On Printing Presses & Memory
My family has slowly been cleaning and clearing out my grandparents' house over the last year following my grandma's passing. Their small, wooden home was built around the time of their marriage - post-WWII and with great love. A white painted shed sits in the backyard with a great bougainvillea growing to the left of the single, centered door, housing my grandfather's workshop inside. Memory and age do funny things - I remember the shed as cavernous and the place where my grandfather built a dollhouse for me. Revisiting it now, the workshop shed is quite small - perhaps 15 feet long and 10 feet wide - and not full of dollhouses but instead of iron printing, cutting, and letterpress machinery. My grandfather worked for years as a printer of papers and graphics and letters, first at Artes Graficas, a print shop in San Antonio, and then on his own.
Three machines were still in the shed when I visited for the last time - a cutting machine, an automated plate press, and a manual letterpress. My grandfather sold much of his type and storage (wide and very shallow drawers that organized individual letters and blocks of typical words of different fonts and sizes) at some point in time after he retired, but there were a few letters and blocks that remained in the shed. Personal cards for my aunts and uncles and proofs of flyers for bingo parties were discovered in old boxes and on shelves. It was fascinating to find these fragments of work and metal and and memory. The three machines are solid, heavy, and remain unmoved, seemingly immobile in the shed - tangible leftovers of the lives that flourished in the house right out front.
My mother demonstrates how to use the hand letterpress machine in the quick video below.
Note: The Artes Graficas building, shown on the left in a 1960s photograph taken by Ray Howell, still exists in downtown San Antonio, shown on the right via Google Street View. It is a law office in its current iteration, across the street from the Old Bexar County Jail (built in 1879, designed by Alfed Giles, expanded twice, and closed in 1962) turned storage facility and records depot turned hotel (a Holiday Inn Express). The building has also been the location of the Central Candy Company and perhaps originally was a garage for cars, carriages, and horse boarding ("Open Day And Night").
The Artes Graficas signage ("PRINTERS" "ARTES GRAFICAS" "LITHOGRAPHERS") covered the original signage ("CARS" "CARRIAGES" "OPEN DAY AND NIGHT" "HORSE BOARDING") etched into stone. Graceful arched windows punctuate the rough-cut limestone at the first floor; the largest arch, centered in the front facade along Camaron Street where the current main entry door exists, is presumably where carriages and horses entered in the building's life as a garage. Smooth stone and brick masonry comprise the second level, and the exterior materials wrap around the sides of the building.
According to a note in Lewis F. Fisher's "Saving San Antonio: The Preservation of a Heritage," the building was constructed sometime in the 19th-century, and has 3 stories with 15-foot ceilings. It was saved from demolition by the city of San Antonio, and restored by Williams Shubert & Saldana Architects in 1978. Windows that are visibly filled in in the 1960s photograph have been reopened, with the addition of a second floor covered porch, both presumably from the 1978 restoration.
Little can be found online on how Artes Graficas functioned as a print shop, so the spatial use and layout of the building during that time remains unknown. Little to no information can be found online at all, other than notations from Google Books that reference "Artes Graficas, San Antonio" as publisher of many Latino and South Texas books. My mother fondly recalls being at work with my grandfather, amidst the noise and movement of the printers. Perhaps my grandfather was physically in the building at the time when the Howell photograph above was taken, working on laying out and printing South Texas books and papers.
