 idea I was gonna actually have to follow the fucking circus. I'll try to do the best I can. For those of you that don't know my name is Chris Fritten and in late 2014 I quit my job. Don't worry that's not the unusual accomplishment you guys are gonna be seeing. I quit my job and I hit the road and for two and a half years between 2015 and 2017 I visited letterpress shops all around North America with my project called the itinerant printer and all told I visited 137 shops in 843 days I made it to 45 states four provinces and I covered almost 50,000 miles. Now this sounds like the great American road trip right and it kind of sounds like the American dream until you guys realize that I got 11 parking tickets six mistull tickets four speeding tickets and had the car towed twice. So you know there's a little of one and a half dozen of the other but let's go back just a step because I know a lot of you guys are graphic designers and I know you're typographers and you might be familiar with letterpress printing but for those of you that aren't I want to give you a crash course in letterpress printing so it contextualizes my project and what I was doing. All letterpress printing is relief printing meaning you're printing the raised surface of a block as opposed to the recessed areas and the kind of letterpress printing that I do takes place mostly with movable type. Moveable type you have an individual character on each block the letter A the letter B the number one the number two and type can be made of just about anything but it's usually made of wood or it's made of metal and in addition to the wood type in the metal type you have border and ornament material and in addition to the border and ornament you actually have what we call cuts and cuts of the image blocks and they can be made of anything they can be made of wood they can be made of copper they can be made of magnesium like tickle me Elvis back here and they can be made using photographic or mechanical processes but they can also be made by hand so the objective of letterpress printing is to pull all these disparate elements together into a form and the form just consists of all your printable elements along with the spacing which we call furniture and letting and once you have this form you take it to a press and all the press does is facilitate inking the form and drawing a sheet of paper across the form to create a print. If you're working on a smaller scale you can take it to antique platen presses like this and if you're working on a larger scale you can take it to a proofing press where you'd be able to lay a larger form in the bed and then the cylinder allows you to draw the paper across it and you get a beautiful print right but not so fast. All letterpress printing like most print making methods is done one color at a time using one form at a time so if I wanted to make a five color poster I'd have to do the yellow first using one form and then the pink and then the blue and then the orange and then finally the black and because letterpress ink takes quite a while to dry I'd usually do that on different days so five color posters, five forms, five days of printing. Now what do I do with letterpress printing and why am I up here talking to you? That job that I quit in 2014 was running the studio I was the studio director at the Western New York Book Arts Center in Buffalo New York and at the Book Arts Center I taught letterpress printing and book binding but we also had a really strong earned income model where we made a lot of gig posters for bands and I work with a lot of mid-level rock bands and other things, Slater Kinney of Montreal and for you punk rockers out here the Dead Kennedys and in addition to that I also made fine artist books and I did all kinds of limited edition art prints and the art prints that we did at the Book Arts Center were all about creativity within constraint. A lot of them were visual poetry and other things deconstructing and reconstructing letter forms and creating new geometries just based on color. So when I'm on the road this is a little bit more my mode of working. I'm doing these limited edition art prints. The only thing that I bring on the road during the itinerant printer project is paper and ink so I work exclusively from what those shops have in their collections whether it's wood type metal type border ornament and sometimes even photo polymer plates and within a very limited window I have to try to create a compelling image from that stuff that I find. Now believe it or not this entire project that I'm doing is based on a historical notion of itinerant or what they called tramp printers and what some guys in the business just called travelers. These guys had a union card from the international typographical union. The ITU was convened right before the Civil War in 1861 and if you had a union card you could actually travel anywhere in America and pick up a job. So you'd work in Chicago for a couple of weeks, quit, move to Kansas City, work there for a couple of weeks, quit, move back to Cincinnati and get another job. At one point in time the union was so strong they were actually required to hire you if you had that card. So you'd walk into the union print shop, there'd be a clipboard on the wall, it would say if there were hours to be worked and you'd hand in your card and you had a job. I even read first hand accounts of guys quitting a job at noon walking down the street and picking up another job at a print shop and I got really fascinated with this nomadic lifestyle that they were living. They were traveling around the country but they were also earning their keep. Now, there's no longer an international typographical union and I couldn't expect anyone to pay me a wage. So what I do now is a lot more like a mid-level touring band. As I travel around the country, I visit private presses, I visit community based shops that are public, I visit hobby presses, I visit schools and universities that have relief printing programs and everywhere I go I give lectures and presentations and I teach workshops and I also make prints along the way. So what I try to do at each of these stops as well is find time to set up pop-up shops and exhibitions and the money that I make from selling the prints that I make along the way is enough to get me to the next place and then the next place. So in this way, I've actually been able to facilitate the itinerant project not just for that two and a half years originally but for another year and a half or more on top of that. So all told almost five years on the road with this model that's a lot like a mid-level touring band. Now, I told you guys I started this trip in 2015, January 26, 2015 and I'm from Buffalo, New York. This is literally Buffalo, New York on January 26, 2015 and I started the trip in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. This is literally Fort Lauderdale, Florida on January 26, 2015. It's a lot like the touring bands do though, you know, you go down south for the winter time, you come back up north for the summertime and when I was out there, I would only spend a day or two in a lot of these shops, sometimes a little bit longer but usually just a day or two and I made prints fast and furious and I made a lot of prints. I made 15,728 prints on the road in that 843 day span and the only thing that I really standardized about the trip was the size of the prints. So I made poster size prints that were 12 by 18 and then I made postcard size prints that were 4 by 6 and what this allowed me to do, the standardization was to work on small presses and large presses because it wasn't only that I'd walk into a shop and I didn't know what they had in their collection, it was also that I had no idea what kind of presses they were going to have. So all told I ended up working on 34 different kinds of presses to create the pieces that I've been showing you. Small ones like these postcard pieces. A lot of times I would find regionally specific elements. This cowboy is from Bozeman, Montana. This amazing set of half tone images from a yearbook is from Montana State University and it's overlaid with an Asian inspired wood type face and then I was able to work with incredible things that a lot of people don't even know exist like wood engravings from the Gram Lee collection at the West Virginia University. It's probably one of the largest collections of commercial wood engravings in the entire world and many of those are multiple colors like the beautiful pieces that you see here and some are just figurative. They're just landscape imagery and things. Now when you travel the country for two and a half years and you take 35,000 photos and you make 15,000 prints, what do you do? You write a book, right? Write a book, they said. It'll be great, they said. It was the most difficult thing I ever did in my entire life because I'm primarily a letterpress printer. You know, I know just enough about Adobe to be dangerous and I know just enough to lay out the book but it really was a challenge. So what I ended up doing is writing a 320 page coffee table book that features over 1,500 photos and 130,000 words that tells the story of being on the road for over two and a half years. It talks about all the people, all the places, and all the prints along the way. And what this really begs is the question why do it at all? Why quit your job? Why hit the road? Why write this book? It's because I consider myself one of what I like to call a new American crafts people. And the new American crafts people no longer have the infrastructure that the unions provided, especially those of us that work in craft and analog arts. So you no longer have that blueprint where you had a formal apprenticeship time and then you'd go on and be a journeyman and you'd work with other printers and other crafts people and then at some point in time you'd hopefully become a master, settle down, and have apprentices of your own. And with that loss of the infrastructure there's also a loss of the formal skill set that you would have. Most of us that are new American crafts people are primarily self-taught. We're autodidactic. Now I was lucky enough to have a few haphazard mentors along the way but without that infrastructure what I knew is that I was going to have to find a way to facilitate my own journeyman time in my career. And that's what I ended up doing with this model. I essentially created a system with the itinerant printer project that allowed me to fund my own journeyman time in my career. Now this started a little bit earlier than 2015. My first foray into itinerant printing was back in 2012 when I went to visit my friend Amos Kennedy down in Gordo, Alabama. Now some of you guys might know Amos. He invited me out and he said come down just print with me sometime. So I did. I took a week out of my schedule. I went down to Gordo and we printed every single day from moment we woke up to the moment we went to sleep at night. We made dinner together, we talked about printing the entire time, we even bound some books together and I didn't know it but it was kind of prescient. When I went to visit Amos I had nothing in mind. I had no idea, no preconceived notions about what I was going to print. So what I ended up doing is pulling out all these galley trays that he had that were cuts from an illustrated dictionary from the early 20th century and what I did is just randomly overlaid those cuts in bright colors so you have these filigree lines, these sharp images that you see behind you in really bright colors. And as a lot of you might be thinking right now this doesn't look very letter-pressy. And this started a whole trajectory with my work that continues to this day, abstract shapes, chance overlays of objects, and these really thin lines in bright colors. A lot of you might be familiar with letter-press printing from things like Hatch Show, that Jim mentioned down in Nashville, really heavy blocky wood type, big wood cut, saturated colors. Well this is kind of the other end of the spectrum and this started that trajectory for my work that lasted even longer. I've done a lot of abstract backgrounds for some of my work that are all one of a kind and then I've moved even farther away from that now and sort of jumped the shark into doing entirely abstract expressionist work. It doesn't involve type at all but I still use the press to create these pieces and sometimes provocatively I like to call them letter-press prints even though they technically aren't. But that's a story for a completely different day. It's a completely different story. This story is supposed to be all about the printing and about the type right? Because that's where we are. We're at typecon and it's supposed to be about the type. And I saw so much type on the road hundreds of thousands of different examples like this incredible example of Hebrew wood type from Boston or this incredible example of extraordinary typefaces from the Rob Roy Kelly collection in Austin, Texas. This typeface I had never seen before from DWRI letter press in Providence Rhode Island. There was so much type. Decorative, plain, sometimes unusual, sometimes new, sometimes old because it's really all about that, right? It's about the letter forms, it's about the type. That's completely wrong. What I realized early on in the trip, especially when I was reading these first-hand accounts from analog or from these old tramp printers, is that they became analog conduits for information. And it's all about the people. It's not about the type and it's not about the printing. And people are the ones who make the prints. People are the ones who make the type. People are the ones who consume the type. And when I was out there, I became these surrogate members of people's families for a couple of days. And I realized right away that I was going to learn more from the people and about the people that I was ever going to learn about printing during my journey in time. And there's one story that I have to tell you that encapsulates the entire thing. It goes all the way from the beginning to the end of my trip. And even though I've told it a number of times, it's still hard to tell. So bear with me. I started this trip like I told you on January 26th, 2015 in Fort Lauderdale at my friend Ingrid's shop. Her shop's called IS Projects. And I wrapped this whole thing up at a place called Vote for Letterpress in Orange, New Jersey with my friend John Selikoff. And John got to hold me when I was at Princeton nearby. When I was on the road, a lot of letterpress printers would get a hold of me and be like, oh, I see you're in Arizona and you're close by. Why don't you stop by the shop? Well, he did the same thing. He's like, you're in Princeton. You're only 45 minutes away from me. I'd really love it if you could come and visit my shop. And I was like, I don't know. I was really at the end of this whole thing. I wanted to go home. I was ready to go back to Buffalo and wrap this all up. And I told him that. And he's like, you know, I'd really like it if you could come out and mold again, have the shop a little while longer, but I'd love you to see it. So we set up a time. He's like, we'll keep it low key. I'll invite a few friends out. We'll print all day and that will be it. So over the course of our conversation, though, I had to ask and I was kind of like, you have a good thing going on here. It really seems great. Like why are you getting rid of it? Why do you have to get rid of your shop? I expected him to be like, oh, I can't afford it anymore. I'm not making any money. I have to move. And what John told me, he's like, I'm sick. I have ALS and I'm not actually not going to be print printing much longer. In fact, when you get here, the voice, my voice is gone. The disease has already taken away from me. So I'll be communicating with you through a text to speech app. And I was like, whoa, that got heavy really quick. Like that was not the answer I expected at all. So I went to visit John and we had this amazing day together. We printed all day long. I learned tons of stuff about him. Number one, that he was this crazy metalhead. We just listened to Metallica and Iron Maiden and stuff all day long and like rocked how well we made these prints. And the other thing that I learned about him is that it was hilarious and it was sarcastic. So we're working with this text to speech app and it made it really, really difficult because I would have to ask questions and I'd wait for him to type it out and it would take two or three minutes and he would come over and he would answer me. So what I started doing is asking these yes or no questions and he caught on to it right away and he would write out the two or three paragraphs still and he would like bring it over. And they were always sarcastic and they were always like, you know, they were jabs at me. And the other thing that I realized is that he was just ridiculous. He would bring it over and he would answer me in like a woman's voice or a robot's voice like whatever you could put on the iPad. And it made it really fun though. It lightened things up. So we spent all day printing these amazing 10 inch Cooper black pieces of wood type that he had and we created these magical prints totally abstract and I went home and that was it. I was done. I spent the next eight months writing the itinerant printer book. I holed up over the winter in Buffalo and over the summer and I wrote it and I digitally put it together, designed it and published it and right near the end I started to send out all of my entries to fact check with people. I was like, you know, don't give me any stylistic or grammar advice. I just want you to fact check this thing. Of course, I got pages and pages of stylistic and grammar advice but nevertheless, the one person I didn't hear from was John and I sent him another email and other emails and a bunch of text messages, nothing back and two weeks into January I got a text message from John's wife Lord and said John passed away on Thanksgiving Day and all I could think was fuck! I didn't finish the book in time. He was a huge part of this project and he was like the capstone for the entire thing and he's never going to see it and Lauren says to me, you know, we still have his entire shop and we have no idea what to do with it. We don't know what any of it's worth. Can you come down and help us? So I came down I inventoried John's entire shop, all of his wood type, all of his metal type, all of his presses and then I went home and I was going to try to connect them with someone that might be interested in some of the stuff and it wasn't two days later that I got an email from Ingrid, the very first person that I visited on the shop and it was about doing a workshop with her and some other stuff and then it said P.S. I'm looking for a Vander Cook SP20. That was like no shit that's the exact press in John's shop. So what I did is connected Ingrid's family and John's family and over the course of two months she was able to acquire John's entire shop as what we call legacy shop and now it lives on inside IS projects in Fort Lauderdale, Florida is what she calls the John Selikoff collection and it's this amazing story of how the very first shop that I visited on the trip acquired the very last shop kind of like a snake eating its tail and there's no way for me to ever know that there's no way for me to predict that and it also would have never happened unless I became that sort of ligament that human connector unless I went on the itinerant printer trip and the last thing that I want to leave you with is this little part of the story that I always like to tell people I made this print any number of times the universe is under no obligation to make sense to you and it's completely true but if you go out there and you take the time to spend with other people learn from them pass on what you learned there's a chance that it'll make one little corner of the universe make sense to you and there's even more to that story if you guys are interested but my time's up right now and I want to thank you guys for listening to me I'll be at the table all weekend and you guys