Mark deserves heaps and heaps of credit for his vision and perseverance on this museum. The museum has been going for over 20 years. 20 years!! Just think, letterpress has had a major resurgence in the past 5 years as evidenced by the number of beginning printers at the fair. He had to be one of the very few to passionately believe in preserving letterpress 20 years ago. Thank goodness he did.You just never know who you will run into at these events. Gary and I were delighted to see Kelly Kilmer (right) and her friend Kara. Normally we see Kelly when she travels to AZ to teach classes. She's a California gal--an incredibly popular collage artist & instructor who is also a prolific blogger. Check out Kelly's blog and teaching schedule--she might be in your area soon. Get your creative on and take her classes!
Out with the old--this is some of the type we took to the fair in addition to gorgeous decorative Japanese papers of course! Note, there is no photo of the wood type that we took--all of it was sold within the first 10 minutes!
In with the old! New, old dusty type that came home with us. I think that printers really just trade their stuff around and around and eventually we'll end up with the same stuff what we started with!
Here's the best part of the printer's fair for me. I got this lovely little print is from one of my favorite artist friends, Kelly Rider from grad school. She moved from the east coast to CA last year. I hadn't seen her for 5 years and a few weeks ago, I emailed her about the event thinking that she lived close by. I forget that CA is like AZ and that everything is an hour and a half away! It was so wonderful to see her, reconnect and catch up. It does your heart good to see friends that you've missed! Now, we just have to think of way to get her to come for a papermaking/letterpressing/bookbinding weekend at The Paper Studio!