One of the nice things about being a printer (as opposed to being a painter or a sculptor, for example) is that I have, almost always, been able to save a few copies of each piece that I have produced.

Over the 23+ years that I have been letterpress printing I have had the pleasure of completing more than 1,700 works for clients or myself. Some of these were one or two color jobs while others were books with many pages or block prints in a dozen colors or more.

As you can imagine, the stacks of sheets have turned into stacks of boxes which in turn became rows of cabinets containing examples of Nomadic Press work dating back to the most crudely printed pieces of the early days of the shop.

As I was wading through the annual reshuffling of completed-job-samples, a member of the acquisitions board of the Minnesota Historical Society contacted me and expressed interest in their becoming the holder of the archives of The Nomadic Press.

After a bit of negotiation, the Minnesota Historical Society now holds a copy of (almost) every piece ever produced here at The Nomadic Press. At some point, all these works will be cataloged and will give future generations a peek at a small segment of the early decades of the Minnesota letterpress revival.

I have to say I am pleased by, and proud of, this recognition of my years of work. And I want to thank all the people whom I have had the pleasure of working with during those years for bringing to me such beautiful graphic design.

And I look forward to sending the Minnesota Historical Society much more examples of interesting letterpress printing in the years to come.

So, to those of you who have ever hired me to do some printing, we are now history. (Though that isn’t to say that we can’t work together again.)