Virgin Wood Type carves niche in printing

A less hurried world has pretty much taken over Geri McCormick’s Brighton home.

It has an honored place in a back room. It dominates a front room. The dining room table is strewn with it. The bookshelves say its name. The walls are decorated with it.

McCormick owns Virgin Wood Type Mfg. Co., one of the last places in America where classic wood typefaces are cut on a classic pantograph router — it may well be one of a kind. The type is used on a letterpress, once the standard in the printing world, with a lineage going back to Gutenberg and the birth of movable type.

Letterpress in printing is a bit like vinyl in recorded music. On a large scale, it has been supplanted by more modern techniques. But its quality and flexibility have not dimmed, and many people still prefer it, not merely because it evokes a time of greater craftsmanship but also because it better accommodates different typographical styles and sizes.

Letters cut from hard maple for use on a letterpress is craftsmanship atop craftsmanship. McCormick and employees Derek Crowe and Paul Jones cut type in contemporary and Victorian-style fonts that bring style, character and even a three-dimensional feel to a poster or wedding invitation or artwork. A woodcut letter, when used in letterpress, raises up slightly off the page so that it can be felt as well as seen.

You can go back to Gutenberg at McCormick’s home. But you can call up Instagram, too, on your mobile phone. In fact, McCormick does that all the time.

“The letterpress community is really that, a community,” McCormick said. “We stay in touch with social media and I use Instagram to show people and potential customers examples of the work we do here.”

Virgin Wood is called that because the letters cut so precisely on McCormick’s router have never been inked. Such an unused wood-cut letter promises the quality, the freshness that printers are looking for.

“We do a lot of business off our website,” McCormick said. “People can learn what we do and what we can offer them.”

McCormick didn’t aspire to create specialty typefaces for letterpress use. She had a job at the University of Rochester. Her husband, Bill Jones, had the idea for Virgin Wood and ran it much as McCormick does now.

But Jones got cancer and it became clear that he, if he wanted to pass on the business, would have to begin immediately to teach McCormick how to cut type on the pantograph, how to be both an artist and a businessperson.

For months, McCormick worked during the day and in the evening learned from her husband how to carry on Virgin Wood.

“it was a difficult time,” McCormick said. Jones died in 2012. In her sorrow, McCormick picked up the business that her husband had started.

“This was his thing,” McCormick said. “Now it’s mine.” She works for Virgin Wood full time now.

That she and her colleagues were able to do so has impressed others in the local letterpress community.

“They’re amazing,” said Rachael Hetzel, owner of Pistachio Press in Rochester. “What they and others do has rejuvenated interest in this kind of printing. I think interest is growing, partly because many people want things handmade rather than mass-produced.”

The less hurried world still has a chance, after all.

In the small backyard of McCormick’s house stands a colorful, artistically decorated wall.

“Bill put it up because the wall that they put up to suppress the traffic noise from 590 wasn’t high enough,” McCormick said. “So he built another one. If you stand close enough to it, you can’t hear the traffic.”

Beyond the walls, the one Jones built and the highway one, the modern world rushes quickly past. Only a little noise gets through.

That’s true inside the house, too.

TTOBIN@DemocratandChronicle.com

Twitter.com/tobin3

Virgin Wood Type Mfg. Co.Founded: 2010Location: 171 Valley Road, Brighton Owner: Geri McCormickWebsite:virginwoodtype.com