The Vandercook proof press stands silent until someone pulls the impression lever—then the studio fills with a satisfying mechanical thunk, the kind of sound that belongs to an earlier century. At Print Icon's Gowanus letterpress studio on 3rd Avenue, Sunday afternoons unfold in unhurried rhythm: drawer pulls, the click of metal type sorted back into California job cases, the scent of oil-based ink mingling with dust from wood specimens that predate most of the neighborhood's current architecture. It is not a museum. The type gets handled, the presses run, and participants leave with ink under their fingernails and a broadside still slightly tacky at the edges.
The wood type archive
Floor-to-ceiling drawer cabinets line the north wall, housing more than four hundred drawers of wood type spanning specimens from the 1880s through the 1940s. Gothic condensed faces, ornamental Tuscans, circus-poster display fonts—each drawer a archaeology of American commercial printing. The drawers slide open with the particular resistance of old wood runners, releasing a faint smell of dried ink and lignin. Some pieces show ghost impressions from decades of pressure; others retain crisp edges that suggest they were ordered, shelved, and forgotten before the shop that owned them closed.
Arriving thirty minutes early to browse the archive before the workshop starts has become the unspoken protocol among regulars. The extra half-hour allows time to pull drawers, photograph interesting specimens, and understand the weight difference between end-grain maple and the lighter basswood faces. Studio founder Emilia Castellanos keeps an annotated inventory ledger on the center work table, noting provenance where known—a job lot from a shuttered Newark print shop, an estate-sale acquisition from a collector in Connecticut. The archive is not roped off. Handling the type is part of the point.
Sunday workshop structure
The Sunday workshops run from one to four in the afternoon and follow a deliberate structure: ninety minutes of typesetting instruction before anyone approaches the press. Sessions cap at eight participants, and booking three weeks ahead has become necessary as word spreads through the weekend plans circuit of people seeking alternatives to brunch-and-browse. The small cohort size means individualized attention—Castellanos or one of two other instructors circulates constantly, correcting backward letters, explaining point sizes, demonstrating the technique for locking up a chase so the forme won't shift during impression.
Typesetting by hand rewires the brain's relationship to language. Each letter must be plucked individually from its compartment in the job case, the lowercase living in the lower section—hence the term—with the capitals above. Spacing requires lead slugs of varying widths, measured in points and picas, a system that predates metric standardization. The muscle memory takes time: reaching for the 'e' compartment without looking, feeling for the nick on the body of the sort to confirm orientation, composing right-to-left in the stick so the text will read correctly when printed. By the end of ninety minutes, most participants have set four or five lines of metal type into a coherent block, ready for the press bed.
Press time and paper stock
The Vandercook Universal I proof press dominates the back half of the studio, a thousand pounds of cast iron and precision rollers manufactured in Chicago sometime in the 1950s. Castellanos inks the press using a brayer, spreading burnt umber or lampblack across the disk until the surface takes on a matte sheen. Each participant prints one eleven-by-seventeen-inch broadside on Crane Lettra cotton rag paper, a stock with enough tooth to grab the impression cleanly. Additional prints may cost extra; verify current pricing with the studio, though the queue usually limits most people to two or three pulls before the four o'clock endpoint.
The moment of impression—rolling the bed through the press, feeling the resistance as the platen makes contact, then lifting the sheet to see the debossed text—delivers a specific satisfaction that digital processes cannot replicate. The paper holds a topography. Run your fingers across the printed surface and you feel each letterform in relief, a physical record of pressure and metal. Some participants frame their broadsides; others fold them into portfolios. The point is less the final artifact than the embodied knowledge of how text becomes tangible, how intention translates through mechanical process into something you can hold.
The Gowanus context
Print Icon occupies a second-floor studio in a building that has cycled through multiple industrial uses since its construction in the nineteen-twenties. The block retains the utilitarian bones of old Gowanus—loading docks, truck bays, wide sidewalks built for hauling—even as the neighborhood's real estate pressures intensify. Large windows face west, and on clear afternoons the studio fills with the particular quality of winter light that comes off the canal, pale and diffuse, flattering to both metal and wood specimens.
The location feels appropriate for a letterpress studio. This is not a heritage craft preserved under glass but a practice sustained by people willing to haul furniture-weight equipment up narrow staircases and spend weekends teaching the mechanics of hand composition. The surrounding blocks hold a mix of fabrication shops, artist studios, and the inevitable luxury condos, all coexisting in the uneasy equilibrium that defines Brooklyn's industrial edges in late 2026. Print Icon fits the in-between zone—rooted in historical technique, sustained by contemporary interest, neither purely nostalgic nor aggressively modern.
What participants take away
Beyond the printed broadside, workshop participants leave with a functional understanding of typographic terms that previously existed as abstract software menu items. Kerning, leading, justification—these concepts become muscular knowledge when you have to physically adjust metal spacing or troubleshoot why a line won't lock up square. The experience recalibrates expectations around speed and precision. Setting a single sentence by hand can take twenty minutes. Printing an edition of fifty requires stamina and focus that make digital command-P feel almost like cheating.
Some participants return for advanced sessions, eventually learning to mix custom ink colors or work with wood type for poster-scale projects. Others treat the workshop as a one-time deep dive into a process they will never personally repeat but wanted to understand from the inside. Both approaches are welcome. Castellanos resists the impulse to romanticize the medium—she will readily note that offset lithography and digital printing exist for good reasons—but she also believes that tactile literacy matters, that understanding how information was produced and distributed for five centuries of print culture enriches our navigation of its digital successor.
Practical notes
Print Icon is located in Gowanus, Brooklyn; nearest subway is Union Street on the R train, about a seven-minute walk. Street parking exists but remains competitive; the studio is also accessible via the B63 bus. Sunday workshops run year-round; verify current schedule and book directly through the studio's website. Sessions are held on the second floor; accessibility inquiries should be directed to the studio in advance. Wear clothing that can tolerate ink—aprons are provided, but splatter happens. Bring a portfolio or flat bag if you want to transport your print without creasing. No prior experience necessary.
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Sources consulted: Letterpress printing · Gowanus, Brooklyn · NYC Brooklyn neighborhoods · MTA transit info
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