Notecards and correspondence sets, pressed into cotton paper one color at a time.
Letterpress, printed slowly, in Asheville, North Carolina.
CCB & Co. runs two hand-fed presses. Send us your artwork, choose a paper and an ink, and a printed proof reaches you by post before any run is booked.
What leaves the shop
- Notecards, flat or folded, in one or two colors
- Correspondence sets, boxed with lined envelopes
- Bookplates, place cards and invitations to your artwork
- A proof sheet, posted to you, before every one of them
Two presses, fed by hand
A platen press and a cylinder proof press. Every sheet goes in by hand and comes out by hand. There is no feeder, no stacker and no third machine waiting to take the overflow.
Cotton paper, one color at a time
We print on cotton rag stock. Each color is a separate pass through the press with its own plate, its own make-ready and its own night on the drying rack.
A printed proof before any run
Nothing is approved from a screen. A proof on your paper, in your ink, goes into the post, and the run is booked only after you have held it.
Minimum runs; no same-day work
A press takes as long to set for one card as for a hundred, so every job has a smallest run, and the schedule has no rush lane in it.
Notecards
Flat or folded, printed in one or two colors on cotton stock, in the standard card sizes with matching envelopes. The double-thick sheet takes a deep impression; the single sheet suits a folded card. Blank inside, or printed with a short line.
Correspondence sets
Cards, lined envelopes and a paper wrap, boxed together. Printed with a name, a monogram or a small mark in one ink, for the kind of letter that gets kept in a drawer.
Small printed goods
Bookplates, place cards and invitations printed from your artwork. An invitation carries no date unless it is drawn on the artwork you send; we print the sheet you approve and nothing we made up.
The proof
Every job starts with one sheet pulled on the press: your paper, your ink, your artwork. It goes to you in the post. Mark it up and send it back, or approve it and we book the run.
How a job runs
CCB & Co. prints on two presses in a shop in Asheville, North Carolina. We take small stationery jobs from people and businesses who want print with a physical impression: notecards, correspondence sets, bookplates, place cards, invitations. Artwork arrives as a vector file or a clean black-and-white scan, we make a polymer plate from it, and the plate goes onto the press. That is the whole business, and we keep it that size on purpose.
From first message to hand-over
You write to us with what you want printed, roughly how many, and the ink you have in mind. We reply with questions about the artwork and the paper, and once those are settled we pull a proof: one sheet, on your stock, in your ink. It goes in the post. You mark it up or approve it, and only then is the run booked into the press schedule. We print, the sheets dry overnight on racks, we trim and score them, and we box them. Then you collect from the shop, or we send the box on.
What we value, and what we turn down
We value register, a clean impression and ink that sits evenly across the sheet. We value paper that takes the press well and a plate with lines thick enough to hold. We turn down work that another process would serve better. Photographs, full-color images and gradients need offset or digital printing, and we do not do them. We do not print same-day or overnight. We do not print banners, posters or signage. We do not design artwork; we print the artwork you send. And we do not foil, emboss with heat or thermograph. If your job is one of those, we say so in the first reply.
Questions we are asked
The answers below are the ones we give in the first reply to most requests. If yours is not here, the form on the proof page has room for it.
- Can I see a proof first?
- Yes; every job starts with one. We pull a proof sheet on the paper and in the ink you chose and post it to you. Nothing is run until you have held it and approved it, and a change at proof stage costs only the time to pull another.
- What is the smallest run?
- Fifty of a kind for notecards and place cards, twenty-five boxes for correspondence sets, one hundred for bookplates. Make-ready takes the same hours for ten sheets as for a hundred, which is why the floor sits where it does.
- Can you match a color exactly?
- Closely, not exactly. We mix ink by hand against a drawdown on your paper and hold that mix through the run. Between runs a color can drift a shade, because ink, paper and the humidity in the room all move. If a match matters, order in one run.
- Do you print photographs?
- No. Letterpress prints solid areas and lines, one color per pass. A photograph or a gradient needs a screen or a digital process, and we have neither.
- How long does a run take?
- About three weeks from an approved proof for a one-color job; longer for two colors or a boxed set. The proof itself takes about a week to reach you once the artwork is settled.
- Can I supply my own paper?
- Sometimes. Cotton and other soft, uncoated stock take the press well; coated or very thin paper does not. Send a sheet first and we pull a test on it before we say yes.
- Do you design the artwork?
- No. We print the artwork you send, prepared as a vector file or a clean black-and-white scan at print size. We will tell you if a line is too fine to hold or a solid too large to ink evenly, and suggest what to change, but the drawing is yours.
- Do you print on colored paper?
- White and a soft natural are the two cotton stocks we keep. A colored sheet you supply can be tested; a light ink on a dark sheet will not cover, because letterpress ink is thin and not opaque.
Send the artwork; we send the proof.
One printed sheet, on your paper, in your ink, before a run is booked. It is the only way we know to show what the finished card will feel like.
Tell us what you want printed and roughly how many. We reply from the shop mailbox with the questions we need answered, and the proof follows in the post.
Where and when
- Mailbox
- [email protected]
- Press room
- Tuesday to Friday, nine in the morning to five in the afternoon, and Saturday mornings until noon. Mail is answered on those days.
- Where we are
- Asheville, North Carolina. Proofs and finished work are posted anywhere in the United States; collection from the shop by arrangement.
