The Slow Art of Saturn Press

What Is Letterpress Printing?

A Q&A about how we make letterpress greeting cards.

Step into our shop in Kent and the first thing that hits you is the noise. Our presses are loud—cast-iron, century-old loud—and they're housed inside a former church, which means the sound bounces off the walls in a way the original congregation probably never imagined. It's an unlikely cathedral for an unlikely craft. Here's a look behind the scenes.

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I.

How many printing presses do you have, and what are they?

Six working letterpresses, totaling about eight tons of vintage machinery. We run four Miehle Verticals, a Heidelberg platen (nicknamed the “Windmill” for its swinging paper-feed arms), and a Monarch handpress for our most delicate work. These machines are big—the Miehles weigh 3,600 pounds each. The Heidelberg adds another 2,500 pounds.

II.

How old are they? Do they have names?

They do. The two oldest Miehles date to the mid-1940s and arrived painted battleship gray, so we named them after WWII-era warships: Hood and Yorktown. Their 1950s siblings are Saratoga and Forrestal. Built to last, built to do hard work, and still doing it.

III.

What's it like working with machines that old?

Every printing press we own has its own personality. Some are reliable workhorses, some are finicky, and some change by the day—but all of them require an expert to work them. There's no “print” button. There's no automation. Every card is the result of a person making decisions in real time.

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Inside the shop .

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IV.

Who's the expert?

Our master printer Rob, who has been doing this for forty-five years. That's not a typo. Forty-five years of listening to what a Miehle sounds like when something's slightly off, and knowing exactly how to fix it. You can't shortcut that kind of knowledge, and you certainly can't program it into a computer.

V.

Walk us through how a card actually gets made.

The path goes: design → plate production → locking the plate into the chase → mixing ink by hand → make-ready (dialing in the press) → printing the first color → setting up the second color → registering it perfectly to the first → printing again. A millimeter of drift between colors would ruin the whole run, so registration is everything. For a two-color card, you're looking at the better part of a day. Three or four colors? Longer. Making quality greeting cards takes time and patience, and that's how we like it.

VI.

Why do it this way when digital printing is so much faster?

You can order a thousand digitally printed cards by tomorrow afternoon. We know. But when inked metal presses into soft cotton paper, something happens that a digital printer cannot replicate. The paper remembers. There's a depth, a slight bite, the unmistakable evidence that a human being was here.

That's what we're selling—not just a card, but an object made with care, on old heavy machines, by someone who's been perfecting his craft for almost half a century. In a former church, no less, where the presses ring out like a very loud, very particular kind of hymn.

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Saturn Press is a letterpress greeting card studio in Kent, Connecticut.