Stumptown Printers

The front door of their North Portland shop.

Stumptown Printers is a letterpress and offset print shop in Portland, OR. Started in 1999, they are most well known for their enigmatic media packaging.

I spoke to Eric Bagdonas, who co-founded the shop with his brother, Bryan Bagdonas, and Rebecca Gilbert. We talked about the history of the shop, Portland’s print scene, print in the 20th and 21st centuries, and much more.

Will you write us two word-polaroids of Stumptown Printers? One from the year you started, and the other from today.

From when we started in 1999: Chief 17 and Kluge after hours club, the nearby Hawthorne Bridge was still yellow and rickety, Martha Stewart still hadn’t discovered letterpress, being green meant you were a frog and if you were concerned about the environment you were a pinko. Stumptown Coffee opened the same year, guitar, bass, and drums ruled, CDs were king, and Clinton presided over a completely different time.

And now 2011: Three moves got us closer to the Willamette River, the first two presses have turned into eleven, iPad has a letterpress app, the Max train now travels east, west, AND north and south, bicycles are a thriving industry in Portland, farm to table and craft economy rules, the word “green” is obligatory in the marketing of all products. 

Where does the majority of your business come from, or is there a majority?

When we first started the shop, we did a little of everything, including newsletters, zines, business identity suites, fliers, posters, broadsides, and music packaging.  We’re all active in Portland’s music scene and even back then had hoped that we’d be able to work closely with our friends from local bands and labels on their printing projects, but didn’t really think that music packaging would become the defining characteristic of our business as it has. 

I’m not sure that we imagined in the beginning that we’d be a full-time commercial print shop, but instead had kind of a funny idea that the shop could function 70% as a commercial job shop, and 30% as a collaborative studio in which we’d work on our own personal publishing and printing projects. 

It quickly became evident, with the time commitment required of job work and costs of operating a shop, that it’d be best to focus on the commercial aspect of the shop. As luck would have it, we found that we could focus our commercial job work on media packaging, an area that we all wanted to explore anyway, and which still remains the majority of our business. The majority of our customers are independent musicians and artists, record labels, film makers, photographers. 

Print samples

I became familiar with your shop through record packaging. Limited edition, letterpress offering likes the Colin Meloy Sings Morrissey E.P. and more widely distributed paper-packaged CDs like Mirah’s C’Mon Miracle. Most of those CDs belonged to an era which has arguably passed– the early to mid 2000s, when the internet made finding out about independent bands so much easier, the way it does today, but illegal downloading was more difficult, CDs were still purchased regularly, the iTunes store wasn’t even open yet, and vinyl hadn’t made its comeback– how has production on music packaging changed for you guys since 2005?

When the optical disc was king, our interest in media packaging was similar to what it is now: we had the goal to create art-as-object, drawing what simply would have been commodity contained within plastic into full experiential expression of a musician’s or artist’s efforts. So during the time when it was almost obligatory for bands to have a product base of CD releases to sell and distribute, we were focused on hand produced, small run packages. Even our larger runs, like the Fahey and K Records releases, contained hand-made or custom elements. 

Some of our first personal projects as printers included creating packaging for our own bands, both in disc and vinyl formats. I still remember from that time (the early 90s) some of the iconic releases with visually stunning packaging that perfectly complimented the musical content. I don’t think that I’d have heard Shellac’s “At Action Park” or June of 44′s “Tropics and Meridians” the same way if they had been packaged in jewell cases rather than hand printed and assembled at Fireproof Press. Each package was individualized with the personal touch of the printer. 

Wooden type

 As printers, and in particular, printers enamored with mid-20th century production techniques, we’re bound by the physical constructs of the machinery that we’ve chosen to work with, and will consequently always have an eye on the tactile, material representation of music and art. The challenge will be continually drawing the two together: the physical printed piece with the increasingly less tangible digital audio format.

That said, compared to the mid 00′s, we’ve been seeing an amazing variety of packaging formats. We’re doing smaller runs and more involved custom work, and we are offering more types of packages for different types of media. Yes, we have seen more cassette and vinyl projects since 2005, and more limited edition CD & DVD releases too. Also, we’ve done packaging devoid of any media at all — elaborately printed lyric booklets or folders containing just download code cards. 

Eric Bagdonas and Rebecca Gilbert at work

Your shop, through both making beautiful packaging and also offering well designed blank packages to encourage D.I.Y. printing, has played a huge role in the improvement of production quality on things like self-released records or self-published small books, in Portland and around the world. How do you see it continuing its role into the two-thousand-teens?

We all grew up during the rise of the zine era, a time when writers and artists who created self-published work not only traded their finished work, but in many cases exchanged production ideas, distribution networks, etc. It was the inspiration of the collective work of that scene, both zine writers and musicians, that led us to explore the tradition of print. 

It’s flattering to think that our work here at the shop contributes to that dialogue, and that we’ve had some impact on the DIY music and publishing world. That’s fantastic. We’re very excited about continuing and expanding our custom printing services and also plan to continue to develop and offer new blank media packaging into the two-thousand-teens. 

It’s been interesting to see how both the growth of interest in letterpress (and home letterpress shops/silkscreen shops) and the technology available to home recording, mastering, and duplicating projects has driven the interest in blank packaging. It’s awesome that people can release complete albums by themselves, in editions of ten to multiple hundreds. 

Yeah, in this age of everything under the sun being visible, advertised, and for sale on the internet– there has been an increased interest in letterpress printing, especially on the part of DIY motivated artists. Any idea how to explain this phenomenon?

Yes, there has definitely been an increased interest in letterpress printing and rise of craft/artisanal work in general.  So much of our social life, personal interactions, and work occurs online and on screen, so I’m guessing that the cultural transformation toward our iDevices and laptops has really helped fuel interest in handiwork, craftwork, and generally DIY art. For one, the ability to be able to communicate quickly with so many people and the access to online information has fostered both the proliferation and preservation of many craft traditions. Also, I feel that folks just need a break and find it satisfying to step away form their digital lives to look for more physical forms of expression.  

There does seem to be a renewed appreciation of the qualities of ink and paper. Many artists have turned their attention toward letterpress printing over the recent years. With its strict reliance on the physical form, structure, and bold line quality, the letterpress technique is a fitting symbol of printing craftwork. In many ways it is the antithesis of digital image composition. 

The same goes for traditional offset lithography, which also has been around for the last hundred years. 

Eric Bagdonas

When we met up so I could tour the shop, you frequently brought up the battle of sorts between CMYK vs. Spot Color Printing, and the influence of technological advancements in the printing industry. Can you tell us a little more about that?

It’s funny, to address the bit about technology, some critics back in the day would have declared the death of the printing “craft” way back in the 1920′s and even earlier as older printers and typographers saw the meteoric rise and proliferation of mechanized type composition equipment. 

The printing craft did not die because of those advancements, but flourished during and beyond that time. Offset presses pushed production boundaries, the photolithography process and advancements in process color greatly improved the quality of art and photo reproduction, and introduction of that additional printing equipment may have helped contribute to the democratization of the craft as equipment became more available and affordable. 

In the latter part of the 20th century, it was digital technology that changed things at an exponential rate. Developments in the industry centered around automation and efficiency of production, as they naturally tend to do, and less on judgement of the craftsperson, creative problem solving, and human input. 

In that span of years, the graphic design discipline also shifted exclusively to digital composition. It is no wonder that there were big aesthetic changes in popular print media. Coupled with increased image capabilities of automated and computer integrated printing equipment and a carte blanche enthusiasm of a new technology, it seemed that the job of the printed piece was to emulate the tool that created it–the computer–rather than to celebrate the materials that it was actually made of–ink and paper. 

Technology dictated the aesthetic rather than attempting to follow a popular aesthetic, as was the case in the early development of moveable type and casting equipment which was originally designed to replicate the hand rendered letterform.

Up until a couple of years ago, a lot of printed media reflected the character of the computer screen image by using aqueous coating, highly processed coated paper, and impossibly fine microscopic halftone screen patterns to build print pieces that possessed a near “backlit” quality. 

Thankfully, by now we’ve learned that some design is best relegated to the computer screen, and shouldn’t be put on paper. There are still the occasional cries of “the death of print,” but instead, we now think of this time as its liberation. After all, the sometimes reckless immediacy of the digital image has its antidote; the delete key.  

The tactile feel that so many people consider emblematic of letterpress printing was as much a quality of the print technology of the time as it was of the letterpress process. Use of spot color rather than CMYK (four color process) was the standard in both letterpress and offset printing and a variety of interesting paper stocks, primarily uncoated, were used for both letterpress and sheet fed offset. Color separations were created mechanically rather than digitally. Trapping (color overlap) was exaggerated to accommodate registration variances. 

The key characteristic of what I consider the heyday of print was use of spot color. Spot color gives a unique character that cannot be matched by digital processes or CMYK. What you physically mix on the glass with an ink knife and put in the press is what you get- bold, pure color.  A printed piece using just two thoughtfully chosen spot ink colors will likely draw more interest even than one printed in four color process (CMYK).  

If it can be believed that print will settle into a role that is similar to that of analog media and vinyl records; less of a utilitarian necessity than a object of beauty and ornamentation, then we want to celebrate its simple functionality through spot color. 

Tell us about two major book projects the shop has completed.

Rebecca just finished designing and printing a book written by Colin Meloy and illustrated by Carson Ellis, “The Grievous Demise of Mr. Whitley Rackham.”  A Victorian ghost story featuring an English nurse and a soldier who has returned from the Turkish war front, the edition is letterpress printed, hand sewn and bound into paper covers. This was an edition of 200 pieces (174 numbered and 26 lettered/signed books), and a project that was begun years ago with some support from Literary Arts Fellowships for Publishers. 

Another interesting book project that we were involved with recently was one that we did for Temporary Residence Records and Eluvium, titled “Life Through Bombardment.” A hard bound book covered with green book cloth and containing 7 pages of original art by Jeannie Lynn Paske, each page also served as an LP sleeve and contained a vinyl LP cataloguing the first years of Eluvium’s recordings. There is also a beautiful fold-out piece of artwork and a library card pocket that includes a personalized & signed card for each book owner. The concept was created by Jeremy of Temporary Residence, and we worked closely with all parties involved to realize the final product in an edition of 1000 pieces. 

Tell us your history as a printer. What inspired you initially? Where did you first do significant work in print?

Although everyone at the shop was drawn to print through independent publishing projects and music, we’ve had fairly different printing histories.  

Personally, I’ve always been interested in offset printing, as it was offset shops and operators that I first encountered. In the early 90s, while working on a 7″ record project, I was led to visit Lakeside Press in Madison, Wisconsin. That was really inspiring to me, and I feel that visit planted the seed for me, that I wanted to become a printer. It was the visceral draw of the process-the sound of chattering delivery chains, oscillating rollers, milling ink & whoosh of air pumps, the budum! budum! of impression cylinders, the smell of ink and freshly oiled machines-as much as it was the fascination with the final printed piece. 

More print samples

The fact that you could start with raw material–blank paper, and end the day with beautifully printed and finished record covers, by the effort of hand work and calculated control of mainly manual machinery was very satisfying. 

I became attracted to the aesthetic of manual image composition using photo lithography, and was inspired by the work of small shops of the 70s, 80s, and early 90s that made the most of older small-format machinery, both offset and letterpress. The work of New Earth Press, Inkworks, Fred Woodworth, Punks with Presses, was influential, and also searching out old chapbooks and political pamphlets produced by small offset shops and artist cooperatives of the1970s and 80s. 

I did some time working at chain print shops, but it wasn’t until I got a job at an independent print shop here in the mid 90s called Pacific Coast Printing that I really got hooked on printing. The production area of that shop was like a monument to pre-digital print. There were presses and parts of all types of small format printing machines-American Type Founders, Itek, Hamada, Multilith, ABdick, a buried C&P platen press there, and exposure units, stripping and manual layout equipment, cameras, bindery equipment, etc. It was beautiful chaos. 

I learned a lot from two amazing printers there, the owner was a lady from New York who could fix anything and make AB Dicks print like they were Heidelbergs, and a guy who was a real character. A life-long printer and mechanical wizard, he once disassembled a 1950s Harris 29 down to the frame so that he could paint it his favorite color.

What would your ultimate print project fantasy dream be?

I’m still interested in pre-digital manual artwork composition in the era of the mechanical paste-up, and generally interested in the amazing spot color work done in small print shops through the 20th century. When printers designed for economy of color, some really creative techniques were used to get the most out of one or two spot pantone colors. I’d like to continue to explore this era of print, and through incorporating some of these techniques, create a portrait study in print featuring Portland musicians who have been influential to me. Maybe not on the level of “ultimate,” but that’s my current print project fantasy.  

What are some current projects Stumptown is working on? What can we expect to see in the rest of 2011?

There’s been a recent resurgence of interest here at the shop in typecasting, hand composition, and the origin of the moveable type. Brian and Rebecca, the other two founders of the Stumptown Printers, have long had a simmering interest in monotype equipment, thanks largely due to the inspiration of our typography and printing mentors Jules Faye and the late Christopher Stern. Stern & Faye have been a very important influence on all of us, both personally and as printers, and when Chris Stern passed away, Brian and Rebecca, along with some of Stern & Faye’s other print colleagues and students, decided to create a non-profit organization to preserve Stern’s Monotype foundry. The organization manages a working museum that has recently opened here in Portland  called CC Stern Foundry. 

Linotype machine

 Additionally, we’ve acquired a Linotype 31 here at the shop, and Brian has taken the restoration and maintenance of this machine on as a personal project. Easier access to composition and casting equipment will undoubtedly shape our future work here at the shop. We’ve scheduled in a couple of art prints for the upcoming months and this week we will be printing our first packaging job using type composed and cast on the Linotype. We also plan on producing more book and broadside work in the near future, involving musicians and writers that we’ve worked with over the years.