About Princetown Press
The history of the world is captured below our feet. From undisturbed soil and the beds of lakes, palaeoecologists retrieve microscopic records of bygone eras. On Dartmoor, the story of the land is told at the scale of people and the story is not always aligned with the scientific findings. Princetown Press makes objects from that gap: letterpress printed, botanically inked, rooted in the moor we live and work on.
Emma Hogbin and Jon Palmer bring degrees in Environmental Science and Sustainable Product and Furniture Design to a practice that most people arrive at through the printing trade. The botanical inks are foraged from the sites the work documents; the text is printed in traditional synthetic letterpress ink, a deliberate contrast between the permanent and the fugitive. The text is hand-set, character by character, on presses that once served the newspaper industry. Our oldest press, Betty, is cast iron powered by treadle and built in Halifax in 1910. The presses are not museum pieces, they are an integral part of our business.
Our workshop is at Tor Royal Farm, a 200-year-old working Dartmoor hill farm, halfway between Princetown and Fox Tor Mire (or Grimpen Mire if you came here via Conan Doyle).
We print short runs on British-made materials, work with local suppliers where we can, and take a select number of commissions each year. Our clients have included the University of Exeter (UK Treescapes) and the Duchy of Cornwall. Recent press coverage includes Country Living, Period Living, and Devon Life.
We are proud to be part of the following organisations:
- British Printing Society - Emma has previously sat on the executive committee
- Find A Maker - selected member
- MAKE Southwest - selected member
- Devon Artists Network
- Heritage Crafts and their Makers Directory
We'd be glad to talk about what a commission might look like for your organisation, estate, or project.