What is Nocturnal Press?
/Late Night Origins
Nocturnal Press was founded in the summer of 2012 after Ingrid Schindall, hereafter referred to as “I”, graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art with a Bachelor’s Degree in Printmaking and Book Arts. In school I was notorious for pulling all-nighters and spending the darkest hours of the night in the printshop. So much so that my letterpress instructor and mentor, Mary Mashburn, cracked the joke, “If you ever start a shop you should call it Nocturnal Press” and so it was. I started selling handmade journals during my time at MICA and continued to do so from my living room. I bartered a very nice, custom leather sketchbook for a proper logo from a graphic designer friend of mine and Nocturnal Press became official.
The next two years were spent setting up a studio in Mount Vernon, Baltimore in a sketchy basement that found several exciting ways to flood throughout the year and a half Nocturnal Press resided there. The studio was not pretty. It was a basement that had been a church space in the 80s and had been used for storage ever since. My friend and studio-mate, Mollie Little, and I spent a month or two making the space habitable. We stapled plastic sheeting to the ceiling to keep the crumbling insulation from falling on us, we tore out a wall in the middle of the room and harvested the drywall to cover the uncovered walls in the rest of the space, we ripped up linoleum tile and covered the crumbling fireplace with a spare wall leftover from our other studio-mate’s recent art exhibition. It was hard work to set up the space but it was a useful lesson in the idea that with friends, and perhaps an unhealthily amount of optimism, anything is possible.
Bound for the tropics
Through the months of selling journals and working other jobs to pay the bills, I missed printing desperately. Unfortunately, the time I was able to spend volunteering at MICA for the Globe Collection and Press wasn’t enough to fill the need. So I started dreaming of a bigger space that would be more visitor-friendly and, ideally, less vulnerable to pipes bursting and frequent flooding. I started to research available printing presses and surveyed local areas and nearby cities to gauge their need for a community printshop. It was clear that Baltimore had a fantastic print scene with several established and friendly printshops. Philadelphia and DC seemed to be in a similar position. I tried lugging my suitcase full of books to different markets along the east coast to find a suitable market and happened upon an artist district called FATVillage not too far from where I grew up in Fort Lauderdale, FL. South Florida has the distinct advantage of abstaining from anything resembling winter, and as a summer-loving wears-a-jacket-when-it’s-70-degrees type of creature, that was a big plus. I dug into the internet and local arts magazines, I asked friends from back home and professors at MICA, to find out what was going on in the South Florida print scene. I came to the conclusion that a small, letterpress focused, community print shop would find a great home in Fort Lauderdale. The dream became a bit bigger than what the Nocturnal Press moniker could hold, so I decided on the broad name of IS Projects to allow for whatever evolution and pivots were awaiting me.
So IS Projects became the umbrella under which Nocturnal Press operates. IS Projects handles all of our public programming, workshops, residencies, gallery exhibitions, artists’ book publishing, artists’ talks and so on, while Nocturnal Press remains active as our boutique printshop, retail space, and bindery. A major portion of our revenue stream is commissioned printing and all of that falls under Nocturnal Press.
Nocturnal Press Today
Nocturnal Press specializes in letterpress printing, screen printing, fine binding, and custom design work. We print everything from business cards to high-end art prints, wedding invitations to gig posters, and whatever else our clients bring to us. We have made custom books for celebrities, artists, locals, designers, architects, billionaires, writers, poets, festivals, and universities. We enjoy every step of the process from the first consultation to putting the finishing touches on freshly bound books. IS Projects and Nocturnal Press make a great team and many of the projects we work on require resources from both entities like when we create items for an event and run a live printing demonstration or a corresponding workshop. The distinction between the two companies is not always obvious from the shop because they share the same space and a very similar mission. The best way to sum up the difference is that IS Projects will help you make it yourself and Nocturnal Press will make it for you. If you’re looking for fine printing on paper check out www.Nocturnal.Press and we’ll make sure you make the right impression!