“There Was an Artistry to it That We Forgot”: The Only In-Use All-Iron Printing Press in Scotland

Around St Andrews, you may have seen bookmarks advertising the James David Forbes Collecting Prize. These feature ornate printed patterns in red, blue, and gold, hand-done by the Crail Press. 

The Crail Press is located in a shed at the end of Dawn Hollis’ long back garden in Crail. Hollis led us through her home until we reached the end of the garden; she opened the door, and before us stood the only in-use Stanhope printing press in Scotland.

“There [are] very few like this left anymore,” Hollis said. The Stanhope press, invented in 1810, was the first all-iron printing press, as opposed to the universally used wooden presses. It is now the source of Dawn Hollis’ living. The Crail Press is run solely by Hollis, a former PhD student at the University of St Andrews. 

Eyes cast downwards, Hollis reached upward and into the typecase, pulling at letters, pressing them into the caselay to spell her name for us. “You [...] get used to everything being back to front,” she explained. It inverts all of what computer generations consider the ‘normal’ method of composition. Our ‘rules’ — left to right, words and letters in the order they are spoken, auto-correct fixing clumsiness — are rendered obsolete when using the press. 

Hollis used to be an academic at St Andrews, where she studied Classics and History. “I was pissed off in Classics, and then during COVID I was on maternity leave,” she explained. “I was like — I’m going to go insane if I’m just spending my entire day in a house with a small baby and literally nothing else [...] I need an hour a day to go and not be near the baby.”

While Hollis walked us through the printing process, her daughter played in the garden. We later learned that her daughter used the press herself to design her last birthday invitations.

“And I didn’t go and write articles,” said Hollis. Instead, she decided to print. “That’s probably telling me something quite interesting,” Hollis realised.  So when the post-doc came to an end, she decided to go into printing as a business. Hollis is now the secretary of the British Printing Society, “quite a nice society of people doing letterpress,” and prints for a living with the Crail Press. 

“It is not a compact hobby,” Hollis said, pointing to her myriad of gear and instruments. “[It’s] simultaneously quite valuable but also really, really hard to ship and to get a hold of,” she explained. “You kind of have to be in the right place at the right time.” Most of Hollis’ equipment is secondhand, and in the case of two of her presses, passed down to her. 

“You tend to know people by the name of their press rather than their name or their face,” Hollis said, describing the UK’s community of printers. The letterpress community has shrunk rapidly in the last few decades. “Letterpress is just kind of an interesting sort of craft in these days,” Hollis explained. “40 or 50 years ago, it was still a main part of the print trade [...] It was how print texts were produced for 400, 500 years — and then very quickly, quite suddenly became replaced.” The rise of computers has been central to this process.

“There was an artistry to it that we forgot and have lost now,” said Hollis, describing the work of those who made books and printed materials by hand.

“When you’re typesetting, and you’re fully justifying, you’re having the margin straight on either side, you’re having to make decisions about, ‘How do you space that out?’ What words do you put bigger spaces in between?” she explained. “Those are the kinds of things that typesetters 50 years ago would think about, would know instinctively.”

“Now we just click a button, and it does it, you know,” Hollis said. “I think that, looking at the layout of modern typeset books, the rules that I’ve inherited from some of the older people I worked with [...] they’re just forgotten.” Hollis gave an example, “Never have a widow: a single word at the end of a paragraph.”

“The people who were doing this [...] they weren’t necessarily the people who were doing the artistic design, but they had a training, and an eye for what would make an aesthetic and pleasing page,” she explained.

Hollis confessed that she owned her first printing press before her first touchscreen phone. It is a pivot towards slower, more conscious creation that Hollis seeks through her business. The origins of the Stanhope press were tied to disseminating information — Hollis called it an “agent of knowledge.” Much like crosswords and sudoku, it requires a breadth of brain activity and a range of creativity. It is not just the clash of cerebral and physical that the press requires, but a combination of literary, linguistic, mathematical, and spatial knowledge.

The letterpress has its own restrictions, however. “It’s not quite as free as designing on a computer,” Hollis said. “But I think that’s what’s quite exciting. Sometimes, I’m trying to do a design, and I think of a certain typeface [...] then I realise I don’t have some of them [...] And once you run out of one letter that you need, you need to change your text,” she explained. “I enjoy that — okay, there’s this problem, how do I respond to that problem?” There is a physicality to Hollis’ work, which is entirely hand-done. “When I’m setting my name,” she explained, “I’ll start with D. You put it in upside down, and every piece of type has a little nick in it, which helps you orient it. And then your thumb’s going to hold the nick, and then you put in the next volume [...] Hand composition is a really important part of it because it’s very restful and mindful.”

“Once you get the hang of it, it’s fairly easy,” Hollis said. Neither of us had seen anything like it before, each letter minute in Hollis’ hand. Standing in Hollis’ shed, which she had built specifically for the press, she explained each part of the mystical process. It is particularly moving to understand that this is how the art of printing was passed down from generation to generation. “But I think you can start pretty small,” she said. “You don’t need masses to start, but I think you get greedy. You want more and more options for design. It just depends on what you want to print.”

“You know, I think there is a real appeal to something which isn’t screen-based. And I think a lot of people find that when they come in.”

Hollis described printing as an art that had been forgotten. Yet, with Hollis and her Stanhope at the Crail Press, it’s hard not to feel a sense of optimism that there are people, even in corners of the world such as Fife, who keep this artistry alive. 

Photos courtesy of Arnaz Mallick