Today we’d like to introduce you to Michael Babcock.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Michael Babcock. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
Interested in architecture as a kid, a natural draftsman, I majored in (trompe l’oeil) painting in college, collected rock records, and played in a few rockity punkity bands.
Graduated in 1986 with a BFA and a three-summer internship on the 39th floor of the Hancock Tower, at the largest ad agency in NE at the time; Hill Holliday. While we watched the pilings for Copley Place being driven, and the “new” Orange Line trench being dug below, I worked and learned for a gentleman name Bob Stacy who ran the studio. A legend, they named a craftsperson award after him at Hatch, the annual NE ad awards ceremony. Having walked past the Graphic Design Department on the way to my studio to paint, I discovered type “on the board” at Hill.
I graduated with skills and got a job running the studio at a “boutique” ad agency on Boylston Street at Copley in the shadow of the Hancock and Hill. Illustration board, non-repro blue pens, hot wax, and cold type. Cutting and kerning lots of Goudy Old Style and Palatino with an x-acto knife. Before Macintosh revolutionized the industry, “type” came from a few of the type houses left in the area who delivered “repro proofs” of composed type every morning from typed copy art directors marked up for style, and a rep took away the night before. I shot and wet processed lots of “stats” in a big copy camera in a dark room reducing or enlarging headlines and mouse type. All on deadline.
Working with type every day, but not having studied it in college, my interest began to build. That was 1988. I found a class in letterpress at the Boston Center for Adult Education, took one, and was bitten. I volunteered to be studio monitor. Then an active community, I joined the Letterpress Guild of New England in ‘89, and was elected president in ‘92.
Having loved and collected books since childhood, I started trolling the dozens of used book stores still in the Boston metro area, and began to collect type specimen books, the writings of printers, and fine press books to build my eye for the beauty and possibilities of thoughtful design, and fine printing from metal type. The original hot metal letter forms of type I had been working with from cold (dead) type the previous few years.
Still typographically naive, I had a taste for letterpress easily satisfied. Inking up any old face and getting that ink on paper was satisfying, and DIY. It was the worker’s control of the means of production. But the type faces mostly screamed gas station business cards, or diner menus. Easy to like, but unsophisticated. What I responded to was direct and authentic design, and particularly the honesty of the process. Setting physical type from the case presents a challenge like that of shooting black and white film knowing color film exists. There’s a creative challenge in coaxing good design from a reduced set of possibilities. That’s where the art is.
The rest is history? The timeline marches on. For 25 years I’ve continued to buy books, and type to educate my mind’s eye, and to expand the typographer’s palette with a good handful of the best original type faces and ornament once available to typographers and printers from the mid-20th century apotheosis.
So, erstwhile college illusionist in paint turned typographic practitioner working from over 700 fonts of vintage type, and ornament, one of the largest collections in New England. As an adjunct activity, I also run a hot metal typesetting business in Allston setting original versions of typefaces in unlimited quantities for books and the like.
I design and print books, broadsides, business cards, and anything in between from type. I have made a genuine commitment to, and continue to champion the original process.
Has it been a smooth road?
The most significant challenge has been getting the word out. Marketing has become so fragmented. The internet has been a boon, and a bane. What media and mediums? Twitter, Facebook place page, Instagram? Do I place on-line ads? Pay for placement? Join a Local First group? Send email blasts? Hope keywords and SEO flush me up in the Google? Pay for print ads in media that would seem to target the right demographics? It used to be one placed ads in the right pubs or newspapers, got listed in the yellow pages, and the phone rang. PR helps. Doing it all as a one-man band is a challenge. I do everything. Web, IT, email, ads, social media, and then the work itself.
For the first 15 years I worked out of my apartment. Early on our landlord threatened to raise our rent because we ran a business from our space. So that forced me on the down low until I bought a house and was able to promote freely ten years ago. I suppose I’m playing catch up now.
But still, the internet and the computer has devalued so many things in weird ways. People so easily, so passively “Like” things on social media. It’s entirely non-committal worse, they expect things to be free. I’m not a trust fund baby, and I can’t work for free.
I guess the other most significant challenge is type isn’t really made any longer in the industrial sense of 50–100 years ago. A small handful of dedicated craftsman still ply the trade, and price their wares as if the industry still thrived. Simply affording new type is a financial challenge. When I began over 25 years ago, type could be obtained from printers and composing rooms going out of business for pennies on the dollar. Those days are passed. What once cost 35¢/lb. for scrap when I started collecting type, now costs $35/lb. My type collection is my retirement fund, not in gold coins, but in lead type.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Interrobang Letterpress story. Tell us more about the business.
I run the other best traditional letterpress shop in the Boston metro area. I’m a “bridge person” who links past and present technologies. Most of my work is “born digital” using modern desktop applications to design with digital versions of materials I have in metal. You call them “fonts”. I can work out ideas quickly and put PDFs in front of clients that look close enough to the final design to sign-off. If I don’t have a digital version of a typeface, or particularly ornament, I make them. I’ve been working using Apple hardware since 1989, and am just as skilled with digital processes as analog. So, I do digital design, and webmaster work as another facet. Aside from pure letterpress, I can brand your business, do your site and digital media campaigning, AND print your paper materials.
That written, I guess my specialty is designing typographic printing that works from historic letterforms, informed by design history. While every job is an experiment, few of my design decisions are arbitrary. I’ve moved past the naiveté of my early enthusiasm for the obvious and colloquial, to a more enlightened vision of typography. While the general trends in letterpress are to work either from anything-goes digital type doing plastic platepress, or intricate, everything-goes cram-the-page “Neo-Victorian” eye candy. The row I’m trying to hoe is mid-century modernist, typographically based, design. The stuff of galleries, museums and fine book publishers. I rarely do the neo-Vic “Wanted Poster” style design.
Having played in bands, and having friends in bands, I’ve done my share of limited edition music packaging and gig posters. I’ve done lots of fine personal stationery, wedding invitations, and baby announcements. Books for local poets, and authors. Fine invitations to society engagements. Prose, and poetry broadsides, and posters for events. And on, and on. 25 years of work. Just imagine.
What sets me apart is the triumvirate of – the knowledgeable eye I bring to my design, the unique collection of type I’ve assembled to work from, and that I’m a master printer. My presswork is qualitatively as fine as it gets. Ask anyone who knows about these things. I make you look good on paper.
I pride myself on the integrity and direct authenticity I bring to my work by way of those three differentiators.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
I don’t know where it’s going. I’d assume there will continue to be many folks doing greeting card lines, and meme-like art prints that get orders and distro on Etsy, or by doing the National Stationery Show at the Javits Center every year. There’s a whole sub-set of relief printmakers who don’t really work from type, or where the visuals dominate and type is incidental at best. More Etsy stuff, much very interesting, and hand made, but not really letterpress except for the dent in paper. There’s also an industry around the irrational money involved with wedding invitations I don’t see going away. The plastic plate letterpress scene is largely dominated by Boxcar Press. They’re the source for plastic plate processing for those folks that don’t own their own exposure units. Boxcar makes the base that everyone mounts their plates on to print, and ships exposed plates nationwide. They have a giant facility in Rochester, NY with more presses than maybe anyone these days, and they print day and night on contract. A plastic plate letterpress conglomerate. I know the owner, because it’s a small enough community that most of us know each other, if not personally, then by reputation. He’s a nice guy, and has built an empire, but fake letterpress isn’t my thing.
What’s the future of the history savvy designer “stationer” working from beautiful faces, and printing nicer paper, on best of class presses? Dunno. Slow steady wins the race? I’m not getting rich doing this; it’s all about feeding the soul of a craftsman doing work better than typically done, and making myself, my type collection, and my sensibilities available to those who know and care.
As I touched on, there are two major camps in letterpress. The anything-goes plastic plate style shop that buys a Mac, a plate maker, and an automatic press, and those that collect anything and everything they can get on eBay and yard sales and build largely undisciplined, and unfocused aggregations of materials to mix and match. So, every line a different type face style work that fills the page. With very little really fine type coming up for sale, it’s a mixed bag. There’s also wild enthusiasm for wood type. Trendy also is the reliance on excessively deep impression into very thick papers. Plastic plates foster this look because plastic doesn’t wear out like type will if similarly abused. That’s if you can get good type, and afford the large space commitment required to house it. The North East is a tough place to afford square footage, so the few shops here in Boston are plastic plate, whereas in the mid-west it seems there continue to spring up the eclectic colloquial style neo-Vics.
I stand out in my field being in neither of those camps. Most of my work is bespoke, though I put some items on Etsy. In my design I don’t seek to fill the page, but rather let paper be part of the picture, and negative space part of the design, and most often work with single type families rather than everything and the kitchen sink. I don’t see many folks doing that.
Contact Info:
- Address: By appointment on Kenton Road, Jamaica Plain 02130
- Website: interrobangletterpress.com
- Phone: 617-522-4236
- Email: info@interrobangletterpress.com
- Instagram: interrobang918
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/interrobangletterpress/
- Twitter: interrobang918
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