Letterpress is by far my favorite form of printing for calling cards and personal note cards. The depressed lettering and markings makes the finished product feel hand made and yet refined and elegant. There are many new shops popping up here and there as people rediscover this lost art form. It is certainly not for those looking for an alternative to the cheap online business card printers, but it is worth every penny. If you want to impress with a calling card then letterpress is the way to go.

Since Gutenberg invented the letterpress in the mid-15th century, it revolutionized the way people printed just about everything. Until printers made there way into people’s home and the advent of cheap digital printing as well as the more standard engraved, thermographed, or offset-printing, letterpress was the standard. As many print shops began discarding their “obsolete” machines, artisans and other aficionados started to buy and restore the presses to start their own niche businesses or to accommodate their own artistic flare.

You can learn more from the Briar Press counts more than 50,000 people dedicated to the preservation of letterpress.

For those of you interested in getting a few of your own calling cards, here are just some of the shops that offer letterpress:

Greenwich Letterpress (New York, NY)

Sesame Letterpress (Brooklyn, NY)

Letterpress Chicago (Chicago, IL)

Rohner Letterpress (Chicago, IL)

The Lettered Olive (Charleston, SC)

Crooked Letterpress (Gainesville, FL)

Three Bells Press (New Orleans, LA)

Vertallee (Austin, TX)

The Mandate Press (Salt Lake City, UT)

Spark & Flourish (Boulder, CO)

Aardvark Letterpress (Los Angeles, CA)

Dependable Letterpress (San Francisco, CA)

Ruby Press (Portland, OR)

Dahlia Press (Seattle, WA)