In college I took a semester of letterpress printing.
My instructor, having spent much of his life picking perfect fonts and dealing with tiny pieces of lettering, was a design-obsessed, DIY kind of guy. He required us to lay out our homework assignments in InDesign, rather than type them in Word, so that even our reading notes became projects worthy of printing as posters.
One night in December, we were both in the shop working late—me to finish my end-of-semester project (poems printed on the backs of paper dolls) and he to work on a batch of hand-printed holiday greeting cards—when he told me about the Christmas gift he and his wife were building for their four-year-old daughter. Continue reading
