Photograph by Katherine Bish
“So you want me to show you?” Elysia Mann asks, climbing on the old, slightly rickety bike. As she pedals, she pulls a lever that engages a platen, which slides up and back on greased sliding-door runners, passing a hand-cut stencil under a roller “inked” with good old-fashioned house paint. Once the silhouette of an assassin has smoothed itself onto a sheet of paper, she pushes the lever forward, and the platen jolts down and careens forward, called home by gravity.
“It went through several design stages,” Mann says wryly. “I think what happened is, we had this bike Steven [Brien, her publishing partner and fiancé] got at a garage sale or Goodwill or something, and it had a warped tire, so … Let’s make it into something.”
DIY is the MO at All Along Press, which opened this April on Cherokee Street. Brien and Mann want to do letterpress printing, bookbinding and silk-screening—and avoid making any money.
“Steven’s from New Orleans,” Mann explains. “His family lost everything in the hurricane, and it forced him to reevaluate the way things work. I approach it more selfishly: I’m just a cheapskate. And I grew up in a very religious family, so I’ve always thought about this stuff. Steven was like, ‘Let’s actually apply these things that we believe in.’ So we are trying to subvert the idea of hierarchy.”
They want writers to collaborate on the printing of their own books. “We all come in together and strain our eyes looking at little tiny letters,” Mann says, adding that they’d never use a word like “client.” She and Brien met in the printmaking department at Washington University; after ignoring each other’s existence for three years, they found themselves both broke and unable to pay their way to a conference in Kansas City. So they rode their bikes and got people to bet on whether they’d make it or not. “That raised money for food and drinks once we got there,” Mann explains. “It snowed on St. Patrick’s Day. That was the day we rode the farthest, because it hurt too much to stop.”
Thus is true love born. After graduation, they moved in together and set up a letterpress in their attic, which had no light or air conditioning and, by fall, was so cold the ink congealed. That’s when they rented the Cherokee space. Both work “real” jobs to pay the rent, but they spend the rest of their time at the press with their mascot, Smudge, an eager, glossy black Lab mix who’s already so well trained, she qualifies as found art. “Someone dumped her in the woods, and she had mange,” Mann says matter-of-factly; she is not surprised by the world’s cruelty, just wants to fix what she can.
Huge delicate prints, tiny exquisite books and journals made with the covers of antique books line the shop walls. Brien and Mann are printing two books, one with a blind poet from the neighborhood, the other with a McKendree University professor who writes short stories. They’re also printing little radial dials on top of a line of “wireless phones” (tin cans and string) as a playful invitation to the neighborhood to stretch the phones between their houses. Oh, and they’re printing materials for musicians in New Orleans: “They are kind of a DIY band, and we like working with people like that, who are willing to figure out how to get things done on their own,” Mann says. “Here’s our homemade screen printing press and developing chamber with state-of-the-art light-tight technology—a towel. And this press we were going to call The Pickle, because we soaked it in vinegar and lemon juice and then scrubbed off 17 years of rust.” Eventually they want to figure out how to make the bicycle press self-inking, “maybe set up a funnel system so you can inject the ink into tubes with the brakes on the bike.”
Mann learns about giveaway fonts and presses from her dad, editor of the Norfolk Daily News in Nebraska, and finds resources online. “There’s a big revival; everybody wants to do letterpress. You use hand-set type, and the inks are shiny. We are so used to seeing words on screens, and there’s actually nothing there. With this you have the type actually pushed into the paper; it makes an impression.”
Close your eyes and you can imagine Leonard Woolf consulting with Virginia over a manuscript in the back of this shop; William Morris cutting out floral stencils for the bicycle press. “The Arts and Crafts movement 100 years ago was a reaction against the Industrial Revolution,” Mann points out, “and DIY’s a reaction against the electronic revolution. People are getting crafty again.”
And again, collaboration weighs more than individual genius. “Everybody wants to be creative; that’s what it means to be human,” Mann says. What gets in the way? “Fear. Laziness. And the idea that the only ways to better your life are measured in dollars. What a horrifying idea.”
