The letterpress printing scene at Yale University is both unique and remarkable, comprising one of the most active undergraduate book arts programs in the world, yet one that receives virtually no institutional support or recognition whatsoever.

As part of its infrastructure, each of Yale’s residential colleges has its own collection of activity rooms, ranging from squash courts, computer centers and exercise rooms, to snack bars, woodshops or carillons. From the beginning of the residential college system in the 1930's, several of the colleges set aside room for printshops, which served to support literary works, hobby printing, fine-art projects and the like. Over the years, various interested alumni and faculty, such as August Hecksher, John Hay Whitney, John Hersey, Quincy Porter and George D. Vail, helped the process along. By the 1970's, as the tide began to turn away from letterpress, some of the 20th century's most influential private presses ended their lives, and Yale’s colleges became the beneficiaries. The entire contents of Frank Altschul's Overbrook Press came to Yale, as did Sherman Foster Johnson's Bayberry Hill Press, and others.

With ten of the twelve colleges having dedicated letterpress shops, plus four additional, university-related letterpress shops (the Yale University Press, the Rollins Printing Office of the University Printing Service, the Library's Bibliographical Press, and the Art School's Graphic Design Press), there existed an infrastructure unmatched in the United States, and quite possibly the world. Each shop had from two to six presses, along with associated type and supporting equipment. When this was combined with supportive friends, faculty and alumni, Yale became a key part of the book-arts circuit in the Northeast. Commercial presses like Stinehour and Meriden Gravure, printers like Joe Blumenthal and August Hecksher, and Yale-affiliated supporters like Greer Allen, Alvin Eisenman, Howard Gralla, and John McCrillis, all stood ready and willing to help the students.

Given this supporting infrastructure, all that was needed was students, and these tended to come in sporadic waves. The result has been something that looks like the keys of a player piano, rising and falling across the timeline of the twentieth century. One year, Jonathan Edwards College might have Lance Hidy (later the chief designer for Stinehour Press) who energetically made the JE Press the center of college life. Another year might see little student printing interest in JE, but a Con Howe (later the Director of City Planning for Los Angeles) drumming up printing business in Pierson College. In between periods of activity, the presses would sit, relatively untouched, for years, fertile ground just waiting for the next enthusiastic printer.

Throughout the years, student interest, when it appeared, begat interest and support from the colleges' Masters, and in periods where there was active student involvement in a particular press, that college often managed to sponsor credit-carrying courses in book-related issues, and raise funds to acquire additional equipment.

The net result of this haphazard, magnificent folly is also extraordinary. One snapshot, some twenty years later, of a few alumni of a single college press in a single year [Pierson, 1979] will serve to illustrate the effect of the program: Charles Altschul (Proprietor, Camden Hills Press, formerly Director, Kodak Center for Creative Imaging and Proprietor, the New Overbrook Press); John Lane (antiquarian book dealer in Holland, compiling a book on extant copies of Moxon’s Mechanic Exercises on the Art of Printing); Michael Ross (founder of NeoFont, one of the first digital type founderies); David S. Rose (serious book arts collector and avocational letterpress printer); David D. Frackelton (founder of a design firm); Richard Cacciato and Natalie Yates (co-founders, Blue Iceberg); Michael J. Boyle (publisher, Boyle's Connecticut Almanac, formerly staff member, University Printing Service) as well as others of whom we have lost track.

Now, as Yale celebrates its Tercentennial with the dawn of the new millennium, the university is poised to restore, enhance and leverage this irreplaceable heritage as the basis for a revitalized, cross-disciplinary program bearing on printing, design, book-binding, poetry, literature, art, and even computer-aided graphics.