idea of perspective, place and reflection:

“Is it not likely that when the country was new and men were often alone in the fields and the forest they got a sense of bigness outside themselves that has now in some way been lost…. Mystery whispered in the grass, played in the branches of trees overhead, was caught up and blown across the American line in clouds of dust at evening on the prairies…. I am old enough to remember tales that strengthen my belief in a deep semi-religious influence that was formerly at work among our people. The flavor of it hangs over the best work of Mark Twain…. I can remember old fellows in my home town speaking feelingly of an evening spent on the big empty plains. It had taken the shrillness out of them. They had learned the trick of quiet….”
- Sherwood Anderson to Waldo Frank in the 1920s