Incline Press on the move!
We are on the move and need your help.
Incline Press has been working for the last 30 years in Oldham, England; and housed in a former cotton mill in Bow Street since 2001. We now have an opportunity to live the dream and move to beautiful, rural Scotland. As well as printing, we will be able to develop a practice teaching the whole craft of book making, and open a seasonal gallery space which the current building cannot accommodate. But we need help to make it happen.
After a long search we now have the chance to buy a former shop in the Dumfries and Galloway region, close to Scotland's book town. The vendor has reduced the price which has put it nearly within our range. We have some savings, and plan to sell some workshop gear, fine press books from our library and have some smaller funding applications lined up. We are determined to organise ourselves so that our printing is only minimally disrupted; new books will continue to be made, and we shall keep as much of the type collection and vintage machinery as we have room for, most if not all.
The Galloway property is in reasonable order, but it will need some immediate work before we can move in. All the lower ground floor joists must be strengthened to take the heavy gear, and the whole building rewired. Then we can begin the difficult, expensive and demanding job of moving presses, type cabinets, paper, the stock and everything else. In other words, we cannot sell our current premises until those essential repairs are done. We've never had mortgages, credit cards, loans or debts, so our credit rating is non existent and to the banks we are unworthy of their support!
In short, we have to find £65k in a few weeks to make the deal. We have a verbal agreement with the vendor, and she will take the building off the market until mid January so we won't be gazumped or undercut, but that is a short deadline for us to find the money that is needed.
So we are hoping for a miracle….and we have some ideas to help that along.
Firstly we have lots of great hand made books and affordable pamphlets in our shop, ready to go and your purchases will help us greatly.
Please take a look there. For most of our books we will post them first class in the UK until the new year.
Secondly we will be selling some new and used type and workshop gear on Ebay over the coming months, including rare and unused foundry type in mostly unopened packets, cast in the 1960s and rare as hen's teeth.
We will flag this up on our Instagram page as we go.
Thirdly, this is the launch of our crowdfunder! We would gratefully accept any gift you might wish to send us using the blue buttons (Paypal or Bank Transfer) or you can pick from this list below.
£10 - A bundle of ephemera, with a newly printed book mark.
£25 - A copy of the pamphlet RED which was the new year book of 2023, plus the ephemera.
£50 - A hardback copy of Jennifer Reid's latest songbook, a copy of RED, plus the ephemera.
£100 - Gifts Of The Magi, a poetry book by Jamie McKendrick, and the pamphlet 'My Orcha'd in Linden Lea' by William Barnes, plus the ephemera
£500 - A copy of Punch and Judy, and the Owl and the Pussy-cat and the ephemera
£1000 - The Oldham Charivari, a new portfolio of over 150 items of ephemera printed over the last 20 years, to be bound over the summer of 2025. It will not be available otherwise. Your name or other dedication of your choice can be added to your own copy.
£2500 - Come to Scotland (once we've moved there!) for a four day course of one-to-one printing instruction with Graham, to make your own letterpress project. Including B&B accommodation, and vegetarian meals.
£3500 - During 2025, we will publish Herbert Read's War Poems. An exemplar edition will bound by Roger Grech, contained in a drop back box with an additional portfolio of Oliver Flude’s woodcuts for the book. This edition is exclusive to this fundraiser and will not be available otherwise.
Lastly, it would be so appreciated if you can share this blog post with folk you think might be interested in contributing, and please do repost our Instagram and Facebook posts as they come up in the near future. We need our community!
We shall keep everyone posted about developments and send you photos as the move progresses – if we get a chance to make it happen.
Letterpress is listed by Heritage Crafts as endangered, with just a handful of workshops like ours left. We are up against the environmentally polluting Digital Big Boys, but still believe in the sustainable fifteenth century tools and traditional publishing model. As custodians of increasingly rare machines and skills who just love real books, we still follow William Morris' rejection of soulless industrialism. We hope you can help us start this new phase of our work - and we will continue to meet the challenge of making and we hope, teaching it.
Thank you so much for all your support of Incline Press. Here's to life's Big Adventures!
Graham and Helen.
