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“What I like about this technique is that you don’t have to be an artist, and yet, you get to experiment with a very creative process, very artisanal too,” the designer says, while stroking the wooden block letters with his finger. “While the technique is more and more used overseas,” he tells me, “I wanted to contribute to making it popular in Japan too.” The press machines are the centerpieces of the studio, where people come to learn and experiment with typography during workshops he organizes, together with his wife Aya Tamura, on a regular basis. At first he decided to buy a couple of machines, but there’s an education aspect to it as well.

“I like this craft, which takes the complete opposite from today’s digitalized world,” says Hosoyamada.

Hosoyamada fell in love with the craft during a trip to Europe and the United States, and soon became obsessed with the world of letterpress, once considered an all-but-dying art that has experienced something like an unexpected renaissance here in the 21st century.ĭesigner Mitsunobu Hosoyamada (right) and Aya Tamura. Against the wall, three letterpress printing machines and dozens of boxes with drawers, which contain wooden and metal letters. Dressed in a long Klein blue work jacket, the graphic designer and co-founder of Letterpress Letters leads us into the basement of the tall, narrow building, which has housed his company for the last 15 years. The all story begins a few steps away, in a building next to the store, at the headquarters of Mitsunobu Hosoyamada’s design agency. Even on cups of coffee, whose fragrance perfumes the place, stamped with a big L, for “LetterPress Letters.” The drink is here deeply linked to another craft: letterpress printing. Here, words and letters has been elevated to art, exhibited for the beauty of their typography, their curves and their upstrokes: they are everywhere, on the walls, the displays, the windows.

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You would think you were entering in a stationery goods and books store, greeted by display units full of hand printed cards, typographic posters on the wall, and a tall bookshelf.

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With its industrial-looking charcoal gray silhouette and its large windows facing the street, the building that houses Letterpress Letters stands out from the architectural monotony of the surroundings.