Smock is based in Syracuse, New York, a post-industrial town whose sprawling warehouses and pretty grit have charmed us silly. Our print shop’s its 20 antique presses, 50 tons of equipment, and 17 employees resides west of downtown in the Delavan Center, a rambling building with labyrinth hallways and wildly crooked floors. This place used to be a factory for John Deere, and before that for the Syracuse Chilled Plow Company, if you look far enough backwards. Nowadays, the Delavan houses many of the city’s painters, photographers, sculptors, and ceramists, as well as Syracuse’s largest art gallery. This is our home.

Who are we? We are faithful lovers of historic craft. We have letterpress ink in our veins. We are idealists. This means we believe in things. We are trying to make the world better right now. This affects everything we do. We read Walt Whitman (he was a letterpress printer too, by the way) (Stuff’d with the stuff that is coarse and stuff’d with the stuff that is fine). We fall head over heels for heavy cast iron presses. We believe in the creation of beautiful things. And we want, like you, to feel good about where our beautiful things come from.

One final thing of note: we’re the first and only print shop in the U.S. to offer printing on a luxury bamboo paper. We developed this paper with the help of a historic European paper mill, because we wanted a truly sustainable paper that happened to be gorgeous. (learn more about our bamboo paper).