Interview: Boxcar Press’ Harold Kyle

Boxcar Press is a Syracuse-based letterpress founded by Harold Kyle. Aside from being a pretty large operation that does quality work, Boxcar is noteworthy as an environmentally progressive letterpress. Their green mission and commitment to sustainable printing seems so timely that we decided to ask Harold Kyle a few questions. Our interview follows….

JU: Let’s start at the beginning…. Why letterpress? What’s the appeal of letterpress to you and what’s the appeal to your customers?

HK: For me the appeal is wide-ranging: the precisely machined cast iron; the endless problem-solving; the lineage of techniques stretching back to Gutenberg’s workshop; the warm community of printers carrying the torch; the crisp bite of type into paper; the beautiful letterpress papers. And it’s true, I also really like large, heavy, precision machinery. I think that our printing customers see our craftsmanship and realize that they can produce something timeless and precious—a rare experience these days.

JU: You started out in Minneapolis but ended up in Syracuse. What role does the city of Syracuse play in defining the identity of Boxcar Press?

HK: Well, we could afford running a business here! The rust belt has treated us well by keeping expenses down and keeping us focused on our work. Since we bootstrapped everything, this was crucial. Living and working in Syracuse is so much easier than in any of the other cities that we’ve called home. We toil away inside one of Syracuse’s large old warehouses, which has today become a lively center for artists and graphic professionals—we love sharing cheap space with kindred spirits. Syracuse is a down-to-earth, modest city without flashiness but with a lot of history and know-how. We try to carry these values into our everyday work.

JU: Boxcar Press has demonstrated a real commitment to sustainable printing- you’ve laid out an ambitious set of environmental goals with clear deadlines. Are you on track to meet these goals? Have some goals been harder to meet than others?

HK: We are ahead of schedule on some goals and behind schedule on others. Part of the reason we’ve posted these goals so prominently is that we can share our successes and failures transparently. It’s been easy to do simple things like switching to a rag service instead of using disposable rags; go through an environmental audit with an outside agency; and switch our office paper to 100% PCW paper, for instance. The hardest goal that we’ve accomplished is the photopolymer recycling program. No one was doing this previously and none of the manufacturers gave us much hope for success.

Other goals we tried our best to meet but found impractical. Take finding a “green web host”  for instance – we moved our web sites to three different green hosts that used solar or wind power to run their servers, but we ended up with sub-par website performance that really affected our customers We unfortunately can’t always expect our customers to wait for the sun to come back out over the solar array! So we decided to buy our own server and pay to offset the carbon emissions from running it instead. Organic cotton paper, which has been a goal of ours, faces some daunting technical hurdles that we may not ever be able to overcome. But the work of “being green” is never done, so we’ll continue to set ambitious annual goals and do our best to meet them every year.

JU: As a commercial printshop, how do your environmental goals weigh against “the bottom line”? Is it difficult to prioritize the sometimes conflicting interests of the environment and income?

HK: We’re fortunate that many of our customers share the same beliefs that we do about the environment, so our interests most often align. Convincing printing customers to choose 100% post-consumer waste paper is much easier than it used to be.

But it’s true that commercial realities sometimes conflict with our environmental beliefs. Although it’s a goal of ours, we still haven’t eliminated Mohawk Superfine from our stock room. This paper is easy to get (it’s made “down the street” in Cohoes, New York), prints well, and is popular among letterpress customers. We know we need to work harder to promote a paper without virgin fiber content, and we plan on doing so in the upcoming year. We have a public goal “All paper used in our print shop and offices is 100% renewable or 100% recycled fibers by October 2009” so that we know that we’re currently off course. Though it’s been easy to sell Superfine, we will work harder to source and stock a recycled alternative plus educate our customers to transition to this alternative.

JU: Do you see yourself as a model for other printshops? Do you think the printing community is working hard enough to adapt sustainable practices?

HK: Yes, I do think of our printshop as a laboratory for sustainable letterpress printing. (The lab coats on the supply page on our website were only half in jest!) By sustainable, I mean that the business is both economically and ecologically sound—we’re not sustaining anything if we don’t sustain ourselves.

Whether other printers are adopting similar practices, I don’t really know. I do hope that we’re a source of inspiration to anyone who wants to help preserve and promote the craft of letterpress in an ecological way. But we realize that we can always do more, and the same goes for anyone in the letterpress community. The moment anyone pats themselves on the back, they’re already falling behind.

JU: Clearly the computer as a tool is integral to your business. Is it hard to find a balance between technologies? In 2009, is the debate over analog versus digital a moot point?

HK: I love hand composition, and setting type by hand was an important part of the spell that letterpress cast on me (and an important part of our craft and aesthetic). Fortunately for everyone involved in letterpress, photopolymer allowed letterpress to be sold to a wider audience. For the printers working in commercial job printing, photopolymer has been a godsend because hand composition is not a commercially viable option (for 99% of us); customers expect to print from PDF files they’ve approved in advance, and this is impossible with traditional typesetting.

For me, the goal has always been to produce beautiful printing. The typographic surface we print from is really a means to an end, and I don’t feel angst or attachment to our choice of photopolymer. It’s the ink pressed into paper that matters.

JU: At the core of Boxcar Press seems to be a commitment to a healthy life and responsible actions. From your embrace of letterpress and sustainable printing practices to community-supported agriculture and charitable giving, do you feel part of broader movement?

HK: Certainly. I am a printmaker and Debbie (my partner and co-owner) is a poet. We’re not your typical business people and our business values reflect an alternate vision of success. A lot of our business thoughts crystalized around Yvon Chouinard’s Let My People Go Surfing, which I know has a following among certain parts of the business community. We’re excited by Boxcar Press’s positive impact on the Syracuse community, the letterpress community, and the planet. You can see that many businesses are likewise motivated by social values by the growth of organizations such as 1% for the Planet (which we support through our Bella Figura and Smock lines); through 1% for the Planet, over 1,000 businesses contribute 1% of their sales to environmental charities.

JU: Who do you look to for inspiration historically? And in terms of contemporaries, whose work are you enjoying currently? These don’t necessarily have to be letterpress printers.

HK: Historically, Spiral Press. Joseph Blumenthal, at least from the distance that several decades affords, appears to have balanced commerce, scholarship, and craftsmanship. The “commerce” aspect of his work is important, because Blumenthal ran an active job printshop. Many fine printers (beginning with Gutenberg) have put themselves out of business and thereby robbed posterity of further work.

As far as inspirational works of printing, I can visit the sixth floor of Syracuse University’s Bird Library to witness Eric Gill’s The Four Gospels and Nicholas Jensen’s Eusebius. Not much could inspire me more than these two works.

There are so many contemporary shops whose work I love, but I particularly enjoy seeing the beautiful things that Studio on Fire and Perishable Press make.

JU: According to the website, you have eighteen employees… growth is generally considered a good things for a business but is there a tipping point? How big is too big?

HK: The funny thing is that, as I’m writing this response, we have 28 employees a year after posting we had 18. I consider growth healthy because (even at this size) I feel that we’re extremely small and almost insignificant in the larger printing world. I want letterpress to be significant and permanent, and I feel Boxcar Press (and other letterpress shops) need to grow the market for letterpress a lot more to accomplish this.

We wouldn’t want to become so big that our customers felt out of touch with us, or that we felt out of touch with our customers. We also wouldn’t want the quality of our printing to suffer because of growth. We haven’t reached that point yet. To the contrary, our printing has improved from the added experience and capabilities our size has allowed. We have more skilled workers, more generous employee compensation, more flexible capabilities, and have become more organized and professional from our recent growth.We’re all much less stressed when a big order comes in or when a key employee calls in sick, for instance.

JU: And finally, if you were trapped on a desert island with only one font, which would it be and why?

HK: Presuming I also washed ashore with a hand-operated press, a composing stick, a can of black ink, rags, solvent, galleys, string, some furniture, leading, quoins, a quoin key, and some cotton mouldmade paper, I think that a type cabinet with a good run of Centaur cast by Michael Bixler would suit. I’d have no need to be “rescued”—this is my happy hunting ground.

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