I am pleased to accept this award from the American Printing History Association. 

It seems like only yesterday that I first caught the bug for printing and letterpress in particular. I started as a thirteen-year-old with a Swiftset rubber-type press to print a neighborhood newspaper. That quickly morphed into a brand new Kelsey press with all the extras to print an even larger paper. My father was an Army officer, and we lived on base at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, at the time, and the workers at the post printshop always had time to help out a pesky kid.  

When my father retired in 1955, the move to California meant the search was on for a bigger press. Settling on a 10 × 15 Chandler & Price. I printed for my high school doing things such as the yearly school literary booklet and student ID cards. I didn’t know that printing forms full of halftones was not done on a C&P. While reading a National Geographic magazine, I learned that Carnegie Institute of Technology,  now Carnegie Mellon University, offered a bachelor’s degree in printing management, which I earned in 1963.  

The 1960s were full of challenges. I did a two-year stint in the Army in Germany as a second lieutenant that ended just as the war in Viet Nam began. Then I worked for Lockheed making publications for the  Polaris Missile system. We used the early and often crude methods such as strike on IBM typewriters to get around hot metal typesetting. That led to my switch to Carlisle Company in San Francisco, which had a wonderful letterpress department, as well as offset and steel die engraving. I was in seventh heaven, being around the large Miehle flatbed presses, Heidelbergs, and even hand-fed C&Ps. I was an estimator and was for a while in charge of the engraving department. We had a large shop of about 250 people,  but Carlisle was one of the smaller printers in San Francisco. 

My proudest accomplishment was estimating a 400-page book of 20,000 copies for the City College of  San Francisco that was solid type we set on the Linotypes, printed on the Miehles, and I came within  $100 of the final cost. So all the letterpress jobs were given to me to estimate, and the other estimators had the big multi-color offset jobs. We did work for local governments throughout California.  To support the demand for bound books, we had a pen ruling machine. Many of the short-run jobs were run on a hand-fed Miehle cylinder press that the forward-thinking plant manager was embarrassed to admit was still in use. 

By then, I was also spending my vacations in the mountains of Colorado. So by 1970, I left the Bay Area for Silverton, a tiny town nestled 9,000 feet high in the San Juan Mountains where the newspaper was still printed by letterpress, and I felt right at home.  

Meanwhile, my wife and I started the Pickle Barrel restaurant, I got involved in local government and drifted from the upheaval going on in the world of graphic arts. I maintained a letterpress print shop where I did all the printing for our restaurant. By now, that shop has grown to include a Heidelberg,  Miehle Vertical, Linotype, and Monotype equipment. In 1996, I was approached by Hal Sterne, who had been told by his wife to choose between her or his new letterpress supply business, NA Graphics. That year I saved a marriage and moved NA Graphics from Cincinnati to Colorado. I have since shed the restaurant, and despite a recent stroke, come to work at NA Graphics every day. I sell traditional letterpress supplies from hand-set type to tympan paper to customers worldwide and share my expertise on various online printing forums. It has been a great ride.

2023 APHA Individual Awards