The Itinerant Printer: Letterpress Printing and Typography Across North America — Chris Fritton
Channel: TypeCon
Date: 2021-02-01

Recorded during TypeCon2019: “Nice” in Minneapolis, Minnesota

Believe it or not, “The Itinerant Printer” project is based on a historical notion of itinerant, or what they often called “tramp” printers — peripatetic journeymen that lived nomadic lives, moving from one job to the next, one place to the next, one print shop to the next, with nothing to their name but their International Typographical Union card and the clothes on their backs. They were often in search of their next paycheck, their next drink, or their next adventure. The ITU no longer exists, and I couldn’t expect anyone to pay me a wage, so I had to re-envision the idea of the tramp printer for modern times. What I do is a lot like a mid-level touring band, traveling from place to place with only my ink, paper, and clothes, using whatever’s on hand to make prints in those idiosyncratic collections: wood type, metal type, border, ornament, cuts, even photopolymer plates. What started as a way to fund and facilitate my own journeyman time became the adventure of a lifetime, one involving thousands of people and tens of thousands of prints, and it gave me the clearest snapshot of letterpress printing in North America I could get, straight from the practitioners themselves.