A NEW ERA
Julie Belcher
It’s been a while folks - The Pioneer House survived a pandemic and stayed closed to the public for a full year - doing online sales and having visitors by appointment got us thru. I have had a shop & studio on Gay Street in downtown Knoxville for 25 years and during this strange time I made the decision to move to a smaller studio. The printshop has moved to its new space and a massive clear out of hand printed paper and letterpress equipment is underway.
When I started Yee-Haw Industries I scoured the eastern US for equipment. There were not any women I could find that did this type of art, but many wonderful letterpress elders helped me along the way. I have made mention of them over the years but this big change has them all in my thoughts.
A writer was doing an article on Yee-Haw for PRINT Magazine and mentioned a man in her town was a letterpress collector, his name was Lloyd Morgan - of the Morgan Press. Along with his brother and father they collected old wood type when it was becoming obsolete to convert to film for a typositor so graphic designers could order headlines for pasteup mechanicals - he told me they traveled to cities along the rivers which was how the printing equipment was moved because of the weight. His tales of wood type being burned for firewood and animals chewing the type led me to his oxbow in NY state. He was an outdoorsman and creative sort and the majority of the Morgan collection is now housed in the Smithsonian. The sorts and jumbled treasures that weren’t on that tractor trailer to DC stayed in the barn until I moved it all to Tennessee, porcupine turds and all. Chromatic 2 and 3 color typefaces, wanted poster cowboy fonts, super condensed gothic were added to the arsenal. My visit was in the winter and he busted a hole in the pond ice so we could carry water into the cabin to flush the toilet. Thanks to Lloyd and so many others along my path.
Letterpress Cover/Cover story, Print Magazine, 1999, Yee-Haw Industries