I print in a rented back room off a courtyard in the Vilnius old town, on a proof press built for a trade shop, and I write down what each job taught me so that the next one starts further along.

Inkstone is one room at the back of a courtyard in the old town, reached through an arch that a delivery van has never once managed. I began printing in 2021 on a borrowed tabletop platen in somebody else's workshop, two evenings a week, and moved into this room with a proof press of my own in the spring of 2024. What is in it now: four cases of metal type, a shelf of wood letters in no complete alphabet, a slab for mixing ink, and a paper stack that swells every October.

Nothing printed here is sold. The room exists because I like the noise a press makes, and because a printed sheet is the only kind of work I do that is genuinely finished when it is finished. Most of what comes off the bed is small: a poem for somebody, a set of labels for jars, a linocut of the roofline outside the window, a drypoint plate scratched on a winter evening and pulled badly three times before it behaves. These notes are the record of getting those things slightly less wrong.

I write about this room rather than about letterpress in general, because the two are not the same thing. A press on a ground floor in a damp courtyard behaves differently from one in a dry studio with a dehumidifier, and my ink sits stiff for five months of the year. I do not name the people who sold me type, the workshop that lets me use its guillotine, or anybody whose wedding cards came out of here. If something in these notes is wrong, it is wrong in a way I have not found yet.