Typography as art for Sonoma printers

Want to publish a book? All you need is a laptop.

Or, you could do it the old-fashioned way, setting the type letter by letter and cranking out pages on a press operated by hand or with a foot pedal.

It might not be modern, but some writers, poets and graphic artists find it much more expressive and satisfying to print small-edition books, posters and graphic art by hand.

In an age when computers rule, and faster is considered better, advocates of the classic letterpress have gotten used to being asked why they bother with it.

“Why use a letterpress when you can easily print books using Blurb or Lulu or any other app with an iPad, iPhone or laptop?” said Santa Rosa artist Cheryl Itamura. “The reason is this: In this fast-paced world, I could have 3,000 ‘friends’ on Facebook, Twitter and other online platforms, but it’s the one, two or 10 who take quality time to sit down over tea that matter in the end.

“So why not take the time to handset type, and print 10 copies of a book, or perhaps just one?”

Would-be printers who agree with Itamura’s quality-over-quantity philosophy can find their haven at Iota Press, a small shop in Sebastopol where they can have access to half a dozen letterpresses and tray after tray of type, some of it dating back to the Civil War era.

“This is not a commercial print shop. We don’t do wedding invitations or business cards,” said Iota founder Eric Johnson. “I teach workshop classes on the fundamentals of press work almost year-round. After people have taken three courses with me, I’ll let them rent time in the shop. But they have to learn how to use the presses first.”

A poet who earned his living as a Bay Area construction worker, Johnson, 71, turned his attention to the craft of printing after his retirement 10 years ago, and started Iota Press five years ago.

One of the artists at work in Iota’s shop on a recent afternoon was Daisy Cortes, 22, of Sebastopol, who said she grew up loving books and started working with a letterpress while attending college in Southern California.

“Then I was lucky enough to find Eric here,” she said. “I’m interested in typography from different styles and different times, and what that says about a culture.”

For Johnson, letterpress printing is a creative exercise in which the typography itself becomes part of the artistic process.

“It’s a really great method of printing. We’re not treating the medium as a quaint antique that we’re rescuing,” he said. “It’s not competitive with commercial printing whatsoever. That means it’s free for us to use as we wish, and that means experimenting with the kinds of typefaces we can get this way.”

When he prints limited-edition books of his own poetry, he combines the words with his ink drawings and different kinds of type to create a work of art that is just as visual as it is verbal.

“For a writer, getting your hands into your composition is a real trip,” Johnson said. “It’s a kind of editing. You think you’ve got something that’s really well-written and then you go to the press and start setting type, and then right in the midst of it, you start rewriting.”

As an artist, Itamura experiments with hand-printed pages as part of the mixed-media, three-dimensional sculptures she creates. In April, she’ll open an exhibit of dresses titled “Dress Cod(ex),” featuring garments made of paper, tape, wire, plastic tubing and other unconventional ingredients.

Look in the pockets of a dress, and you’ll find loose pages of a book, written and printed by Itamura.

“You pull out the papers from the pockets to read the book,” she explained.

You can reach staff writer Dan Taylor at 521-5243 or dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com.