Jesse Marsolais is keeping the letterpress and lettercarving craft well and alive
Jesse’s camera didn’t work while we talked on Zoom, but I could hear him softly carving away at something in the background. He told me about his work as a letterprinter, lettercarver, and collector of ephemera. “I've dedicated myself as a steward of these crafts, and I feel very lucky to be able to carry on at a commercial level,” he said. “It’s a lifestyle commitment to traditional craft, in the face of wiser counsel and very little financial reward,” he said with a chuckle.
Marsolais has been a letterprinter, lettercarver and general physical print artist since the mid 2000s, and this is his second time participating in the Northampton Book Fair. Marsolais discovered letterprinting while studying creative writing at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, a liberal arts institute heavily inspired by Tibetan Buddhism. The university obtained a letter press for free when those presses became practically obsolete for most commercial printing in the 1970s. “It was there that I was first exposed to it, but it wasn't until I actually graduated and then moved back to the Boston area, where I'm from, and basically crashed out of the publishing industry, that I remembered how much fun I had as a letterpress printer.”
Marsolais ascribes his non-conventional journey towards artisanal craft to his experience at Naropa University. “It was a place where you couldn’t just take things at face value; you had to kind of create your own spaces.” It was under that ethos that Marsolais was able to secure independent credit to study abroad in St. Petersburg, Russia, even though Naropa had no Russian/Slavic Studies department. Naropa gave him “an appetite for creating these opportunities,” and that carried into his career as an artisanal print artist.
He then worked at a greeting card company for a while as a graphic designer before securing an apprenticeship with John Kristensen of Firefly Letter Press in Boston, where he worked for six years, from 2007 to 2013. In 2012 he also received a grant to study with Nick Benson at the John Stevens Shop in Newport, Rhode Island, but in 2013 he decided “it was time to leave the nest and fly on my own for a little while,” so he moved to Central Massachusetts where he started working as an independent print artist.
Another move to Cape Cod solidified him a little more, until a teaching job at Yale’s “Art of the Printed Word” seminar came up in 2021, and he took the job, moving him to Eastern Connecticut. Marsolais is now an instructor for the seminar and manages the Jonathan Edwards College Press, which is one of three remaining residential college presses at Yale, which has a rich printing tradition that has stayed alive centuries after the school’s opening. “It's cool to be the inheritor and the steward of this tradition,” he said. “I'm really trying to secure it so that other people have access to the press and benefit from it as well.”
Marsolais is also a collector and seller of ephemera, which he will be exhibiting and selling at the Northampton Book Fair. Originally interested in them due to a lack of purchasing power, he has now come to prefer ephemera. “I think I'm attracted to the intimate format. I'm kind of a miniaturist at heart, so I like smaller expressions,” he said. “There's a poetic quality to something that is not meant to last forever.” Marsolais will also be bringing different mediums of print to the fair with him, including broadsides, chapbooks and carved items to exhibit and sell.
He gave some advice to individuals wanting to break into bookselling or the craft of artisanal printing: “Every time you think you've come to a wall, it's at least a window or a door. You can find your way into the next room if you're sufficiently motivated.” Catch Marsolais at this year’s Northampton Book Fair, Friday, November 20th, 5-8 pm and Saturday, November 21st, 10am - 4pm at Northampton Center for the Arts, 33 Hawley Street.
Written by Francisco Aguirre-Ghiso, 21 October, 2026
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