⬆ Letterpress type | Unknown |metal type
⬇ Letterpress place | The Ken Kulakowsky Center for Letterpress & Book Arts print shop

⬇ Letterpress border | (metal type) unknown name

The Ken Kulakowsky Center for Letterpress & Book Arts

Thanks to Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology, we have a rent-free location for a hands-on print shop lab where donated equipment is used to teach letterpress printing and book arts classes.

The Black Art
A history of Printing in Lancaster County, PA

History of The .918 Club

by Ken Kulakowsky

THE .918 CLUB’S NAME DATES BACK TO THE 15TH CENTURY WITH GUTENBERG’S INVENTION OF AN ADJUSTABLE WIDTH MOLD TO CAST LETTERS. The characters cast by Gutenberg upon applying modern methods of accurate measuring turn out to be .918”. Our club began in March of 2004 when Ken Kulakowsky brought together the Lancaster Cultural History Museum Print Shop volunteers to share ideas and suggestions concerning the educational demonstrations.

The seeds of the club were sown in January of 2004 when my wife Judy saw an article in the Lancaster Sunday paper looking for someone with letterpress experience to help with an exhibit at the Lancaster Cultural History Museum. Having retired the previous year after 35 years of teaching Graphics at Octorara High School in Chester County, I was especially interested in the history of letterpress printing. I reached out to the museum Monday morning to ask if they still needed any help with their planned exhibit. The Education Director informed me that I was the first and only person to respond to their posting. After meeting with the museum’s curator and CEO, I was asked to direct the exhibit. They wanted to feature their collection of old books, including an original copy of the Martyrs Mirror printed in Ephrata, PA. In 1745, Jacob Gottschalk arranged with the Ephrata Cloister to have them translate the Martyrs Mirror from Dutch into German and publish it. The work took 15 men three years to finish, and in 1749, at 1,512 pages, it was the largest book printed in America before the Revolutionary War.

The exhibit was to run for 9 months (April 2nd through December 31st) and then be replaced with a new exhibit. After seeing what letterpress equipment the museum had in storage and its condition, I declined to help. I explained that the amount of work necessary to get everything ready and running was not worth the effort for a 9-month display.

They asked me what it would take to make this exhibit a reality. A permanent printing exhibit would make an effort worthwhile. After being told the Board of Directors would have to make that kind of decision but that the idea would be presented to them at their next meeting, I was sure that was the end of my letterpress revival story.

Unbeknownst to me, several members of the Board were involved in Scouting in Lancaster, and we had worked together on numerous projects. They convinced the rest of the Board that if this exhibit could be done, I would make it happen. With this endorsement, there was no time to spare to prepare the Printed Word exhibit for an April 2004 opening.

With the help of several museum volunteers, we got to work cleaning and sorting the equipment, supplies, type, and accessories necessary to operate a letterpress printing shop.

We would also need help manning and running the exhibit since the Board wanted this to be an actual print shop showing visitors how printing was done before computers. They also wanted some hands-on activities to engage visitors. I contacted the many regional schools with graphics programs and print shop owners I had befriended during my years of teaching to get them involved. They also reached people they knew who might be willing to help make this exhibit a success.

The first meeting of the potential print shop volunteers took place in early March, with 21 people in attendance. I suggested we start a club to support the print shop’s volunteer demonstrators. After much discussion, the club was formed and named The .918 Club. Several early club members also helped prepare the print shop for the opening night.

The opening of the Lancaster Cultural History Museum Print Shop took place on April 2, 2004. Being the First Friday, we had large crowds and even a visit from Lancaster Mayor Charlie Smithgall. During the night’s program, we demonstrated printing on an 8x12 C&P, had people print a special memento on a 9x13 Kelsey and used rubber stamps to personalize a headline on a broadsheet about Lancaster.

The print shop was a massive success, with multiple people offering us letterpress items that had been sitting around with no place to go. We also were approached about having school groups experience this as a field trip destination. We were off and running!

Over the years on the square in Lancaster, we had both local and international tourists visit the museum and participate in a live printing history demonstration. The .918 Club also allowed Boy Scouts to complete their Graphic Arts merit badge and the local educational institutions to show their students a “live” history lesson, which engages the mind and the muscle on each visit.

Building Character

When the Lancaster Cultural History Museum closed in 2009, the Print Shop Museum was offered space as part of BUiLDiNG CHARACTER, 346 North Queen Street, Lancaster. With the establishment of this new location and a new name, Heritage Press Museum, we can still offer the community a place to visit and experience a treasure in downtown Lancaster.

Thanks to a partnership with Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology, we had a location in the Orange Street Branch Campus building for a hands-on print shop lab where donated equipment was used to provide classes in letterpress printing. The small space we occupied limited the number of individuals who could participate in letterpress workshops.

In 2015, the college gave The .918 Club the use of the Naval Reserve building at 117 Parkside Avenue, part of the Orange Street campus. After the building renovations are complete, it will become a center for students of the Visual Communications curriculum to experience traditional printing technologies. It will also be a center for the community to learn letterpress printing, bookbinding, paper making, and typography. As community members and students of all ages are introduced to the book arts, they can use the studio to create with the printed page's typographic form and physical composition.

BRIEF HISTORY OF THE NAVAL RESERVE ARMORY OF LANCASTER, PENNSYLVANIA

Soon after the end of World War II, the US Navy and the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion (OWM&R) set about the task of establishing about 300 armories across the continental United States, making use of pre-existing, state-and-city-built military armories, as well as creating “new” Quonset hut armories. As surplus war material, the Quonset-hut-style armories (designated “Type B”) would minimize depleting already scarce building supplies while enabling the Navy to provide Reservists with much-needed training facilities.

Briefly, a Type B armory was comprised of three prefabricated, round-topped Quonset huts (each 40 feet by 100 feet in size) placed side by side and joined to a 20-foot-by-150-foot frame structure across one end of the huts, offering about 15,000 square feet of space. For training the Reservists, the armories were to be furnished with desks, chairs, and training equipment from the Navy’s surplus war supplies. The average cost of this type of structure was about $180,000, not including installing technical training equipment.

In February 1947, COMFOUR, the district commandant, praised the Organized Reserve Surface Battalion 4-18 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, for their “conscientious effort and enthusiasm.” Lancaster was the first city in the United States to fill their Reservist Battalion to 100% capacity. Now all that was needed was the armory facility itself.

According to The Naval Reservist bulletin, once a building contract was awarded, it would take only about six to eight months before the training center would be ready to open. In October 1947, the bulletin reported that the Lancaster building contract had recently been awarded.

A year later, in March, the bulletin noted that each Naval Reserve Center (NRCT) allotted and arranged its internal space as needed to accommodate its constituent Reservists. Armory facilities could include office space, an enlisted men’s recreation room, and an officers’ wardroom. A typical layout may house “a carpenter shop, classrooms, and a sick bay… in one of the prefabricated wings. The second wing contains an ordinance room, an electrical shop, and a radio room. At the same time, the third hut provides space for electronics and transmitter rooms, forge and maintenance shops, lockers, and a boiler room.”

Lancaster’s former NRCT is now known as the Naval Reserve Building on the Clark Street Branch Campus of Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology. Though the Quonset huts are long gone, the remaining 3,000 square-foot building is being rehabbed under the guidance of The .918 Club of Lancaster for use as a hands-on letterpress classroom and exhibition space in conjunction with the college’s Visual Communications Department.