A Volunteer-Run Living-History Letterpress Shop Returns to the Chesapeake Print & Book Arts Fair
The Ephrata, Pennsylvania nonprofit print shop returns to Havre de Grace with letterpress work made on historic presses kept alive by Saturday-morning volunteers.
Conestoga Press, a volunteer-run living-history letterpress shop in Ephrata, Pennsylvania, returns to the Chesapeake Print & Book Arts Fair on May 9, 2026. If letterpress printing is a craft of impressions, Conestoga Press is a craft of stewardship — housed in the Carriage House of the Theodore Sprecher Museum at 249 West Main Street and operated by the Historical Society of the Cocalico Valley, the shop is kept alive by volunteers who show up most Saturday mornings to keep the presses inked and running.
A working museum, not a static one
What sets Conestoga Press apart from most vendors you'll meet at a letterpress fair is that it isn't a business in the usual sense. It's a nonprofit print shop whose mission is to preserve and demonstrate the craft — and the machines themselves are part of the collection.
The centerpiece is a Bronstrup wrought-iron hand press from the 1850s, the kind of cast-iron lever press that would have been familiar to a printer working in the decades around the Civil War. Alongside it sits a 1926 Chandler & Price 8×12 — the workhorse platen press of the early 20th century — and more recent additions including a No. 14 Pearl press, donated by Julie Hocking of Hocking Printing Company (publisher of Ephrata's Shopping News). Their Bronstrup is cataloged in the Association of European Printing Museums' worldwide handpress database, which gives you a sense of its historical weight.
Translation: when you pick up something from their Chesapeake Print & Book Arts Fair table, you're holding work made on equipment museums elsewhere keep behind ropes.
Part of the Chesapeake APHA community
Both Glyph Design Studio and Conestoga Press are active in the Chesapeake Chapter of the American Printing History Association (APHA), and the Fair is in many ways an APHA-adjacent gathering — a chance for chapter shops and friends of the chapter to get their work in front of the public. Conestoga has been part of it from the start. They've exhibited with us in Havre de Grace in previous years and they keep coming back, which says something about the community of printers this Fair is building year over year.
Randy Newcomer, the shop's typesetter, has put it simply: what he values most about fairs like this is the chance to share the craft. That ethos comes through in the work they bring — letterpress pieces from the shop that read less like a product line and more like an invitation to come learn how any of it is made.
