#AARDVARK LETTERPRESS ARCHIVE#

Set and letterpressed by AardvarkвЂ™s Bill Berkuta on 100% cotton stock with custom mixed ink, finished with AardvarkвЂ™s printersвЂ™ mark.ДЇor anyone looking to print just about anything, please be sure to visit the team at Aardvark. WeвЂ™ve printed a lot of work with Aardvark over the years - business cards and stationery, invitations and posters - but weвЂ™re really excited about our latest effort: CommuneвЂ™s Golden Rules of Artist Collaboration. Weight, texture, content, sheen can all be explored for days on end here. Founded in 1923 by two USC students, McManus & Morgan has been supplying our city with the best papers from around the world for almost a century. 12' x 18' EDITION SIZE // 95 RELEASE DATE // March 2015 MEDIUM // Letterpress Print PRINT // Printed by Aardvark Letterpress in Los Angeles, California.

Molten lead is readily available to cast into type, cans of ink litter every shelf as colors are constantly being mixed, and the paperвЂ¦ sourced from their supplier and next door neighbor Gary at McManus & Morgan, which is the oldest paper store in Los Angeles. The machines are clearly from a bygone era and you can imagine the history of each one, long before they arrived here in MacArthur Park. Cary Ocon, General Manager and the youngest son, quit. Brooks Ocon, Master Printer and the oldest son, joined Luis in 1976. We are a family business started by our father, Luis Ocon, who immigrated from Mexico in 1964. Loosely organized in flat files, binders, and folders throughout the shop, you can blindly pull any number of insane things out of their archive: work for those untouchable people like Bill Clinton and Oprah Winfrey, musicians like Miles Davis or even Kanye West, designers like Valentino and Hedi Slimane, local artists and architects like Ed Ruscha and Frank Gehry. Aardvark Letterpress has been providing high quality letterpress printing, foil stamping, and other related services since 1968.

#AARDVARK LETTERPRESS ARCHIVE#

The archive covers more than 50 years, the machines date back more than 100 years, and collectively the team has more years of experience than any one of them can add up. The Aardvark shop is somewhat of a time capsule. Joined by his two sons Brooks, right after he finished high school, and Cary, after a decade-long career in law, Aardvark has been a family business its entire life. As the rise of technology and digital printing began to kill the world of mechanical printing, Luis had the intuition to shift the business from typesetting into letterpress printing, rebranding the business as Aardvark Letterpress.

After arriving in Los Angeles in 1964, Luis found work at Aardvark Typesetters before eventually purchasing the business in 1978. While working at a newspaper in his native Mexico City, Luis began teaching himself the linotype trade after hours and quickly began (to borrow a recently learned phrase here) вЂњsetting slugsвЂќ with the best of them. Luis came into the world of typesetting at the ripe young age of 13. To prevent unauthorized access, maintain data accuracy, and ensure the correct use of information, we have put in place appropriate physical, electronic, and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure the information we collect online.The story of Aardvark Letterpress begins with Luis Ocon. Such addresses are not used for any other purpose and are not shared with outside parties. We use return email addresses to answer the email we receive. Since 1968, Aardvark Letterpress has been providing rich and elegant letterpress printing for wedding invitations, baby announcements, holiday cards. We do not share this information with outside parties unless required to do so by law. We use the information you provide about someone else to inform them of our services. We use the information you provide about yourself when placing a request/order only to complete that request/order. To make this notice easy to find, we make it available on our homepage and at every point where personally identifiable information may be requested. To better protect your privacy we provide this notice explaining our online information practices and the choices you can make about the way your information is collected and used.

Aardvark letterpress