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Jessica Spring learned to set real metal type in 1989 and has been a letterpress printer ever since, most recently inventing Daredevil Furniture to help other printers set type in circles, curves and angles. Her work at Springtide Press—artist books, broadsides and ephemera—is included in collections around the country and abroad. She also collaborates on the Dead Feminists broadside series with illustrator Chandler O’Leary. Their book, “Dead Feminists: Historical Heroines in Living Color” is available from Sasquatch Books.Spring has an MFA from Columbia College Chicago and teaches letterpress printing and book arts at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington where she also has co-organized the annual Wayzgoose—a book arts festival—for over a decade.
She has led workshops and residencies around the country, including Penland, Paper & Book Intensive, Wells Book Arts Institute, Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum and the International Printing Museum.
[…] Jessica Spring is an artist in Tacoma, Washington where she works out of a converted garage studio and letter press shop in easy striking distance to the Puget Sound. She began her printing career in Chicago. In college she worked“I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. as a typesetter for the school newspaper. As she puts it, her experience “went backwards” in that she first learned more modern typeset before moving into hand set type. While working at a design firm, the opportunity to acquire a Vandercook Press presented itself. It was on this proofing press that she began learning hand set type. […]