seaborn press

We're Matt & Jennie - we have a letterpress studio in Brooklyn, NY. We love metal type, extra nice paper, and printing.

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Christmas cards are already in our Etsy shop! These are printed on recycled paper with antique type (and new ornaments) that we found on eBay long ago.

Hey, it's only two months until Christmas...

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Been printing lots and lots of stationery lately, getting ready for the holidays, finishing up our autumn collections.

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Can never get over how detailed and crisp metal type is...

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We have three fonts of Arboret, two of which are brand new from Skyline. The other is from the foundry whose matrices were bought by Skyline, so just slightly older. The crazy thing about Arboret is that the original matrices were saved by a guy who found them in a garbage heap at Republic Type Foundry. He cleaned them up, had them made into new mats and re-cast them. Some of the pieces were never found, though, which is why in the newer castings from Skyline, there are a few pieces of the original missing - the square flower piece above, the piece that forms the bottom of the upright bits, and a few others. It's a crazy typeface and story - I wonder how many great fonts were completely lost because they weren't picked out of a can of scrap.

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It's hard to believe that these typefaces are all 120 years+ old. (From the 1885 Mackellar, Smiths, and Jordan)

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Was looking through some digitized type catalogs the other day (thanks, Google) and clipped some nice typefaces from the 1885 Mackellar, Smiths, and Jordan. We actually have this font in 48pt, though not the crazy add-on pieces (sadly).

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Our lives have been made infinitely easier since getting these magnets for the galley trays. There have definitely been a lot of "why did we wait so long?" moments since starting our little shop. All part of the learning process, right?

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(Angle body) type is pretty.

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New type cabinet!! It's metal, it's really clean because it's dust free, it's about 1/3 the size of our other cabinet but holds the same number of cases...it's almost perfect (would only be better if it were wood, but we'll forgive it for that). Top three fonts are new, bottom one is old but relocated from the hulking monster other cabinet.

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Amazing, amazing font we're so happy about - we got it on eBay a little while ago but have been too busy to even think about using it. It's called Augustea Inline. We love that it wasn't designed until the 1950s - we hardly have any recently-designed metal types (they're kind of hard to come by, unsurprisingly). So excited to use it!

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(Finally) Got our hands on some angle body type - it's been fun to play around with. The font is Palace Script, which came in a new cabinet (!!) we bought from a nice Portland printer. Along with lots of other great things I still need to photo!

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With his Kelmscott Press, William Morris (1834-1896) made some of the most stunningly beautiful hand-made books ever (our collection has quite a few) including The Wood Beyond The World (1894) with a knockout frontispiece seen here by Edward Burne-Jones…

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filed under : inspiration

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Office cat isn't helping much if he's sleeping on the job...

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planning out the timing of our winter/spring releases!

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Diagram for using circular quads - from George Bruce's Son & Co. (great foundry name). You can keep your Adobe type on a path tool; this is how we do it!

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printing new wedding stuff today - forum is the font (and a tiny bit of centaur small caps)

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Happy Super Moon day!! (These are our new Nebula party invites, to celebrate)