The Anchorage Press

The Anchorage Press is a working laboratory of letterpress equipment dedicated to the study of fine typography and innovative partnership of image and text. The Anchorage Press is located in Jolicure, New Brunswick and has served a teaching studio for the students of Mount Allison University under the lead of Thaddeus Holownia for over a decade.

The Anchorage Press developed out of Holownia's knowledge as a communications and fine arts student in Windsor, Ontario and his experiences as a young artist in Toronto during the late 1960's and early 1970's. It was during those times when he was already making images and collections of images that he decided that photography was a means of expression by which he had facilities to do so. During those days, the Toronto arts community was less divided and general eagerness for experimentation shadowed the line between technologies and disciplines. His involvement with an artist-run gallery called A Space gave way to his meeting creative people from many fields including people from Coach House Press. This early exposure to small-scale printing and publishing opened Holownia's vision of the realizing possibilities that books were a means of presenting his photographs.

In 1977 when Holownia went to New Brunswick to teach in the fine arts department in Mount Allison University, he brought his ideas with him. Being the resourceful artist, he had begun acquiring odds and sods of printing equipment that were being retired from local printshops.

In about 1983, he was able to establish a temporary print-shop that crouched in the basement of the university's library. In an attempt to encourage interest in printing and print history in the community, he helped organize the 1987 Anchorage Symposium on Printing and Publishing in Atlantic Canada in concurrence with the University's Centre for Canadian Studies. This event was not much to what Holownia expected from the arts community that he expected.

In the same year he approached Mount Allison's administration to propose the conversion of an old carriage house on the campus into a ‘poet's house' with a letterpress printshop having a living space for an artist or writer-in-residence. He believed that an active press had the probability of being a centre of cultural activity not only in the campus but in the community. The administration however did not share the same vision and so it was not realized. Holownia disappointed established his own imprint taking on the local nickname of the carriage house ‘the Anchorage'. By fall of 1987, the Anchorage Press was moved out from the library and into the addition at Jolicure.

The Anchorage Press became a private press with the move to Jolicure in 1987. Over the years, the Anchorage Press has produced books, exhibition catalogues and ephemera for the university, as well as casting the names in lead of the Mount Allison graduates and printing them on the university's diplomas. The university and the community has somehow benefited on Holownia's Anchorage Press, not to mention his generosity of teaching in the university.