things that inspire us, greeting card designs before they go to print, live coverage from roadtrips/trade shows, custom projects on the drying rack, scandalous photos of the bbh crew and friends, & other mindless drivel
For one night only, starting at 8pm, everything in Blue Barnhouse's West Asheville store will be 75% off, cards are discount priced between $0.25 and $1.25. Free food and beer, DJing by Harvest Records, lots of greeting card giveaways.
The following day BBH starts moving presses to Wilmington, NC. BBH will thence trickle out over the course of June, the last thing to go will be our greeting card store- but on the night of May 26th you will never see a price on our cards like this again!
You are encouraged to say goodbye to our wonderful little letterpress shop!
There were a number of factors involved in my decision to move BBH to Wilmington, NC. The primary reason would be my interest in filmmaking-- I've wanted to be involved in filmmaking for a number of years, and over the course of the last year I have been actively making efforts to dive into it. At the beginning of the year I applied to UNCW with the intention of getting a second bachelor's degree in Film Studies, and just a few weeks ago I was accepted into the program. The film studies program there is pretty amazing and Wilmington is a hotbed for filmmaking where I already have some good connections-- a brand new adventure awaits me and I am thrilled to be able to pursue a new creative medium. My other reasons for relocating are more personal, mostly having to do with going back home, having my family close by, a less expensive living situation, the beach, fresh seafood. I love the ocean, I love Wilmington, I love the prospect of being able to go surfing year round.
In June, this space on the corner of Wooster Street and Dawson Street in downtown Wilmington will be taken over by Blue Barnhouse.
By a stroke of luck when I started nosing around for a possible location to move Blue Barnhouse, I found it on the first phone call: a 10,000 sq ft warehouse in downtown Wilmington that was shared by a number of craftsmen. The landlord was jazzed about the idea of our presence there and was willing to work with us to hold the space until June. It's well lit and spacious and couldn't be a more perfect space for our needs.
How we want to say goodbye to Asheville.
1. For starters, we won't be having a retail space in Wilmington, and we have a lot of gifts and stationery we need to unload. That's why starting today, until the day we leave, everything in the store is 50% off it's marked price, and that goes for our bargain bins too. Please note that due to this transition and all that it entails we have had erratic operating hours. Currently we are open M-F 12-6, sometimes we'll be open on Saturdays, but it is always best to call ahead: 828-225-3991
2. We've had our heads up our asses for the last couple of years and haven't had any local events in the recent past- but we'd like to see all the faces of friends we've made here locally over the years. We will be having a social hour on the last Friday of each month where we'll be serving Free PBR, have some giveaways, and talk about the good old days. These dates are March 25th and April 29th from 7pm-??
GRAND CLOSING
The day before we start rolling the presses away to their new home, Blue Barnhouse will have one last hoorah on Friday May 27th. More details to follow, but we promise it will be a really great event with all kinds of free for-all giveaways. The retail shop will continue to be open until mid-June.
Book Release Party
Hopefully, if it is released on time, we will somehow work in a release party for my book Adventures in Letterpress, which features images of letterpress from more than 70 letterpress studios and artists from all over the world, and is currently available for pre-order on Amazon.
Photographing letterpress for my upcoming book, Adventures in Letterpress.
But where can we get your cards?!
Malaprops and Write On, both downtown, have been carrying our cards for years, and I'm certain they will continue to do so after we leave. There is also our webstore, which has every product we've ever made under the sun for sale. You can also send an email with the subject line "subscribe" to info@bluebarnhouse.org to subscribe to our newsletter, where we will keep you up to date with our most current work and happenings, or you can get up to the minute progress reports via our twitter account.
Space for rent
428-B Haywood Road will more than likely be available for rent by July 1. We are still working out the details about the space before we put it on the market, but please contact me if you are interested in looking at our space.
Can we visit you?!
Our new studio will be a private studio, but we'd love to have visitors. All you have to do is drop us a line to make an appointment at info@bluebarnhouse.org. And if you are interested in following my pursuits in filmmaking, you should check out my filmmaking blog, Dark Academy.
And lastly...
I realize that this is probably sudden and sad news to many people here in the neighborhood. We intend to make the best of our time remaining here in Asheville, and look forward to seeing all of you to say our goodbyes and show our gratitude for so many years of support.
We are very excited for this new adventure on our horizon and the fortunes it may hold.
When I first began working at Blue Barnhouse back in Spring 2009 I knew nothing of Letterpress and only a little about printmaking in general. After a few crash sessions on the Vandercook and the C&P, a little hanging around the shop, and a modicum of historical letterpress education, I fell in love.
It was the smell of the ink, the clankety-clack of the C&P and the side-stepping necessary while operating the Vandercook. The feel of the different grains of paper and how they accepted ink. The little bit of fear that gripped my heart every time I fed the motorized C&P and the exhaustion of my body after operating the foot-pedal C&P.
Around the time I began working at the shop, Brandon began the process of compiling submissions for Adventures in Letterpress. It wasn't long before he realized he had a Photographer apprenticing in the shop, and I started shooting some of the submissions we were receiving. Over the next several months, we set up a makeshift studio (versions 1-7) and I was able to learn more than I ever wanted to know about shooting paper. Trust me, Paper is not easy or fun to shoot until you get the hang of it. Which took about 2 months.
Then I moved to Massachusetts.
There was a hole in my heart where a press used to be.
In the summer of 2010 Brandon came to pick me up in Boston (after visiting a few presses on his journey), and we hustled down to NY for Renegade Brooklyn and some fun with the folks at Mark Batty Publisher. (read B's renegade post here.. it's a hoot!)
While in NY we also visited PressNY and the Arm, two of our fav presses run by some really lovely individuals. I got to shoot the shops and drool over type. My love for letterpress was compounded.
the Arm, photographed by lydia see June 2010:
Press NY, photographed by lydia see June 2010:
So now it's January 2011, I am visiting Asheville, and I couldn't stay out of the shop. In fact, I have spent more time here since I've been back for a limited 5-day run than I have spent anywhere else. I've been scoring "Stupid Fucking Lovebirds" both clean and dirty, I've been shooting the shop and filling wholesale orders. I've been taking it all in..
I even made this video of me Operating the foot pedal C&P Wednesday night. So when I get lonely in the cold, white North, I can watch it and remember how warm Letterpress makes me. and how I feel Home again when I'm here.
I generally avoid talking about how cool Asheville is to anyone I don't know... having been born and somewhat raised in what used to be a peaceful and spacious beach town that in less than two decades became an endless parade of stripmalls and standstill traffic, as folks north of the Mason-Dixon line realized how dirt cheap real estate was in our oceanside paradise and cockroached it all to hell.
Now I have probably contributed to the eventual buggering of West Asheville, as Men's Journal, who interviewed me about my neighborhood, has named it one of the 30 best places to live in the U.S., and the coolest neighborhood in the Southeast. So far, for the most part, it has attracted like-minded and considerate citizens-- we'll see how long we can keep it up.
Asheville has long been supportive of the Mom & Pop business model, its downtown area has stonewalled any efforts by corporate chains from entering its domain, and in 2004 when Wal-Mart came creeping at the fringes of the city, the citizens went into an uproar. The vandalism quoted from the article in Farrell's voicemail (at the top of this post) is best described here by Green Anarchy:
Anonymous saboteurs used on-site construction equipment in the dark of night to ram into the shell of the Wal-Mart Supercenter on Swannanoa River Road, causing an estimated $900,000 damage. The vandals entered the site and hot-wired a dump truck and drove it into different areas of the building.
The demolished Wal-Mart eventually went up again, as planned. Months after BBH had moved from my basement into its current retail location, Wal-Mart tried to hit us from the West Side, a mere mile from a string of blossoming small time shops. The concerned citizens of West Asheville managed a more peaceable way of forcing them out, as described here in our local rag, the Mountain Xpress:
In a less-extreme example, West Asheville residents rallied to stop Wal-Mart from setting up shop on Patton Avenue. After months of meeting on weeknights, parading through the streets flying banners and turning out en masse at local-government meetings, an ad hoc citizens' group triumphed when the retailer withdrew its proposal.
Tourism is what makes this town thrive, and many who visit eventually come back to stay. I did. Because besides the whole community thing there is enough edenic wilderness in the immediate area that you could hike every weekend and never see it all in a lifetime. However there are those who visit and trash the place, and those who come to live here, and trash the place. The highway south of us is being widened and eventually six lanes will pass through Haywood Rd, a block away from where BBH currently resides. Stripmalls are currently being built in the same area where "progress" is taking place.
If you've ever been to Graveyard Fields, a hot hiking spot on the Blue Ridge Parkway, you will have no problem seeing what I mean by inconsiderate visitors: trash everywhere, piles of poo and toilet paper on the side of the trail, throngs of people talking at the top of their lungs and cars all jammed into one tiny parking lot-- an absolute zoo.
Where I go you got to get dirty, wet, and sometimes hurt, but you will never see a budweiser can and nary a beer belly but my own, because most tourists never want to work that hard to see something this beautiful.
Time for a dive into a top secret swimming hole.
The asheville area is also an east coast mecca for kayakers, as creeks and rivers are bountiful--and when I moved to Asheville I landed into a hornets nest full of kayakers. My first hike was a creek hike, and I haven't been able to do any other kind of hike since.
The creeks here flow through beds of granite, making the waters crystal clear. Boulders abound. You climb, you slide, you leap, you land, you wade, you swim, you problem solve to get to your goal. But there is no finish line. It keeps going. Miles and miles of waterfalls.
The keen sandal--invented by a sailor, protects the toes, grips wet rock, hugs your foot tightly, and is perfect for amphibious travel.
When I take someone to these secret locations, I warn them: prepare to get your feet wet. Prepare yourself for a treacherous journey. I generally end a creek hike with a cairn.
I think I've said enough here. I won't divulge where I get my hikely rocks off--but if you ask nicely I might take you there myself. Now then, comes the answer to why I'm even sharing an ounce of info on my best kept secret, sweet Asheville: if you are crazy enough to read this blog I guess yr alright enough to join the party.
Men's Journal interviewed me for an article about West Asheville a few weeks ago. I started off the interview by telling the journalist that I really don't want anybody else to find out about this place, but I would talk to her about it anyway.
A fact checker just called today, to like, check on some facts:
FACT CHECKER: ...and I wanted to verify that you refused to share information about your favorite hiking trails in the area?
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