Shelley Barandes, owner of Albertine Press, loads ink onto one of the eight antique letterpress machines she has in her Somerville studio.
(John Tlumacki/Globe Staff)
Shelley Barandes feeds sheets of cotton paper into the huffing, puffing press. The machine continuously re-inks itself and leaves the indent of a dreidel on each Hanukkah card.
"I call this one the warthog. She's a beast," Barandes, 28, said of the printing press as she wiped her hands on her apron.
"The neighbors to each side of me, and above and below me know which press I'm using based on the sound."
The "warthog" - a motorized Chandler & Price platen press from the 1950s - is one of eight antique letterpresses in Barandes's cheery Somerville studio. She runs her growing, two-year-old company, Albertine Press, out of this space in an old factory building. Samples of her greeting card designs, custom wedding invitations, and coasters hang on the walls and clutter the counters. The air smells of Taza stone-ground chocolate - a neighboring business just down the hall.
"I like old things, I like that letterpress is an antique craft," Barandes said. "People have been doing things this way for hundreds of years."
Letterpress, which became largely obsolete in the 1980s with the advent of desktop publishing, is different from modern printing in that it leaves an impression, or indentation, in the paper. It is elegant, usually expensive, and very much in vogue again.
Barandes and her three interns literally have a hand in every card produced by Albertine Press. She draws - either digitally or by hand - each of the card designs. Some of the presses have to be hand cranked, and the larger, motorized press must be hand fed. And because each color of ink is done in a separate pass on the press, Barandes might touch each paper several times as she feeds the machines.
"With so much mass production, there is now a real resurgence of anything that is very clearly handmade," Barandes said. "With letterpress, you get a clear impression . . . it's tactile. I love that."
Albertine Press cards are available in boutiques around the country and on etsy.com. Locally, Barandes sell cards at Magpie, Boutique Fabulous, and Blue Cloud Gallery. Her popular "World Notes" series offers ethnic patterns in loud colors while her simple "Park Sketches" cards feature line drawings of Boston Common, Central Park, and Golden Gate Park. Barandes also works directly with clients to create custom designs.
An order of 100 four-piece wedding invitations (invitations, outer envelopes, reply cards, and reply envelopes) starts around $1,000. But for brides like Kathy Huber, of Groton, it's a small price to pay for a personal touch.
Huber, who was married on Aug. 18, asked Barandes to create invitations that incorporated blue-footed boobies (prevalent in the Galapagos Islands, where Huber and her husband, Paul, vacationed), orchids, and dragonflies.
"I knew I wanted something unique," Huber said. "Letterpress has a feeling of permanence. It brought a sense of timelessness to the occasion."
Barandes is usually working on five or six custom orders in various stages at any given time, and though she's designed more typical invites with flowers, stars, and ribbons, she also drew Sputnik for one science-minded couple and is working on an Art Deco design with bumper cars for a wedding at an amusement park.
This creativity is what drew Barandes to the art form. She was working as an architect in New York when she started letterpress classes at the Center for Book Arts in 2004.
When Barandes and her husband, Jacob, moved from New York to Cambridge that year so he could attend graduate school, she sought out studio space at the Lydia Pinkham Building in Lynn and started culling her press collection. She did her first custom letterpress job in 2005 and launched the company later that year. "I decided architecture wasn't what I wanted to do for the rest of my life," she said. "I was tired of measuring how high the toilets should be off the ground."
A friend's lovebird, Albertine - named after Marcel Proust's sometime obsession - was the inspiration for the company name and sweet bird logo.
Barandes moved to the bigger studio in Somerville in 2006. She now has the space to teach letterpress classes about once a month - and the classes are always full. Students learn how to hand-set type and create stationery or business cards on a smaller, hand-cranked Vandercook press.
Besides teaching, Barandes is showing her work at local craft fairs and working on a new catalog of greeting cards. One new series combines her love for architecture and letterpress: It features details of famous buildings around the world, like lattice work from the Eiffel Tower.
And now, as Barandes finishes her tea, she tells the Hallmark version of her letterpress obsession: Soon after she started Albertine Press, she discovered that both her great-grandfathers had been printers. Their pictures hang on the yellow wall in her studio.
"Printing must run in our blood," she said, smiling.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
