Lettre Sauvage - Workshops

Our Letterpress Workshops...

Lettre Sauvage studio is located in Santa Paula, CA, about an hour from LA and Santa Barbara. Equipment includes: Vandercook SP15, Pilot table-top press, Chandler and Price 10x15 old style platen press (for scoring and die cutting), Challenge 23" paper cutter, and three cabinets of metal type. Students ages 10 and up with any level of experience are welcome.

Your creativity will be enhanced by great music (often live), conversation, and the sweet, art-first atmosphere of the Lettre Sauvage studio under the oaks.

Tours are free, so make an appointment to drop in and contact us for information about learning the craft of letterpress.

Instructors/hosts: Fiona Spring, Cameron Leggett and Genevieve Yue. Get to know us!
phone 805.794.0167
info@lettresauvage.com

New Year Journal Making

Print a cover for your blank book using the Vanndercook SP15.

Cut, fold and sew the book using a simple "kettle stitch."

Valentine Love-In

Back by popular demand! Print 25 love-filled greetings.
We'll use vintage printing blocks, photopolymer plates and metal type.
Last year everyone took some of each person's designs,
we all had a lovely variety!

Basic Letterpress: Calling Cards

Learn to set metal type on the composing stick and transfer to the press.
Choose from a variety of ornaments both vintage cuts and Lettre Sauvage originals.
Mix ink and run the press! Each participant will make 50 calling cards,
and may choose to save their design and come back for another print session later.

Community Studio

Lettre Sauvage studio offers personalized lessons in the craft of letterpress printing for individuals and groups of up to four. Use of the press is available to experienced printers.

Printing Lesson

By appointment

Learn to operate the press. Basics of typesetting, inking, preparing paper and making the press ready to print will be covered.

Taught by Fiona Spring

$35 per hour per person

$50 per hour for a group of 2-4 working on the same project.

Studio Rental

By appointment

After one or two lessons, students may wish to work on a solo project. Lettre Sauvage staff will be available to help with services like ordering and cutting paper and advising on printing and design issues. There is also a small library in the studio of books about books, printing, design and poetry.

Equipment includes:
Vandercook SP15
Pilot table-top press
Chandler and Price 10x15
Challenge 23" paper cutter

$20 the first hour, $10 each additional hour

	A limited edition broadside featuring the 4th Choral Ode from Euripides' Hippolytos (1268-1281), translated by Anne Carson. Hippolytos was published as a part of Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides (NYRB Classics, 2006). It was also the inaugural play directed by Stephen Sachs at the reopened Getty Villa in September 2006. Anne Carson is a poet, essayist, and translator, as well as a professor of classics and comparative literature at the University of Michigan. She remarks in her preface to the book, “There is in Euripides some kind of learning that is always at the boiling point. It breaks experiences open and they waste themselves, run through your fingers. Phrases don't catch them, theories don't hold them, they have no use. It is a theater of sacrifice in the true sense. Violence occurs; through violence we are intimate with some characters on stage in an exorbitant way for a brief time; that's all it is.”
$35
Limited edition of 150. The dimensions are 7” x 10”. Using an antique letterpress, the broadsides were printed from copper plates on Twinrocker handmade papers in two colors, Cripple Creek and Sagebrush. They were then scorched with smoldering tea leaves and a butane torch.

	An original broadside by Stephen Dunn. Dunn won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for Different Hours, and is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Richard Stockton College in New Jersey. “In The Open Field” was published in The Insistence of Beauty by Norton in 2004. On the collection, The Literary Review remarks, “Dunn's poems reveal a mind alive within its own inner-circlings, the transforming power of loss, the fictions that lead to the core of our truths, the possibility and reality of loving another again.”
$35
Limited edition of 176. The dimensions are 7" x 13". Using an antique letterpress, it was printed from copper dies and a linoleum block onto Ingres printmaking papers. Each broadside varies slightly. All broadsides were printed by Lettre Sauvage in March 2007. Each is signed and numbered by Dunn.

	Excerpts from “Get High” Edward K. Kaplan's translation of “Enivrez-Vous” by Charles Baudelaire. Hand-set type and stenciled lettering designed by Leggett. Sewn triptych structure slips into a black paper jacket.
Sold Out
Printed in an edition of 50 on Rives heavyweight paper at UCSB print studio under the Lost Pollen imprint.

	A limited edition folio featuring the four-part poem, Coqui, Coqui, by Benjamin Jackson. Jackson received his M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College and has been published in the New England Review. The folio contains four individual sheets and a folded cover. Titles are: I. The Art of Loving II. Toco Polo III. Dreaming of Echo IV. Mimesis
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Limited edition of 50. The dimensions are 10" x 10". Using an antique letterpress, it was printed from magnesium plates on Stonehenge art papers. The cover was painted with watercolor. Each folio is signed and numbered by the poet. Printed by Lettre Sauvage in October 2005.