Sometimes a person’s life takes an unforeseen turn and ends up entirely different than expected.
That’s certainly the case for letterpress printer Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr. The mathematics major was living in Chicago and working in a corporate office of AT&T when he got blindsided by his calling in life.
Kennedy spoke May 6 to a crowd at Stair District Library as part of the 2025 Michigan Notable Books program. The book “Citizen Printer” is about his work.
Kennedy wasn’t even aware of letterpress printing until he visited Colonial Williamsburg while on vacation with his sons in the late 1980s. He stepped into the village print shop — saw the moveable type that created inked images on paper — and his life changed.
“I was fascinated by it,” he said, and when he returned home to Chicago, he couldn’t stop thinking about the process.
He found an organization that taught an adult enrichment course in letterpress printing and he enrolled. Then he took a second course.
“And then lo and behold I got a printing press,” he said. “Somehow this one thousand pound printing press followed me home and I put it in my basement.”
The timing was good because his wife was out of town and there was no argument about bringing the thing into the house.
“I would print at night. It was a fun thing to do,” Kennedy said. “I rode the L to work in Chicago and I would just hand out what I printed. Normally it was a proverb or a poem. Some people were reluctant to take it because people hand out all sorts of stuff, but then when they saw it and saw the way it was printed, a lot of people came back and asked for a second one because they enjoyed it.”
After a few years he made a break from the security of his job and went back to school to study printing and earn a Masters of Fine Arts degree.
“I tried for three and a half years to work within academia, but I found that it was not worth the effort to try to shape that institution in my mold and I struck out on my own.”
He packed his equipment into an 18-wheel semi and moved to a small town in Alabama, taking the next 10 years to hone his craft.
Kennedy began making posters similar to the large advertisements for festivals and musical events. Someone came into the shop one day and bought a poster simply because the date of an event marked the day of the couple’s engagement.
“Then I realized I could sell these as something else. So I started making these things that I call oversize greeting cards,” he said.
Proverbs, aphorisms, axioms, sayings — these began filling his cards rather than advertisements. And he developed a style characterized by multiple layers of ink.
“This one probably went through the press five times,” he told the audience as he held up a sample of his work.
Kennedy often changes the routine in the middle of a press run and mixes up the order of the color layers. The result is a distinctive finished product.
“Each card is unique as each of us is unique,” he said, “but we have this underlying thing in common.”
He never sees a mistake as a problem.
“Perfection to me is imperfection. I believe in random. Chaos is the natural state of things. I believe that order is only chaos we understand.”
A friend of his once said that he was a bad printer and Kennedy readily accepted the title Amos Kennedy’s School of Bad Printing.
Kennedy now has thousands of cards in his Detroit shop — stacks and stacks of them.
“You would think I would stop, but I can’t. Anyone else would think I have a problem, but I do it and I continue to do it. Of all the things I’ve tried in my life, it’s the best thing that I do.”
The art of letterpress printing
PEOPLE TAKE existing technology and hobble it together to get something new, said Kennedy in explaining the art of letterpress printing. That was the case with German craftsman and inventor Johannes Gutenberg, who developed the printing press around 1440.
“He was a fascinating individual,” Kennedy said.
Metalsmiths knew how to cast metal for jewelry, so Gutenberg learned the skill to advance his new idea.
“He realized he could use a wine press to apply pressure and release ink. Gradually he put all of these things together to make what we consider the first printing press in Europe.”
It wasn’t just a new machine. It led to an astounding revolution in human communication. Before Gutenberg’s invention, books and other documents were all written by hand. Scribes would spend hours in a scriptorium or in a library tediously copying every word to create a copy of a book.
The printing press relieved a portion of the tedium — now a worker had to collect each letter of a word and arrange it backward so the printing could be read correctly — but once that job was done, multiple copies of the book could be made and distributed. This sparked the growth of universities around the world.
However, that wasn’t the first use of the press. The medieval Catholic Church realized it could sell many more indulgence cards — a practice in which individuals could buy an indulgence to reduce their time in purgatory.
Investors made a lot of money off the production of the printing press; Gutenberg lost the rights to the invention and never did prosper from it.
“It’s been a tradition in printing since then that you can easily go broke becoming a printer,” Kennedy said.
Four hundred years after Gutenberg came the second revolution.
“While many of us think we live in an amazing time with the development of the computer and digital technology, it pales in comparison to what letterpress printing did,” Kennedy explained. “It really revolutionized the world, and that revolution didn’t really take place until late in the 19th century.”
Efforts were underway to speed up the type composition process and German immigrant Ottmar Mergenthaler came through with a solution. Rather than picking out each individual letter, the operator of the new linotype machine could set an entire line of type using melted lead, operated by an individual seated at a keyboard.
The time needed to compose a book or create a newspaper was trimmed by a huge factor.
Once again, that revolution was overshadowed in the 1960s and 70s when offset printing took over, eliminating the need for wooden and metal type completely.
“When a printing process is no longer commercially viable,” Kennedy says, “it becomes an art form.”
But be careful with the word “artist,” he’ll add, because that’s not a word he uses to describe himself.
Kennedy remembers speaking with an artist friend about her impressive exhibit in a gallery.
“She said to me, ‘Amos, I can’t afford my own work.’ ”
Kennedy understands there are costs to create items and that artists need to make a living, but he doesn’t want to create art that people can’t afford.
“I consider myself more as a craftsperson,” he said. “Artists’ work has all these deep meanings. My work is ‘Have fun, be happy.’ Although I do have some work in esteemed locations, more importantly I have my work in more than 5,000 homes in America.”