At Princetown Press, we use traditional letterpress printing techniques, working exclusively with wood and metal type. We use hand-powered printing presses, and recycled papers to create printed ephemera that inspire and delight. Where possible, we use British-made tools, and materials.
With combined degrees in Environmental Science, and Sustainable Product and Furniture Design, makers Emma Hogbin and Jon Palmer bring a unique perspective to the endangered Heritage Craft of letterpress.
Princetown Press is a botanical ink and letterpress studio in Princetown, on Dartmoor in Devon. Oak galls, hawthorn, willow, nettle, dock and moor grass are foraged within a few miles of the studio at Tor Royal Workshops and made into botanical inks. The printed word is committed to paper with wood and metal type on historic hand-powered printing presses.
The studio is run by Emma Hogbin and Jon Palmer, who have worked in craft for more than twenty years. Emma grew up in Canada and brings a background in environmental science, bookbinding and paper, along with an incomer's eye for the moor. Jon trained in sustainable product design and has worked as a fine furniture maker and boat builder; he is now compositor, printer, and keeper of the machines.
Their work includes original botanical ink artwork, letterpress prints, and chapbooks. The studio also prints commissions for writers and artists, such as poems set as broadsheets or small editions. Larger place-based commissions, for organisations such as the University of Exeter, use a landscape's own materials to tell its story. The studio also shares how to make ink from plants through instructional booklets and recorded webinars.
Nothing is quick. A single piece may follow one Dartmoor place through a whole season, and the natural inks keep shifting in colour after they leave the studio. That change is part of the work.
