Digitomedz Gazine
10.4.2026…..For Immediate Release:
We just interviewed a printer who has resigned from Otherworld Press because he feels that there are catastrophic developments now bubbling below the surface in the letterpress avantgarde. “I feel like they aren’t taking seriously the crisis that is brewing in our culture which could end the world as we want to know it. These pioneer letterpress shops just keep hurtling forward without regulation to an alphabetic nightmare.”
Our source claims that he has seen secret studies that show an alarming drop in online usage in communities where letterpress has established successful shops. “Screen time is dropping like an elevator without brakes, it’s awful. You’ve got teenagers forgetting to turn on their phones while setting type with stained old wooden type. Graphic designers come for a workshop and the next thing you know they quit their jobs and buy an old Poco Press to put in their apartments. I try to talk to old friends from the design industry, telling them about the latest upgrade to Indesign, and they barely listen. “Huh?” is what I hear now.. Like, they don’t care!”
Our own research tallies with this source, and another thing is beginning to happen: the sale of hand-printed books and artists’ books is soaring. People who were just a few years ago harnessed to screens with fifty others in giant companies are having their work bought by collectors and museums. Huge international fairs have come into being to exhibit printing by hand from all over the world. Universities are including book arts and letterpress in their course catalogs now, and they can’t accommodate the numbers who wish to enroll.
We spoke to a small group of scholars and philosophers about the ramifications of this phenomenon. One thing they all agreed on is that it’s like, weird. “I mean, why would anyone want to pick out letters one at a time, getting one’s hands dirty, spending a whole afternoon to put a little poem together? Something I can do in ten minutes, bada boom.” But that was countered by one of the other panelists who raised the deeper question: “what if it’s part of a rebellion, as it were, against the digital universe? What if these people are discovering that the hands-on shaping of words and books is by its very nature an antidote to the depression many feel about the advent of AI and instant ‘influencing’?”
This led to a discussion of ethics and whether letterpress should be regulated by the government to prevent that exact effect from snowballing and perhaps eroding the very basis of our control over masses of people. It was even proposed that letterpress shops should not be allowed to teach the method to anyone under sixty. This of course was shot down on constitutional principles, but other, less stringent policies were put forward. Whether our present government would agree or even knows what letterpress is, was left to conjecture. “They don’t know anything & don’t give a shit” was the unanimous feeling.
Our own opinion is that letterpress is definitely increasing its scope and influence all over the world. It does seem to undercut the user’s interest in screen time and digital gymnastics. But think of this before you get your underwear in a knot: when they print a book or a poster, the print run is, like, in the hundreds. I mean, our own Insta account has 10 million followers! Talk about a tempest in a teapot (what the hell is a teapot?). Letterpress is not to be feared any more than the marginal scribbles of an old beatnik poet. Like, are you reading this online? Huh?
—Gene Alteredsen…. editor of Digitomedz Gazine