Iceland review - 2016, Page 27

ICELAND REVIEW 25
OLD BECOMES NEW
The technique of letterpress printing goes
back almost 600 years. According to Hildur,
when she and Ólöf started out, “People in
Iceland didn’t know what letterpress was. It
was new here, even if it’s a very old tech-
nique.” While many printing companies in
Iceland possess letterpress machines, she
says, they use them for functions such as
perforation, die cutting, and scoring, but
not for deep-impression printing—some-
thing unique that Reykjavík Letterpress
brought to the table. Before starting their
business, Hildur and Ólöf worked together
in the advertising industry. It was around
the time of the financial crash of 2008 that
they felt the need to branch out on their
own. “We came across a lot of different
blogs by all kinds of different people who
were showing off work they had done with
a letterpress and they had just learned how
to use it by themselves,” Ólöf explains. “The
people doing the blogs were not printers,”
Hildur clarifies. “They were designers or
photographers or small business owners,
particularly from the US. It made us think,
if they can learn it, so can we.”
ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE
Now, what started out as just the two women
and a 1940s Original Heidelberg Windmill
letterpress machine, procured secondhand
from a retiring printer in Iceland, has
grown into a successful business with three
additional full-time employees, a team of
freelance designers on hand and a new
workspace in the Grandi area of Reykjavík,
by the old harbor. Reykjavík Letterpress
offers custom printing for events such as
weddings and coming-of-age ceremonies,
as well as for businesses in need of pro-
motional material. In addition, Ólöf and
Hildur have created their own line of prod-
ucts, from greeting cards to coasters to gift
tags, which they hope to begin exporting to
Scandinavia in 2017. “We love the freedom
of using whatever font we want. We use
all kinds of illustrations and symbols and
fonts we think are right for the project,”
says Ólöf, and Hildur confirms: “Anything
is possible.” u
DESIGN
From top:
Letter press types; drawers
where the letters are kept;
coasters for a restaurant.