The letterpress sitting in the basement of Brooks Hall is out of date.Its technology, which has existed for hundreds of years, has been modified and simplified. Students looking to go into graphic design will mainly use offset printers, a modern version of the letterpress that transfers images from a plate to a rubber blanket to a printing surface, according to Denise Crisp, an associate professor of graphic design.They won’t need to place a paragraph “letter by letter by letter” on the letterpress’ bed. They won’t need to lock those perfectly placed words in the press, they won’t need to put ink in the drum, and they won’t need to hand crank a piece of paper over the type twice. They won’t need to, but Crisp said they’ll want to after they use the printer.”You really get a sense of ink on paper, and the only way you can do that is with the letterpress,” she said. “Ink on paper that they would be doing today in contemporary printers would not be letterpress.”Justin LaRosa, a sophomore in graphic design who was offered an undergraduate grant to work with the letterpress on Nov. 18, said it was this “charming” aspect of the printer that drew him in.”Pretty much any project in my type class that I could possibly use the letterpress, I took advantage of that,” he said. “I’m in a lucky spot in the program right now where there’s a lot of opportunity to use it. Further down the road, my output will by with the computer and I won’t be able to use it, so I’m using it as much as possible. It’s so much cooler than using a laser.”When students print text from computers, Crisp said they don’t get the sense that their work is composed of “four different inks and plates hitting the paper in order to make that color.””The letterpress really connects to the physicality of it,” she said. “It’s handcrafted. I’ve rarely met a student who was introduced and hasn’t fallen in love with it.”LaRosa said he sees in the machine a “great charm involved with using it and seeing all that old type and this old machine. It’s a great resource that the school has, and I’m hoping more life can be brought to the shop.”He said he’s running into more and more people working on the letterpress in the shop, and that faculty members like Crisp are hoping to make the letterpress a staple.”Every time you go down there, there’s someone there,” LaRosa said. But until two years ago, when students and faculty in the College of Design resurrected the letterpress, it had been used sparingly, and only “by people who knew something about it,” Crisp said.Then Crisp, along with a group of students who formed a group that would “go down and print things on the letterpress from the little bit of materials that we had,” worked toward finding the printer a permanent home.”It was really important to graphic designers to be able to use that kind of technology. It teaches a lot of things about the materiality of type,” Crisp said. “It also links what they do to the history, so it was very important for us to maintain it.”This movement occurred during what Crisp called a “huge revolution,” in which people are starting to pick up and restore “all these things that were being dumped with the advent of the Macintosh. People that picked them up were younger — the next generation of people could get this equipment for cheap.”The printer’s weight saved it from destruction, Crisp said, because something “this heavy is not something you can just toss away.”This younger generation of students — those who have grown up using computers for printing — “really revitalized it,” Crisp said.”We really see it as a vital contemporary machine that makes things in a very particular way,” she said. “There was a faculty here, Tony Brock, who was actually a student when it was in use. He was institutional in keeping it around, It never had a very good home, but we kind of found a place for it.”That place is a converted “old shop” in the basement of Brooks Hall, where the letterpress — one that prints specially placed, moveable letters rather than the more modern version of offset printing — has resided since 2006. “Two years ago, there was provost money for improvement in technology and teaching equipment, and so I had a proposition ready and was able to get some money for that to set up some room for it,” Crisp said, adding that College of Design Dean Marvin Malecha “very much supported the movement and dedicated the space to it.”Students in graphic and industrial design now use the letterpress in their first classes, Crisp said, to “learn how to print on it during freshman year and then use it in different ways in different classes, sometimes as a break from what we’re doing on the computer.”Crisp said she hopes to see the letterpress connected to the computer, so that type students make on their computers can be printed on the letterpress. Crisp and LaRosa aren’t the only ones who are fascinated by the machine.LaRosa’s grant, he said, will go toward a book that documents the atmospheres around letterpress shops in the South. “The idea is to go around to a bunch of letterpress shops in the local community and, I guess, surrounding states and find out more about the community that exists among the letterpress printers,” LaRosa said. “To find out what the charm is behind using this really old technology.”