Foxglove Letterpress: Making an impression

TEMPLE – A friend’s recent birthday was the misplaced brick that tripped me onto Foxglove Press.

Scanning the shelves of too overdone or too random or way too cutesy or just too Hallmark greeting cards, my eye caught the image of a flock of birds, disappearing off the corner of an otherwise blank front. A simple square of lettering on the back read: Foxglove Press, Temple, ME.

A Hodgkin once joked to me that if you see someone driving in Temple and they aren’t your next door neighbor, they’re either visiting that neighbor or they’re lost.

With that in mind, I wondered out loud who could possibly be making such eye-catching, hip greeting cards in a, quite literally, dead end town. It was something one might see in a vintage/locally made/found in a thrift store/named after a Kerouac line shop in Portland. Definitely something one would see on Etsy’s Instagram, with a live story about the artist digging the clay out of their hometown river before turning it into the vase you’re about to drop $100 on.

Not something you’d expect to come out of such a small town, but this wasn’t the first time Temple had surprised me.

So I headed out on Route 43 toward downtown (for lack of a better term).

Tom Jessen’s studio is attached to his family’s home, in a fixed up garage with large, mixed media artwork dangling from the walls, an extensive CD collection and numerous antique wooden trays of letters. A machine the size of a young elephant sits off to one side. Similar, too, in both color and influence of an elephant, the letterpress dates back to the turn of the century. Jessen says it’s a clam shell style, pumped by a foot pedal with more of a stamp action than a rolling one.

“You do get into a rhythm with it, but you can’t fart around. You can’t space off while you’re doing it or you could lose a hand,” he said.

The machine presses one greeting card (or wedding invite or baby announcement or thank you note) at a time, using a Tetris-style stack of letters. The tiniest factors can change the outcome drastically- things like temperature of the ink, the before mentioned rhythm or an ever-so-slightly fallen letter. Over the course of the nearly 15 years that Foxglove has been alive, Jessen has learned how to trouble shoot in these situations. Using something as minute as a piece of scotch tape to raise a letter, the self-taught printer will adjust until the product is perfect. Or as close to perfect as he can get.

“Not too many people hand set. It’s very laborious,” he said.

But working with his hands is part of what drew Jessen to the art form- one of many that he practices.

“Everything about this is physical. There’s so much more of the printer in the process. You’re really imbedded in it. You have to embrace those idiosyncrasies.”

In Jessen’s opinion, the resurgence in interest for old school printing is a representation of our need to reconnect with the world we live in.

“I swear to god this is why people are getting into it. With everything out there in the ether, people want something they can rub their thumb across. It’s the tactility of it,” he said.

Foxglove has taken the backseat for Jessen as he has shifted focus to other art projects, but his cards are still for sale at Devaney, Doak and Garrett Booksellers on Broadway. More of Jessen’s work can be seen on his website, here.