The Jonathan Edwards pressroom isn’t a time capsule or some historical diorama. The old art of letterpress printing doesn’t send you back, but roots you in the now. As students enter Yale, they confront daunting questions about their future. Who will I become? What will I do? But as they enter the pressroom, they leave these questions at the door. They keep their minds on exactly what’s in front of them: the charming faces of metal letters, the smooth glide of rollers, and the sudden reveal of words on paper, their ink still fresh and gleaming.
Pressmaster Jesse Marsolais steps through an unmarked door in entryway K, ducking his head under the low frame, and trods down the few stone steps into the Jonathan Edwards basement. The pressroom sits behind thick panes of glass. Inside, two presses form the perfect odd couple. One’s a gargantuan slab of steel with a heavy lever and a roller that threatens to flatten anything in its path. The other is delicate and skeletal, dwarfed by its own flywheel.
Marsolais wears his usual uniform of blue jeans, a plaid shirt, and a JE hat. He stands in the center of the pressroom, as if ready at any moment to get back to work. He speaks with a steady voice—printed, it would be a Garamond or Bembo. His gentle blue eyes peer from the lowercase o’s of his glasses. While letterpress printing has fallen from its industry heyday, Marsolais isn’t anxious about its future. He chuckles, “We’re already as obsolete as we’re gonna get.”
Stocky cabinets of steel type crowd the presses. Ink rollers and ink knives huddle in boxes. Tall racks hold all kinds of paper, from small pages of discrete and dependable manila cardstock to unruly sheaths of newsprint, which at any moment threaten to slip from the shelves and flit away. In noble opposition to the clutter, a spotless workbench stretches along the wall’s edge. The sharp orange scent of hand soap mingles with the oily musk of ink. In this subterranean workshop, Marsolais and a small gaggle of curious undergrads carry on the craft of letterpress printing, delivering artistry and dignity to the printed page.
He feels no need to sell himself or his craft: he has a steady flow of students, usually six or seven interested undergrads a semester. He wants students who are naturally drawn to the printed word and the meditative rhythm of craftwork, students who are ready to learn but also wish to bring something of themselves to their work. “I let them tell me that they think it’s important.” In his course, Art of the Printed Word (ART 0706), students create ephemera, broadsides, and, eventually, full-on books. They experiment with papermaking and linocutting. They find their niche, whether it be art books that experiment with form and material or modest cards with painstaking attention to the subtleties of spacing, type size, and impression strength. “You need something that’s your own,” Marsolais insists. By the end of the semester, his students have exactly that.
It took time for Marsolais to find something of his own. After high school, he left his home in Massachusetts and set out for Naropa College in Boulder, Colorado. At the foot of the Rockies, he studied creative writing and aspired to become an author. A professor quickly tempered these dreams with a stark truth. As Marsolais tells it, his professor declared, “Few, if any of you, will get a book deal.” The solution the professor provided was small-press printing. Be your own publishing house. Make your own books. Still, Marsolais had a few years before he could put ink to paper.
Marsolais left college and entered the corporate publishing world. He was surrounded by snuffy Ivy League grads and brutal bosses. He sums up this time in just a few words: “I wasn’t a great employee.” Exiled back to Massachusetts, Marsolais happened upon a miracle: Boston’s last master printer wanted an apprentice. “Finally,” Marsolais says, “the work I did elevated my lived experience.”
Now, with his own press, Marsolais Press, he is content in his craftsmanship. In a world that demands technical perfection, Marsolais says his goal is “human excellence.” The effort of the craftsman should be seen in the craft. The work may not always be flawless, but it should always be good enough to sell itself: “If you’re the one trying to convince people, you’re just not working hard enough.” Even as he strives for excellence, Marsolais rejects the egotism of the artist and embraces the humility of the steward. He doesn’t just have his own creativity to pursue, but machines to maintain, collections to preserve, and students to teach.
For Marsolais, teaching is the last aspect of his craft he has yet to perfect. As long as his students can withstand the occasional impassioned ramble and hearing hours of Tom Waits on the pressroom speaker, Marsolais will try to teach them. He hasn’t quite refined his lecturing style or nailed down the perfect syllabus, but he knows his mission. “The rest of Yale takes care of the mind, and I hope the heart. I take care of the hands,” Marsolais says. The process of composing a line of type, arranging a page layout on a printing galley, and printing a proof demands constant attention to your hands. As you make mistakes and fix them, only to realize you’ve made yet another mistake, you must cultivate a mindfulness and patience towards the hands you thought you already knew.
“You live in your hands,” Marsolais says. Borrowing a phrase from John Keats, Marsolais describes his project as contributing to his students’ “negative capability,” or their ability to remain calm in a despairing world. Marsolais admits, “My work can’t solve every problem,” but, by preparing the souls of students for the challenges that face them, it can certainly help.
