Dave Selden’s Workshop of Lost Wonders

To arrive at Dave Selden’s workshop, you wind down a wooded lane next to picturesque river. I would like to report that it gets ever narrower until arriving at a rustic, moss-covered cabin deep in the fir trees, but in fact it’s actually housed in one corner of a metal warehouse. The dreamlike experience picks up again inside, however. Packed into a space about the size of a large dining room are strange artifacts of a steampunk past.

Dave is the creator of 33 Books, a small company that started as a kind of analog Untappd (and in the same year, 2010, by coincidence). His first product was 33 Bottle of Beers, a little notebook the size of the back pocket of a pair of jeans. Beer fans could record their encounters with tasty ales and lagers inside, even tracing out a spider graph of the flavors if they wanted to really get their nerd on. There’s no social component—it’s purely for the fan alone. Unlike the gamified world of social media, these notebooks were made for the kind of personality who enjoys the tactile and the detailed. Far from a single five-point rating—though it does include that—one can record the date and package sampled, capture relevant details, and even pen little biographies, perhaps of the moment and mood of the tasting.

In subsequent years, he added to the collection of journals, first in a fairly obvious way—wine, whiskey, coffee—before moving on to more specialty products. You may well have seen one of these at a beer festival or wherever it is whiskey people do their tasting. What took me to Dave’s workshop, however, was a more recent line of hand-printed posters, which accounts for all those pots of ink and cast-iron machines with elegant flywheels that greet you upon entry.

Dave is not a luddite. He designs everything on a computer, and uses a laser to cut out the boxes in which he ships his products. He does have a certain temperament, however, consistent with the type of person who appreciates older crafted activities—such as, for example, smoked Franconian malts or Belgian lambic-making or Norman cider-making. (As a parting gift, he handed me a bottle of cider made from his own fruit.)

He studied printmaking in college, and began collecting his own presses after starting 33 Books. Old-timey printing produces a distinctive look and feel—one you can’t achieve with modern printers. I was there to see him create a project we worked on together, a cool poster of beer glassware. The inks on these posters creates a distinctive mottled appearance that occurs when a slick of ink is transferred from a plate to a piece of paper. When using two colors, the alignment may be ever so slightly off, so that it’s easy to see the print went through two printings. All of that can and has been replicated with computers and lasers—but what no modern printer can do is slightly emboss the paper itself with the edges of the metal press. It takes something like a 1909 Chandler and Price letterpress for that. Nearby is a smaller Golding Jobber, built in Boston in 1888, and his first press, which he uses mostly for cider labels, is a 1928 Vandercook No 1.

Dave had made the first pass with the yellow, and finished with black

Placing the print “in register”—or alignment.

The finished print with its distinctive mottling and embossing.

The press has an ingenious design. And no wonder—these were workhorses of printing for decades. If you look at the pictures above, the round disk at the top of the machine is the ink plate. It slowly spins around while three rollers move up onto its surface, spreading the ink, and then roll back down over the plate with the image, transferring the ink. The operator then presses the paper against the plate, and the ink is in turn transferred a second time. Et voilà—a print.

In a digital world, there’s something especially cool about the tangible. It’s why, despite the early fervor for Kindles, good old paper books still sell well. We like to hold things, feel the paper between our fingers, smell the ink or, in older copies, the age. These new-old prints are attractive because they bear the mark of old technology. No matter how clever we are, we can’t reproduce the mark of the letterpress on the page except by using an actual letterpress. (Amusingly, Dave reported that the old timers who used to use these things before they all but died out in the 80s are offended by the touch of the press. They always tried to let the plates just “kiss” the paper so that it bore no marks. Now, of course, those lines tell us a human hand was involved and are much coveted.)

Dave’s workshop is deliciously tangible. Precarious stacks of ink pots rise from one table. Blocks and plates sit on a machine the function of which I’ve forgotten. The original journals, which Dave doesn’t print himself, are stacked in wire boxes on one wall, while architectural drawers, wide and shallow, contain other prints. (The laser printer, prosaic and modern and entirely without romance, Dave has positioned in a different room, out of sight of the cool stuff.)

Beer Glasses Print

Dave approached me about working on a print of beer glasses as a follow-up to his very cool cocktail glasses print. Call me biased, but beer glasses are actually a lot more stylish and interesting than cocktail glasses. They may come in fewer varieties, but their forms and functions come from a richer story, and they emerge from specific places and cultures. We narrowed it down to ten after starting with an expansive first cut of 25 glasses, several of which I hoped Dave wouldn’t like (he didn’t!). He also allowed me to include one of my favorite vessels, the incredibly charming little Belgian ribbeke. It’s attractive, but it’s also the glass associated with ordinary beer—lambics in an older era and then pilsner in the more modern one.

Dave added a bunch of cool touches, too. For the tubinger, he identifies the different kinds of pours available in Czechia. Thanks to recent education I received from Kevin Kain, we managed to ensure it has the proper circular dimples as well. Want to know what they call the lid on a German steinkrug? It’s there. And with each glass I have penned a wee biography to guide buyers to the right glass/beer pairing.

You can buy a copy here. They make excellent gifts and, what’s this?—the holiday season is just around the corner. He even has a few handsome editions in a “bespoke frame manufactured by yours truly from upcycled beer, whiskey and/or wine barrels.”

As to seeing the workshop? You’ll have to email ahead.

With an admittedly pretty cool laser in action

Jeff AlworthNovember 2, 2023