The Crail Press is a small, traditional letterpress workshop located in the heart of the seaside village of Crail in Fife. Printing here is done the (very) old-fashioned way, with moveable lead type, oil-based inks and hand-operated presses.

The Crail Press has three key workers. The first is the Stanhope, a two-hundred year-old cast iron press, the only of its kind in ‘jobbing’ use in Britain. This squat press is almost identical in operation to the type of press used by Gutenberg to print his Bible, and is perfect for larger-format work such as books, posters, and any item requiring careful hand-inking. The second is the Adana 8 x 5, a ‘self-inking’ tabletop platen press, which is around fifty years old and a veritable workhorse for all items of small printing – business cards, bookplates, beermats and more. The youngest member of the team is presswoman Dr. Dawn Hollis, who came to letterpress through her academic study of history. She took her first pull of a printing press in Oxford in 2010 and has found it impossible to stop since.

One of the chief goals of the Crail Press is to get letterpress printing into as many hands as possible, and so all forms of print work are valued highly. The Crail Press appears at local fairs selling greetings cards, stationery, prints, and more. It also works to commission, with recent jobs including miniature termcards for a student society, bookmark-shaped business cards, and personalised business cards. Both Dawn and the Stanhope also have ambitions to produce at least one small ‘chapbook’ a year, with design inspiration drawn both from contemporary fine printing but also from the early sixteenth and seventeenth century printers whose work provided the sources for Dawn’s PhD in History. Finally, the Press offers workshops and experiences to those keen to try their hand at printing themselves.