If you wander down Aberdeen Street in Fredericton and into someone’s back yard, you might stumble upon Rabbittown Press.
Named after the Rabbit Town historical district in downtown Fredericton, Rabbittown Press is retiree David Brewer’s hobby and passion. In a world where the death of print media is constantly being reiterated, Brewer and his presses are preserving part of the art of printing and printmaking, at least for a little while.
Rabbittown Press is small, just a little two-story garage shed. But it is full of equipment. Brewer’s collection includes three different kinds of floor presses, and one small tabletop press he rescued from a yard sale down the street.
Brewer began printmaking as a hobby in the 1990s. Back then he did everything by hand – carving a woodcut, placing it in ink and pressing the cut into each copy. His first press was sold to him by a friend who told him if he was going to continue the printmaking, he would need a press.
This set him down the road of printing, which is text-based, as opposed to printmaking, which is image-based.
Both arts require a similar methodology though. It is the step-by-step process that Brewer said he enjoys the most.
“I just like the multiple aspect of it. You make one and you end up with an edition and you got say 10, 15, 20, 25, whatever [number] you want, and they all look just about the same. They’re not but they all look just about the same and it’s kind of neat to see that happen.”
Brewer occasionally sells some of his work, but it’s not a money-making project for him. This year his three big project were the printing of a Shakespeare sonnet for Bodleian Library in Oxford, England, his annual Christmas cards, and the printing of his book.
The book is an essay he wrote on the Book of Kells and Celtic imagery – a subject he said he has long been fascinated by.
“I was told I outta do it as a thesis, but I said ‘I’m too old to do that foolishness,’” he said.
“So I thought, well, I’ll publish the thing, put it in a nice little book, and send it out to different universities that happened to have Irish studies or Catholic studies.”
Brewer said he’s seen the revival of relief printing as people are looking for tangible feel of fancy wedding invitations or greeting cards. But some of the old techniques have been lost.
“The name of the game nowadays is to get this kind of deep impression, so you’ve got kind of a tactile thing going there … people like that. That’s not the way good printing used to be done, it used to be just a kiss thing where you didn’t know it was even pushed into the paper.”
Brewer said he’s glad to see printing becoming more popular as small print shops pop up in bigger cities in Canada and the United States, but he’s skeptical that it will last in the digital age.
“The one good thing about the resurgence of this, interesting letterpress type stuff, has been that presses have been preserved and they probably will continue to be preserved … but yeah, people are going to forget about it, it’s not going to last forever.”
As for himself, Brewer said he’ll continue to do it because it gives him a purpose and something to do.
“I don’t really know how I wandered down this road but I seem to have wandered down it … I just do it for the fun of it.”
