This year's event will be held November 3-5, 2023 in Two Rivers, Wisconsin. The Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum annual Wayzgoose conference hosts designers, printers, typographers and letter geeks of all stripes from across the globe. It is a weekend filled with type talk, great speakers, and lots of letterpress.
Times below are stated in Central. Schedule Subject to Change.
Four engaging hands-on workshops! Must be pre-purchased separately when registering and before the event.
Boxed lunches served. Must be pre-purchased separately when registering for the event. Cannot be purchased day of.
Welcome Wagon
Visit the Welcome Wagon page for full details »
Experience the Museum and spend time with old friends and new, wandering and talking, and participate in these open experiences (no registration necessary).
Learn about the history of the Hamilton Manufacturing Company and the exciting things the museum is doing today.
George Brylski, Jen Anne and David Carpenter
See wood type being produced on the museum’s pantographs. Learn about the entire process of making wood type, from half round to finished piece. Border stamping.
Find out all the inky secrets, get a behind the scenes tour with Jim Moran, Master Printer and Collections Officer.
This is Punk Rock Time
Since founding Vichcraft in 2015, Jenna Blazevich has steadily been building a collection of social-issue driven projects made with various tactile handcraft mediums that she uses to stylize words and phrases of personal significance. A consistent thorough-line in her work has been a punk rock influence that is reflected both in the carefully curated phrases and lyrics she highlights with custom lettering, but also in the ways it has inspired her approach to running a responsible, socially-conscious art practice. She strives use this punk ethos as a north star while making historically-informed work that provokes new ways of thinking.
Wood Type at Letterform Archive
Established in 2015, Letterform Archive is a San Francisco nonprofit center for inspiration, education, and community. This special collections library and museum preserves over 100,000 artifacts of calligraphy, lettering, typography, and graphic design, and offers radical access to the collection through exhibitions, publications, hands-on tours, and their Online Archive. The Archive also offers a yearlong certificate program in type design, accompanied by public workshops, lectures, and salons on the letter arts, both in-person and online.
Join us for a delightful evening of type talk and fine refreshments.
Museum only open to those with reserved tables.
The Wayzgoose Swap & Sale is unlike any other conference event.
The Swap Portion: Anyone can bring prints to swap.
Before you arrive at Wayzgoose create something that you would like to share with the Wayzgoose community.
Then be prepared on Saturday morning to swap with other attendees that also brought prints that they would like to trade.
The Sale Portion: There are 25+ vendor tables to peruse for purchasing prints and print-related goods.
A great chance to explore the options in downtown Two Rivers.
In the fields of the experimental language of letterpress
Professor, graphic artist and letterpress printer.
Graduated in Fine Arts, post-graduated in graphic design, master in Education, Art and History of Culture and PhD in Social History. Professor of design and typography at ESPM and Link School of Business. Co-founder of Oficina Tipográfica São Paulo, since 1998 he has worked for the preservation of Brazilian typographic memory and cultural projects in Brazil and abroad. For 25 years he has been teaching letterpress courses that are a reference in this area. He is also a partner of Letterpress Brasil, an atelier focused on the creation and production of personalized projects that explore the artistic and traditional bias of letterpress.
The Design and Printing of Joseph Low (1911-2007) and Eden Hill Press
Joseph Low’s self-published, promotional pieces from linoleum cuts that he carved and printed via letterpress at his home studio - Eden Hill Press - are exquisite.
A copy of Print magazine from 1951 profiled its cover designer/illustrator, Joseph Low. Craig Welsh, like many, had never heard of Low or been aware of his work. That has changed.
In the past 18 months Craig has connected with Low’s daughter Damaris. He assembled a collection of several hundred pieces designed and/or printed by Low, and has begun work on a book and exhibition of Low’s career that reached from the 1930s to the 1980s. The work spans children’s books, New Yorker covers, LP records for Haydn Society in Boston, and 70+ cookbook inserts for Woman’s Day magazine - most driven by Low’s desire to use letterpress printing as his method for image making.
In the 1930s Low produced work at Tarbu Press. In the 1940s Low taught at Indiana University while helping establish its Corydon Press. While living in New Jersey Low worked under the Quattrocchi Press name. It was his move to Connecticut that established Eden Hill Press as the moniker by which his most significant works were produced.
BIWOC Hamilton Summit: Cultivating a Culture of Safety and Belonging
“The challenge these days is to be somewhere, to belong to some particular place, invest oneself in it, draw strength and courage from it, to dwell in a community.” - bell hooks
I’ve been to three Wayzgooses and with each visit noticed there was very little diversity when it came to presenters and attendees. The museum feels to me like a shrine to white men, a preservation of a time in history when anyone other than white men were kept out of the room and off the press. Last year I encouraged a new friend, Jenn Graves, a Los Angeles-based book artist and letterpress printer, to attend her first Hamilton Wayzgoose. While in Two Rivers our friendship blossomed as we contemplated all of the incredible resources Hamilton has to offer. We asked ourselves, “How do we get more people of color, and in particular women of color, in the room?” I reached out to Stephanie Carpenter, and Jen Farrell to expand the conversation. We proposed an invitation to a core group of BIPOC women, from different parts of the country, art practices and skill levels to spend a long weekend experimenting, plotting, planning, connecting and building community. We hope to grow this first convening at Hamilton into a larger opportunity for BIPOC women to attend Wayzgoose, become familiar with Hamilton and engage with its rich history. Our presentation will share the experience of this first step in introducing new and dynamic voices to Hamilton and thoughts for future activities.
Print Futures LIVE
Hear from three Print Futures all-stars LIVE. Rapid-fire presentations from these emerging printers will get you excited about the future of letterpress. Pushing the boundaries of letterpress tools, text, and image, these new voices in letterpress not only move the craft forward, they give us an inspiring glimpse of where the field of letterpress printing could go in their capable hands. Let’s give them all a warm Wayzgoose welcome!
Print Futures provides a new, unique platform for upward mobility in the letterpress community. To date, Print Futures has featured over 20 emerging artists and educators, whose virtual lightning talks and ensuing discussions build bridges, encourage, and support the next generation of printers. Print Futures is co-produced semi-annually by Partners in Print (PiP) and Letterpress Educators of Art & Design (LEAD).
Keeping Letterpress out of the Hellbox of Design Education
Gloria’s career spans the fields of art, design, and education. As a design consultant, she has developed extensive identity and packaging systems. As a professor at ArtCenter College of Design, Gloria has been a dedicated design educator for over three decades, shaping and inspiring future generations of designers. As Director of Archetype Press, ArtCenter’s vibrant letterpress studio, she reinforces the value of analog typography. In 2015, Gloria was instrumental in creating the Hoffmitz Milken Center for Typography and currently serves as its Executive Director. She has a bachelor’s degree in fine art and a master’s degree in design.
Organize, Heal and Envision New Futures with Print
There is a certainty in the printed word, and at Ladyfingers Letterpress, we express that same certainty in the belief that new futures where people are safe, seen and celebrated are possible. We live in an extraordinary time where there are incredible injustices happening every day and where our main vehicle of information is the internet, a place rife with misinformation and where truths are often twisted. Our response comes from a place of organizing and healing, pushing forward a positive message that people can emotionally and physically hold onto. In the words of Amos P. Kennedy, we “Put the message in the hands of the people and move on.”
Join Colorado Springs-based Ladyfingers Letterpress as they discuss their approach to message making, from pen to press. For the past 12 years they have joined the art of hand-lettering and letterpress as the basis of their creations, often blurring the lines between art and activism. As a trans and queer-owned business, they create work from their lived experiences and work to create a world in which others can do the same.
Get an update on all things Hamilton from Administrative Executive Director, Peter Crabbe, and Museum Board President, Tracy Honn.
Changing Types: The Hammond & VariTyper Typewriters as Alternatives to Hot Metal
Briar Levit is a Professor of Graphic Design at Portland State University. Levit’s feature-length documentary, Graphic Means: A History of Graphic Design Production, which follows design production from manual to digital methods, established her scholarly focus on graphic design history—particularly aspects not in the established canon. She currently co-directs The People’s Graphic Design Archive with Louise Sandhaus, Brockett Horne, and Morgan Searcy. In 2021, she edited a book featuring the research of 19 scholars for Princeton Architectural Press called Baseline Shift: Untold Stories of Women in Graphic Design History.
Really Big Prints! A Decade (nearly) of Streetroller Printing on the Third Coast
Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum has been a sponsor/collaborator for Really Big Prints! since the beginnging in 2014. Now the museum will be our “home” as they hosted this year’s event and have provided a home for the archive. RBP! has been a biennial fixture at the Hamilton Wayzgoose since 2014. This year’s collaborators, Berel Lutsky, Katie Ries, and Stephanie Carpenter will speak about the origin story of RBP! (which includes a story about small amputation with a happy ending), and the ins and outs of creating the collaboration necessary for a communal printmaking event.
Specimens of Printing Types Made at Bruce’s New-York Type-Foundry 1882
The 1882 Specimens of Printing Types Made at Bruce’s New-York Type-Foundry is arguably the greatest type specimen ever published by a type foundry. Not only does the book include the complete text of The Invention of Printing by Theodore Low De Vinne (1878), but nearly all of the text entries for its over 1500 typefaces are disguised facts and a bibliography about the history of printing and its components. This short talk will summarize the origins of this amazing book and its 19 supplements from 1865 to 1894; its contents and multiple parts; and who received copies.
The Rule of Saint Benedict scroll project
I am a printmaking artist in Central Minnesota working out of a small letterpress printshop called Bruno Press, I inherited from my late father 18 years ago. I am very involved with my rural community as a small business owner, artist, and small town promoter. I enjoy collaboration and was fortunate to be presented with a huge artistic opportunity back in July of 2019. Internationally renowned Artist-in-Residence at Saint John’s University, Richard Bresnahan, reached out asking me to be involved with a large scale art project he was starting. Richard asked me to letterpress print the Rule of Saint Benedict in the form of a scroll that would be ensconced in the first permanent installation of the Jon Hassler Sculpture Garden on the grounds of Saint John’s Abbey and University in Collegeville, Minnesota.
He would title this project Kura: Prophetic Messenger and I would embark on the most epic project of my career. Over the course of a year, I would research The Rule and meet with Sisters from the Order of St. Benedict in St. Joseph, design the text and images, research paper, glue, and many other things I needed to understand to complete this scroll. Using Thai Mulberry paper, printing began in my humble printshop, printing started in March of 2021 and did not stop until May. I carved all 18 of the images out of linoleum and once printed, hand-colored them with watercolor and gold leaf. The final step was to glue all of the pages together to form the 36 foot scroll that is housed on a cherry wood display holder.
An Interview with Jim
Jim Moran, Master Printer and Collections Officer. Jim runs letterpress workshops, archives the collection and maintains the museum on a daily basis. Previously he had volunteered at Hamilton and donated presses and equipment from his Green Bay, Wisconsin, printing firm, Moran’s Quality Print Shop, where he worked as apprentice, pressman, partner and owner with his father and grandfather for over 35 years.
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End of Wayzgoose! :)