Behind the Scenes

For the first time in City Arts’ history, we chose to give all three issues the same cover story, which highlights the art of letterpress and letterpresses in Seattle, the Eastside and Tacoma.

But we still took the opportunity to create a unique design for each cover.

The question mark block on our Eastside cover and the main headline spelled out in blocks across the Seattle cover comes from a set of woodblocks graciously provided by Dale Hart and Reba Blissell, who used to run a letterpress business called Rolling Bones until 2004.

“We got into it years ago, and we’ve seen the letterpress trend come and go in waves — there’s another one coming now,” says Dale, who currently maintains a letterpress “mini-shop” at his otherwise-digital communications firm Methodologie. “It’s funny, the more computerized the world gets, the more analog our desires.”

Though their basement studio is currently being remodeled, the couple was able to dig up an old box filled with two alphabets of different sizes. On March 16, Andrew Waits photographed dozens of letters and word configurations in his studio with the goal of conveying the tangible effect of a three-dimensional piece of typography. “It’s nice they got to see the light of day,” Dale says.

Below: Seattle, Eastside, and Tacoma