I can’t remember exactly when it was that I started appreciating and acquiring books for more than just the words they held and the stories they told. Fairly early on, my younger, and more bookish, cousin gave me a succession of birthday presents: hardcover editions of Alice in Wonderland, A Wrinkle in Time, and The Phantom Tollbooth. I cherished these gifts then, and all these years later, I still have them.

The next major acquisition came from my aunt after I graduated from high school. She gave me more than a dozen fat, burgundy cloth-bound volumes with gold lettering on the spines, letterpress-printed pages and deckled-edge paper; each was a volume in a “collected works” series that included authors like Shakespeare, Balzac, Poe, and Hawthorne. Literary classics. My aunt acquired these books over a period of years by saving coupons cut from the newspaper. It took several coupons and 40 cents to purchase each volume. I used to look at them through locked, leaded glass doors in the bookcase that stood in the corner of my grandmother’s living room. The gold lettering on the spines shimmered like jewelry. My aunt is now 85. Much of the gold lettering has worn off the bindings and the deckled-edges have yellowed. I still have these books, too.

As a student at Hampshire College, I learned how to run the big, clunky letterpress in the arts building. I loved the way type literally made an impression on the page. Meanwhile, reknowned print-makers Leonard Baskin and Barry Moser were teaching at Smith College. I didn’t study with them but I followed their work. When Moser published his own illustrated version of Alice in Wonderland, I snapped up the commercially-produced first edition. It shared many aspects of the much pricier letterpress edition: gloriously large-format, marbled endpapers and purple binding cloth, stunning interior design with bold, darkly humorous illustrations, and beautifully-set texts. It’s no longer in print, and I still have it.

Settling in Boston after college, I encountered something of a letterpress printing revival. In a burst of enthusiasm for the more tactile aspects of putting words to paper, letterpress print shops had sprung up in many cities. It was exciting to see people put their passion to work in this way, bringing back a technology and a sense of craft that had been commercially outmoded decades before.

Ironically enough, all this was happening just a few years before personal computers and desktop publishing hit the scene.