Sara Tejada ’06, owner of Inkprint Letterpress in Manchester, recently joined other alumni entrepreneurs in Centennial Hall to share their business expertise with students and other alums. But her journey to that panel took her a little farther than most.

Sara came to the US from the Dominican Republic a week after 9/11. She spoke very little English but took intensive English classes at UNH (and watched lots of American TV), and made her way to KSC, where she majored in Graphic Design, with a special interest in printmaking. She landed a job at Tree-Free Greetings, in Swanzey, a few months before she graduated. The company took her to the National Stationery Show, where she first saw modern letterpress—and fell in love.

“It’s really hard for me to explain the emotion that letterpress evokes,” Sara said. “It’s a different world. It isn’t just lead type being pressed against paper—you can do that with a type writer or a printer. It is impression, dimension, light, hand made, texture, color. Whenever I get a letterpress piece I touch it, because it is an art that is meant to be tactile, and then I get really close to it and see where and how the impression was made. Was it a kiss? Was it a bite? Everything, from the type, the colors, the impression, the registration— everything has been hand picked by the artist. What you get isn’t just a file that was printed on top of the paper. You get a design that was hand set and pressed into it.

“I came home completely in love with it. I told my family about this antique way of printing and the impression it made on me, and my grandfather said, ‘A letterpress? I have one in the attic, if you want it, it’s yours.’ It was the best present ever. A small 5 x 8 table top that is meant to print business cards and small items like that. I studied it and took a few workshops. Quickly I discovered that if I wanted to print faster and bigger, I would need a bigger machine.”

Eventually, she met someone who had an 8 x 12 Chandler and Price that he was going to scrap. Sara was delighted to take it off his hands, “though I didn’t have a place to keep it or the least idea on how to move an 1800-pound machine,” she recalled.

Sara opened Inkprint Letterpress on October 21, 2011. “It is a small studio in the middle of Manchester,” she said. “I have a radio, my grampa’s Kelsey, his typewriter, my Chandler and Price, and lots of paper. When I’m in the studio, I’m in a different world.”

“The best part about all this is that I am the designer, and I am the printer,” Sara explained. “So, when I have this idea in my head, I set it, tweak it, maybe make a plate out of it … and then it’s just my machine and me. I get a piece of blank cotton paper, set it in the press, run it. … And then you see your design come to life. You can touch it as it’s being created. It is yours, and you’re completely responsible for the outcome. That ownership is extremely gratifying. … I truly am living my dream.”

If you’d like to learn more about Sara’s adventures, or see some of her work, check out her blog, or visit the Inkprint Letterpress site.