On-line printmaking magazine 

Planning my application for a trademark for my on-line magazine for printmakers, I watched the video on determining whether the mark is for goods or services. “Think carefully,” the narrator said, “because you can’t change later on, and you can’t be both things under one mark.” After this, I decided that the magazine is a service. For ten years, I had been making goods in the form of printing presses; for the next ten years, I will—to use the language of the US Patent and Trademark Office Trademarke ID Manual: “Providing on-line magazines in the field of printmaking.”

Making goods: It’s over, but not done

When we started making Halfwood Presses back in June of 2004 it was just the two of us. I had a dream of a Perfect Press made with modern technology but which also showed steel and wood craftsmanship. It didn’t occur to me that my design for an etching press would lead where it has.

While it was always my goal to use new technologies to help our fellow artists, crafts people and designers to get their hand-printed art made, I never imagined that I could break the printing press mold. Even when Tom ambled in to my shop on Taylor Avenue North with the first Mini Halfwood Press in one hand, swinging at his side like a satchel, I burst out laughing; it had to be a joke press!

What had been a joke was made real by Tom Kughler. Off-the-cuff I had said it would be nice to have a scale model of the press he made for me—the big one I call the “Century Halfwood Press.” Now, that 300-pound press was shrunken to ten pounds. We set the press on the bed of the Century and I put a printing plate and felts on the tiny bed of the Mini, and proved that it worked. This was no joke, after all.

Perfect presses for perfect studios

The rest is history. My dream of a Perfect Press for a Perfect Studio—my goal when I walked off the UW campus two decades before—morphed into something much, much bigger. The Halfwood press became a work of art in itself.

That’s what people told me who bought into this dream to realize their own. My dream resulted in a work of art. It is art not only in design as a beautiful, functional object, but also as a medium to bring the printmaking experience to many more people than I could with the big presses of bygone ages.

I was lucky not to know how much it was going to cost my family to make my dream a reality. To see where the road would lead had me build the road as I traveled. Over the course of ten years we served hundreds of creators by making 150 presses after the first Legacy Mini Halfwood to the robust, 100-pound Mariner Halfwood presses.

Noting the approach of our ten year anniversary making presses, I took a step back and looked at how the interest in small printmaking presses has grown—from Singapore to Brazil. At 72, I think about what the next ten years might mean for me, expanding as we move deeper into the 21^st Century, when designing a miniature press can be a work of art.

However, as a business, making presses is stuck; I still do most of the details and my wife, Lynda, still handles the paperwork. As a business, we are tiny. The Halfwood Press enterprise can be much, much more and serve many more people all over the world. I wonder if I could bring the printmaking experience to many more people if I started over.

As a creative person, I do not ignore the roads that I have not yet traveled. At the same time, I will not forget to look back to all the good people with whom I have made contact through press-making. Today I am meeting more people, and this keeps the press-making moving forward. As the manufacturer, Tom is ready to make many more, and other makers are taking notice of the market for small presses.

Ultimately, though it has been an amazing ten years, I realize that sometimes things just run their course. I have made the decision to let others take the business and grow it. I have been role-playing the Middle Man. There are more capable people who will make the making, making, marketing, and selling a profitable enterprise. The inertia of interest in the Halfwood Press Line (and the start-up of the new, all-wood WeeWoodie Rembrandt Press) will keep on.

What’s next?

Looking forward, there remains a big project that I can do to maintain my tie to the Halfwood Presses and which holds to the course I set for myself as an artist, teacher and family man: an on-line printmaking magazine that I will call PrintmakingWorld On-line, with the job of providing on-line magazines in the field of printmaking.

It will not change me from what I have been for half a century into something like an entrepreneur, business man or publisher. On the other hand, it is a probability—no, a necessity—that the main advertiser in PrintmakingWorld On-line family of on-line magazines will be Halfwood Presses, WeeWoodie Rembrandts, Printmaker Chests, games, books and on-line open courses for the printmaking world and, very importantly, printmaking for kids.

In the words of Muriel Strode and Ralph Waldo Emerson, where this road will lead I do not know, but I will head where no one else has gone, and I will leave a trail.