Tony Zanni

“You gotta meet my buddy Mike,” Tony’s cousin Cam told him some years ago. “He's got all this letterpress stuff in his barn.”

Tony took him up on the invitation. And from then on, this Rochester, NY, graphic designer was madly in love. With vintage printing presses. 

Tony“As soon as I saw his shop, I was hooked,” Tony recalls. “Lead type, wood type, and presses everywhere.”

Soon after, he was spending weeks hanging out in the barn with his newfound toys.

“I set my first poster and did my first wood cut for it as well,” he says. And it wouldn’t be long before Tony had a collection of his own.

“Even replaced my kitchen table at one point with a letterpress.”

A refurbished Wesel Iron Hand Press is one of several Tony and his colleagues have put back to work at Dock2Letterpress in Webster, NY.Tony’s part nostalgia, part eccentricity, and 100 percent passion. Never one to follow the pack. From a late-blooming college career at RIT, to a one-man freelance design business, all the way to the Webster, NY, print shop where his letterpress collection now resides with a museum’s worth of other fully operational printing presses. A dying art revived, refreshed and relevant, improbable as it sounds.

“My passion lies in setting type, and letterpress design and printing. I enjoy graphic design on the computer, but I’m happiest when I'm at the shop at 1 a.m., setting type and making things.”

Tony likes to collaborate on creative projects, too. One of his next goals is to team up with a photographer.

“I'd like to find one who’s into processing their own work and combine some letterpress with some sweet black-and-white photography,” he says.

A postcard from the shop's fall 2009 grand opening party.In the meantime, he’ll keep taking his inspiration from friends and their work, as well as other letterpress businesses, “like Yee Haw Industries, Hammer Press,” he says. “And I just recently discovered Amos Paul Kennedy Jr.”

So what else inspires him?

“Staring at the moon on a lonely night,” he says.

Yeah. He seems the type.

See more: www.dock2letterpress.com, www.typehigh.com, and on Etsy

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