Square letters
Foundry Hebrew, including nikkud when the text requires it. Ketubah clauses, psalms, and family names set with the same care as a title page.
Bezalel · Jerusalem
Type, impression, paper.
A Hebrew and Latin letterpress atelier. We set metal, ink the form, and print stationery, broadsides, ketubah commissions, and editions small enough to number by hand.
The atelier
Printed, not reproduced.
Jerusalem Letterpress opened in 2009 in a room on Bezalel Street, a few doors from the old art-school quarter and a short walk into Nahlaot. We are a working press, not a copy shop and not a digital printer. Hebrew and Latin sit in the same cases. Cotton sheets wait in the drawer until the form is ready. The impression is the work: type into fibre, once, then again, until the edition is complete.
Clients come for correspondence suites, wedding ketubot, broadsides of verse, and book plates that will outlast the volumes they mark. We decline bulk flyers, photocopy work, and anything that belongs on a toner drum. If the job wants a plate, a make-ready, and a quiet afternoon, it belongs here.
Three registers
What the shop holds
Roman & italic
English, French, and German lines for bilingual stationery, colophons, and broadsides. The Latin cases sit opposite the Hebrew, not as an afterthought.
Cotton sheets
One hundred percent cotton, deckled or trimmed, in ivory and a restrained warm white. No clay-coated stock. The bite of the type is the point.
The sequence
How a sheet is made
Every commission, from a visiting card to a numbered broadside, follows the same three movements.
Compose
The text is set by hand from the cases. Hebrew reads toward the compositor’s left; Latin toward the right. Leading, spacing, and the measure are decided on the stone before a single sheet is wasted.
Ink
Oil-based inks are mixed in small lots: oxblood, indigo, iron black, and an ivory tint for blind impression. The rollers take a thin film. Too much ink fills the counters; too little starves the serif.
Impression
The iron press closes. The sheet takes the type. Make-ready is adjusted until the impression is even from the headline to the last line of the colophon. Then the edition is run.
In the room
Figures, not slogans
2009
Founded
2
Iron presses
14
Cases of type
100%
Cotton sheets
Commissions
Bring a text. We will find the type.
Ketubah wording, a poem for a wall, a suite of cards, or a plate for a private library: write to the studio with the language, the quantity, and the date you need the sheets.
Open a commission