Base Press Brings Award-Winning Typographic Letterpress to the Chesapeake Print & Book Arts Fair

Base Press is the letterpress studio of Frank Baseman — graphic designer, printer, design educator, and A.P.A. member — operating since 2016 from Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia. Baseman's work sits at the intersection of graphic design and fine-press letterpress printing, and it shows in the conceptual rigor of his output. His Rebus Quotes series earned a Judge's Choice Award at the 2019 AIGA Philadelphia Design Awards, and his prints are held in permanent collections at the Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography at the Cooper Union, Poster House in New York, the Cary Graphic Arts Collection at Rochester Institute of Technology, and the Tipoteca Italiana Fondazione in Cornuda, Italy.

At the Chesapeake Print & Book Arts Fair, visitors will find letterpress prints from Baseman's ongoing series, including the Rebus Quotes prints — typographic puzzles that encode familiar sayings through imagery and type — as well as books, cards, and typographic explorations drawing on wood and metal typefaces sourced from and developed during his residencies at the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, and the Tipoteca Italiana in northern Italy. His Yiddish Words book, letterpress-printed in Hebrew wood type, has been featured by Steven Heller's Daily Heller and entered permanent collections at multiple institutions. Base Press work rewards close looking: the impression of the type in the sheet, the layering of color, and the wit embedded in the composition all come through at arm's length in a way no screen can replicate.

Find Base Press at the Chesapeake Print & Book Arts Fair on May 9, 11am–4pm, on the 200 block of N. Washington Street in Havre de Grace, MD. Admission is free — learn more at chesapeakeprintersfair.com.