The Last Word...

With an ever increasing amount of technical wizardry and wonderment to supposedly make our lives easier, there are a few who work tirelessly to maintain crafts, techniques, and traditional ways of working alive.

The Counter Press is a small typographic collaboration between David Marshall and Elizabeth Ellis. Both established graphic designers, they have always had an interest, and passion in the origins of typography, and when the opportunity arose to purchase a neglected original press, there was no going back.

Months of painstaking work eventually brought this beautiful press back to life, and The Counter Press was born. Individually, and together they work on small commissions, and short-run prints, and in December saw their largest print run of their own Christmas cards.

Over the last few years wooden type has been seen as a decorative accessory in our homes, being sold at a premium, lined up on book shelves, a mish-mash of fonts and styles sat together, but it's certainly worth taking a second to think what they could have been used for in years passed...a film poster from the 1940's, the front cover of The Times perhaps.

Having seen first hand how this process works, it is incredible to believe that this was how everything we see in print today used to be produced, and it's collaborations like The Counter Press that will see this skill kept alive for many more years to come...