St Brigid Press

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United States
Afton, VA
St Brigid Press

Letterpress printing and small press publishing in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia Please visit our website, blog, and store at www.stbrigidpress.net !

"St Brigid Press was born out of a passion for language. We are dedicated to learning, practicing, and passing-on the art and craft of letterpress printing with hand-set type, hand-carved illustrations, foot-powered presses, and hand-sewn books. We hope you enjoy the items made at the Press as much as we enjoy creating them."

04/23/2026

Click, click, click go the letters in the stick…

Typesetting the colophon today of a forthcoming broadside.

Quiet, calming work.

04/15/2026

The rhythmic clink and clank of the Golding Pearl No. 3 as it inks up makes me smile. Made in Massachusetts in 1910, this printing press is powered by a foot treadle. Which is why this video and post are short — I gotta keep pumping so that it will keep printing. Have a good rest of the day, y’all.

04/08/2026

It has been a while since I used the 1964 15MP Challenge cylinder press. So imagine my consternation when I cranked the big hollow cylinder and a bunch of neatly-emptied sunflower seed hulls and a half-gnawed hickory nut fell out onto the bed of the press. We live in a rural community, and most of my neighbors are other-than-human — including an occasional mouse that eludes the resident black rat snakes and secrets away its seed supply inside the printing press cylinder. Fortunately, the cylinder's slotted opening was timed to dump out seed husks at the *end* of its trip down the length of the press, instead of on top of the inked type I was printing with. So, I vacuumed them up between prints. No sign of the mouse, but there was a verrrry long shed snake skin hanging from the rafter...

Print shop life! I am grateful for the community in which I live and work.

07/08/2025

What to do with bold, old metal type with the disconcerting name of “Empire”? Well, one solution is to beat swords into ploughshares. So I printed up some 72pt “Peace” with Morris Fuller Benton’s 1930s design. These little cards get tucked into orders shipped from St Brigid. Press is a foot-treadled 1909 Golding Pearl No. 3.

09/14/2024

I’m very happy to announce the release today of “Night Piece,” a little letterpress booklet of a lovely poem by Carol Moldaw.

Lana Lambert carved the brilliant mini super moon for the illustration. Covers are hand-marbled in India.

Booklet is 2” x 4”, in a numbered edition of 110, at $24 each.

More info, photos, and ordering here:
https://www.stbrigidpress.net/books/night-piece

07/26/2024

Great little print from intrepid traveling press mechanic Paul Moxon with a quote by Robert Vandercook, who developed the Vandercook flatbed cylinder proof press before the First World War. Vandercook is referring to the thousandths-of-an-inch precision with which traditional letterpress printing operates. In the next photo, I am holding a cast metal letter (or, “sort”) which in America are all milled to exactly .918 inches high. This uniform height of all letters allows uniform printing impressions on each page. So, .001 inches is a mighty tiny fraction, that makes a big difference!

#.918

07/25/2024

“Every mystery solved brings us to the threshold of a greater one.”

— Rachel Carson, in her 1954 speech to the sorority of women journalists, Theta Sigma Phi, entitled “The Real World Around Us.”

07/23/2024

Happy 125th birthday, Ruth Ellis! Legendary printer and activist in Detroit, Michigan, Ellis ran a trade printing business from her home with her partner, Ceciline Franklin, and provided a safe haven for LGBTQ folks there. Her legacy continues now as the Ruth Ellis Center .

07/16/2024

Henry David Thoreau on the astonishing ubiquity of printed matter. From his journal entry March 10th, 1856, here printed by Houghton Mifflin and Company in 1906.
#1856

07/08/2024

Sometimes, when I need a break in the print shop, I sit down in the corner of the room where much of the Press library is housed, and randomly select a periodical or book to peruse for 5 or 10 minutes. A favorite shelf holds a number of back issues of the venerable Canadian publication, *The Devil’s Artisan: A Journal of the Printing Arts*. Founded in 1980 by Glenn Goluska, William Rueter, and Paul Forage, and run by The Porcupine’s Quill since 1995, the DA offered its readers articles about printing and bookmaking and the people who undertake these crafts in Canada until 2023. The DA edition here, from 1994, focuses on the exquisite, moving engravings of Rosemary Kilbourn, including an essay by her. When I dipped into this wonderful issue, my 5 minute break ran to 20.

Address

Afton, VA
22920

Website

http://www.stbrigidpress.net/

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