Say hello to The Sprawl's new community project: a pop-up printing press on wheels!

At a time when the internet increasingly takes more than it gives, we have been mulling over how best to reach and engage with Calgarians. The conventional wisdom is that if you are publishing nowadays, you need to focus all your energy online.

But what if there is a different and more creative way?

And what if that way—meeting people face to face, having conversations, and inviting them to make something by hand—could spark curiosity and help Calgarians see their city in a new light?

That is exactly what we're doing with our pop-up press—an old printing press mounted into a cargo e-trike.

The Sprawl has been experimenting with letterpress printing since 2023, when Meta blocked news from Facebook and Instagram in Canada. At the time, I joked that we should get a printing press, because that would be the future of journalism: setting type and passing the news around by hand, just like the old days.

I quickly realized I wasn't kidding. Soon I was on the hunt for a printing press, and found one—albeit a relatively tiny one.

Ours is a Kelsey Excelsior 5 x 8 tabletop platen press that was manufactured in 1967, used in Edmonton for awhile, and eventually ended up on Vancouver Island, which is where we found it (on Facebook Marketplace, of all places!) before hauling it back to Alberta.

Since then, we've taken it to local festivals, libraries and schools, inviting Calgarians to print so they can experience firsthand how newspapers and books and everything else used to be made—long before screens monopolized our attention.

When young or old press paper to ink, you can see their faces immediately light up with joy.

All of this experimenting with wood type and printing blocks was promising. But I wanted to do more with it.

Specifically, I wanted to localize it.

I got to thinking about local archival photos. What if you could print a historic photo of the place that you are in—giving you a new perspective on the city right in front of you?

This idea took some refining, as you can see in the above attempt to reproduce a 1912 Stephen Avenue photo. You can just barely make out the streetcar. I was pushing the limits of our small hobbyist press, which was designed to print business cards and greeting cards—not large halftone photographs.

I sought advice from the letterpress community and we shrunk it down to about the size of a trading card. This made a huge difference, as you can see!

Now that we have a format that works, we hope to make an ongoing series of local Calgary cards. When we make a card, we'll take the pop-up press to that location where people can print it. (And vice versa—if you invite us to a specific spot, maybe we can make a location-specific historical card!)

This project has been a labour of love. My dad put in countless days, which turned into weeks, to craft a beautiful cabinet system to hold the press in the trike box. Chris Pecora designed the eye-catching vinyl graphics. The finishing touch is Sam Hester's brilliantly colourful illustration on the back.

This spring and summer, we'll be taking the pop-up press all over Calgary. You'll see us at festivals and community celebrations—and maybe you'll find us tucked into some obscure corner of town with a forgotten bit of history ready for you to print.

For starters, I'm taking the pop-up press to a few Jane's Walks this weekend. Next Saturday, May 10, we'll be outside the Village Square Library from 1 to 3 p.m. And on Saturday, May 17, we'll be at the InglewooDIY Festival.

Follow my Instagram account to follow along with our printing adventures. See you on the road!

Jeremy Klaszus is founder and editor of The Sprawl.