Judith Berliner is the owner of Full Circle Press, where she uses antique letterpresses to print jar labels with gold foil embossing (pictured here). Her apprentice is Ethan Cameron (on left).
Judith Berliner and her team produce invitations, postcards, menus, signs, announcements, stationery and more. The nearly-forgotten tools of letterpressing, like pica poles (to measure spaces), backward typeset and sticky boxes of colorful, thick ink are used daily here. “Our intention is never to be fast,” Berliner says. “It’s to be right.”
Full Circle Press’ high-profile clients include Apple and Pixar — a business card for Steve Jobs is featured in one of their display books.
As a child, working in her family’s print shop in Grass Valley, Judith Berliner’s job was to help her father produce custom maps and limited-edition books on the antique machinery. She now works those same presses as owner of Full Circle Press.
Apprentice printer Ethan Cameron says a printing press has so many working parts that, “If it doesn’t look right, there’s five different things you have to try to make it work.” But Judith Berliner says once you get the hang of working the analog presses, it’s sort of like “working a sewing machine.”