As a late summer downpour passes through New Orleans, Amelia Bird leans over a hulking platen press inside Baskerville Studio. An embossed plastic label that reads “Beulah, Born 1901″ identifies the apparatus, one of three, each weighing thousands of pounds, at the nonprofit printing collective located in the city’s up-and-coming Bywater neighborhood. Bird spins a wheel of the antique machine with weary pleasure, then rolls out yellow ink and puts down sheets of paper one at a time. She’s producing a poster concept by the fellow Baskerville member Jeffrey Goodman that uses digitally designed polymer plates and metal type. The end product will be distributed as a souvenir during the film exhibitor Shotgun Cinema’s upcoming screening of the Talking Heads’s 1984 documentary “Stop Making Sense” held at the nearby Marigny Opera House.
Though New Orleans is an art-friendly place, “letterpress and book arts are not music or painting” in terms of visibility or access, observes Kathryn Wollan, a cofounder of Baskerville. To help revive these crafts, she, Bird, Tyler Harwood and the printmaker Miriam Stassi joined forces this past February in a one-room workshop tucked inside a weathered, red two-story building. All have full-time jobs — Wollan works for FEMA on the post-Katrina recovery effort, Bird at the New Orleans outpost of Alice Waters’s Edible Schoolyard program — but wanted a platform for their passion for printing, as well as a place to stash their personal collections of tools and gear. The studio’s retro resources are ideal for spreading the word about goings-on the old-fashioned way. Baskerville has also started a series of broadsides in collaboration with local poets, and hosts workshops and classes. “Collaborative opportunities have happily found us,” Wollan says. “It seems like a genuine outgrowth of a dynamic and creative local community. People just seem to get really fired up at the possibility of printing their words and images on real paper with this old mechanical equipment.”
