Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
Fifty-seven years ago, Kay Michael Kramer had to take the bus home from high school. On his way to the bus stop, he passed the print shop where students were learning how to set type by hand. Tiny bits of silver glinted in the grass, and he bent to pick them up.
Letters.
Rather than painstakingly replace each minuscule letter in its proper compartment, students were hurling them out the window.
When Kramer found out he’d be taking the typesetting course the next semester, he knew one thing: “I wanted to keep my type!” He went on to the Rochester Institute of Technology and studied with a famous historian of type, Alexander Lawson. Kramer landed his first job at Von Hoffmann Press in St. Louis, then moved to the C.V. Mosby Company (now part of Elsevier). Soon he was director of art and design, shaping the look of medical reference books and college textbooks in biology, zoology, botany, nursing…
“Textbooks were fun, because it’s such a competitive market,” he says. “You’re looking to do eye-catching, handsome books, knowing people have to choose.”
Typesetting and printing were becoming faster and slicker by the day. But in the evenings, Kramer still read books like Printing and the Mind of Man and his former prof’s Anatomy of a Typeface. He couldn’t know all that history and let it turn into something coolly automatic or inelegant. So in 1970, he founded The Printery, figuring the only way to have a truly free press was to have a private press.
Now, every decision was his. His freedom would be expensive. As typesetters went out of business, Kramer bought their furniture, in both senses of the word: the worn wooden chests stacked with shallow drawers, and the “furniture” of wood pieces that insert between letters to create white space. He made Bulmer his house font, liking its clean, straightforward approach, devoid of eccentricity, and the easy grace of its swashes. He also bought Garamond, Bembo, Baskerville, Caslon… “The original company was still casting the original Caslon, designed in the middle of the 18th century,” he exults.
Kramer wanted to print on handmade or mold-made paper with watermarks and deckle edges. He wanted beautifully composed type, warmed by ornament and color but with a simplicity of design—nothing fussy stuck on at the last minute to pretty it up.
His first book was Old Drum, the story of a foxhound killed by a Missouri sheep farmer in the late 1800s. U.S. Sen. George Graham Vest vowed that he would “win the case or apologize to every dog in Missouri!” His courtroom eulogy called the dog “the one absolutely unselfish friend that a man can have in this selfish world,” and the book Kramer printed paid tribute.
For Voices in the Dark, a collection of poems Frenchman Jean Wahl wrote when he was imprisoned by the Nazis, Kramer made an oblong book that took its shape from the length of the lines of poetry. He set it in Cochin, a font named for a French engraver, and printed it on French paper handmade in the 1930s. To his horror, pages kept sliding out with bits of the letterforms missing. He held the paper up to the light and saw fine grains of sand embedded, so he positioned each sheet strategically and stood guard over the press.
“The more minute, detailed, and time-consuming it is, the more he loves it,” his wife, Virginia, says cheerfully.
Another early book, By a Vote of Congress, was inspired by a letter that fell out of a book donated to Washington University. On June 18, 1775, John Adams had written to Elbridge Gerry that for the sum of $2 million, “fifteen Thousand Men shall be supported at the Expense of the Continent.” When these men arrived in Boston, Adams continued, “The Utmost Politeness and Respect will be shown…and all the Pride, Pomp, and Circumstance of Glorious War displayed—no Powder burn’d however.” Kramer printed the book in 1976, for the nation’s bicentennial.
His most recent book, The Artist & the Capitalist, also started with a letter, this one written by William Morris, father of the English Arts and Crafts movement. Morris famously hated to write letters, yet this was a vehement, seven-page screed penned to a mysterious chap named Richard Marsden. A librarian and collector named Jack Waldorf bought the letter and commissioned one of the foremost Morris scholars, Florence Boos, to research its provenance. As it turned out, Marsden had written a scathing review of one of Morris’ socialist speeches, “Art Under Plutocracy.”
Once Boos finished her text, Kramer’s work began. He chose Jenson and Old Style typefaces, based on the same source that inspired Morris’ Golden Type in 1890. He began each chapter with green-and-black initials and used delicate ornaments throughout. And Virginia found a sepia-tone photo of Morris that included his signature, so readers could have the fun of comparing it to the letter’s signature.
The Artist & the Capitalist was a runner-up for the 2008 Carl Hertzog Award at the University of Texas at El Paso.
The Printery has been written up in national journals, and the St. Louis Mercantile Library held an exhibit to commemorate the press’s 40th anniversary. Libraries and other cultural institutions are steady customers, either because a topic is connected to their collections or because the books are so beautiful.
The process isn’t entirely old-fashioned, though: Photoshop’s invaluable for enhancing old images, and the Kramers have combined hand-set type with photopolymer plates, making negatives from old engravings that would otherwise be impossible to reproduce.
“We sound like we’re living in the past, and of course we are,” Kramer says dryly, “but this new technology allows us some interesting results. Especially when we’re printing fine lines on handmade paper, which is thick and varies in surface. I could show you—”
He breaks off and glances at his wife. She knows immediately what he’s thinking. “Whenever we get written about, we get calls from people wanting us to do family histories,” she explains. “They say, ‘I only want eight copies. That can’t be that much trouble, can it?’”
