About the Press
There is a particular kind of dissatisfaction that comes from loving books deeply and finding that most of what is available does not quite meet that love. The object in hand — its weight, its paper, the relationship between the type and the page — falls short of what a book, at its best, can be.
That dissatisfaction, combined with a sustained study of the incunable period — the first decades of European printing, when the conventions of the book were still being argued out on the press — led to the founding of Impressio Incunabula Press.
The incunabula are not interesting because they are old. They are interesting because they are unresolved, in the best sense: their makers were asking what the printed book could do, and answering that question by printing. The press takes its name and its orientation from that moment — not as a historical reference, but as a working method.
Each edition is hand-set and printed by letterpress in strictly limited numbers. The focus throughout is on the book as a complete object: type chosen for the text, paper chosen for the type, impression considered in relation to both. Readability and beauty not as competing values, but as the same value approached from two directions.
Impressio Incunabula Press operates in White Plains, New York.