The Thousands

I once said the word ‘letterpress’ in a roomful of designers and I won’t be making that mistake again, not without a poncho. Blubbering, sweating, the silent tears of nostalgia. No high-volume offset process can match the emotive fluids wrought by letterpress – that 20th century craft-printing art of the type freaks.

Well, lucky they sell ponchos at the post office now (I saw some in those boxes next to the AFL alarm clock calculators), because Melbourne-based illustrator Niels Oeltjen and his partner Carly have launched a fine art letterpress web store.

It’s called Wilkintie. Basically, you can subscribe and they’ll send you a beautiful, new letterpress print every month for a year. The Wilkintie artists come from all over the world, and include Lachlan Conn (okay, he’s from Northcote), Gwénola Carrère (an illustrator and toy designer from Geneva) and Joe McLaren (from rural Kent, England).

Maybe don’t read the next bit out loud in your studio. They’re printed onto archival-quality, 100% cotton rag from the 250-year-old St Cuthberts Mill in Somerset, England. All prints are made at Idlewild Press, run by Carolyn Fraser, which uses restored 19th century presses, ‘and many clever techniques handed down from the craft printers that came before’. (This design porn has not yet been rated.)