From Whatcom County Business Pulse Magazine.

Bison keeps tradition alive
New business locates on State Street
by Christopher Key

Carly James and Kevin Nelson show off one of their
museum quality printing presses at Bison Bookbinding.

These are some examples of printing done by means
of letterpress at Bison. It leaves an impression,
to say the least.

Gutenberg and Ben Franklin would feel right at home
with this case of raised type.

Offset and digital may dominate the modern printing market, but there’s some traditional methods that are hanging on. Stroll into Bison Bookbinding on State Street and you’ll see a shop devoted to more traditional methods of printing. Carly James and Kevin Nelson are the owners.
“I got interested when I was at the University of Iowa and took some printmaking classes,” James said. “I decided I wanted to learn more about how to make books. I worked in offset print shops and binderies.”
At art school in Portland, she learned about letterpress and book arts.
“I worked at Towner Press here locally, getting the skills I needed to open my own shop,” James said. “Letterpress is a completely different process. It uses raised type and actually debosses the page as you print. Offset doesn’t leave an impression on the paper.”
Everything at Bison is done by hand and there is no waste.
“It’s far better environmentally and it’s efficient,” James said. “It gives your project a tactile quality. People respond to that character. It really stands out. You can do digital typography and still print by letterpress.”
Nelson added that they’re helping keep an art alive in the digital age.
“This method is better for things people want to hold onto; wedding invitations, keepsakes,” he said. “It’s really a different market than digital or offset. We’ve been doing more CD packages than wedding invitations so far. People seem interested in having their business cards letterpressed.”
Nelson and James made contact with local bridal shops to offer the letterpress option.
“Offset printers are not our competitors, but our partners,” Nelson said.
The new shop is doing a lot of book repair, but they don’t want to get involved with old and rare books. They’ve picked up some business from the library.
“Poets and writers who want to print a smaller edition of a book come to us,” James said.
There are three employees and one apprentice working in the shop.
“I was able to find the people I wanted and now have enough staff to get anything done,” James said. “We got older equipment because they don’t make what we need anymore and we want to preserve these machines.”
They utilized two investors, a bank loan and all their savings to open the shop.
“Letterpress is a recovering art,” James said. “For years, machines were scrapped. Now, they are back in demand. You can’t get them free like you could at one time.”
Location was important.
“We wanted to be downtown, not in some warehouse style location,” James said. “Our landlady decided to let us move in, partly because she loves what we do.”
Bison is part of the Downtown Gallery Walk and has been gaining some attention from that event.
“We plan to do some advertising, but so far it’s been mostly word of mouth and drive by business,” James said. “We’ll be going to bridal and book shows. We’d like to become a resource for other book artists in town, establish connections. Down the road a bit, we’d like to expand a bit into papermaking and silkscreening.”
Bison Bookbinding is more than just a print shop. It’s also a museum and art gallery.