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Can we tell you more about the letterpress-printed coasters you’ll find in our “Drink Local” Ales and Lager 3-Packs? We didn’t clutter ’em up with the usual paragraph of production notes, so we’ll share some details here:
Field Notes fans know we’ve been working for years with the amazing Dan Barron at Flywheel Letterpress in Freeport, IL for years. He was all set to do the coasters, until his girlfriend got a teaching job a couple hours from Freeport. Dan had to pack up and move quickly, and decided to sell his printing business and all his equipment.
Thus, we met Elizabeth Isakson-Dado, who bought Dan’s presses, type, and other equipment, hastily relocated it all to Pilsen on Chicago’s South Side (no small feat in itself), and launched into printing tens of thousands of coasters. With her husband Jamiel, and help from some of her former printmaking students from Columbia College, she worked long hours and weekends (missing the Pixies and Replacements at Riotfest, sorry!) to get these coasters made. This feat was all the more impressive considering she was printing one or two pre-cut coasters at a time on Dan’s antique 1920 hand-fed 10 x 15 Chandler & Price “New Series” Platen Printing Press. Liz and Jamiel have rechristened the press “Eleanor,” presumably because it’s easier to curse at an inanimate object if you give it a name. If you know anything about hand-feeding, and trying to register two colors of ink on a round coaster (no registration marks there, buddy!) you will understand what they were up against. We don’t like using the word “handmade” when machines are involved, but it’s fair to say that no other Field Notes products have been so carefully guided by the human touch as these coasters.
This epic mission now behind them, Liz and Jamiel have named their business Tandem Felix Letterpress and are offering letterpress printing workshops and private lessons. And we wish Dan Barron the best of luck, too, he’ll surely go on to quietly do great things, but we’ll miss him.
“Drink Local” Ales and Lagers 3-Packs were sold out long ago. Don’t miss future Quarterly Editions, get yourself a year-long subscription.