The 'Church of Type' Spreads the Gospel of Letterpress

If Johannes Gutenberg or Ben Franklin walked off of Pico Boulevard and into Kevin Bradley’s Santa Monica shop, they’d feel pretty much at home.

“It's keeping that direct connection to the past alive in a contemporary fashion, but this doesn't exist in L.A.,” says Bradley. “It's been pure madness to come here and do this alone and try and make it work.”

Like those old school giants of the printing world, Bradley is a master of the handset letterpress. After two decades working in Tennessee -- including a stint at the famed Hatch Show Print design company in Nashville -- he came to California five years ago to carry on the sacred tradition in his storefront studio, the Church of Type.

The higher power is obvious the minute you enter this holy place. The walls and ceiling are covered with posters heralding classic country, blues and soul singers and prints boldly announcing wrestlers, robots, civil rights heroes, pork chops, Communists and Bigfoot.

It’s a sensory overload, like hundreds of people screaming at your eyeballs in big block letters.

There are trays of ancient of fonts, massive drawers heavy with metal type, and at the heart of it all, the enormous machines that speak a mechanical language from a time gone by.

“The printing presses, one's called Baby and one's called Maimy because she pinched my finger off once,” Bradley says. “But they all have personalities, idiosyncrasies; they're temperamental. They want some love.”

That’s not something you would say about a cold, silent, brushed steel laptop.

“I'm the only guy who's 100 percent no computer,” says Bradley. “I just do it by hand, I carve wood blocks or set type. I have over 2,000 fonts of type in here from six point to three feet tall. And so I'm a traditionalist in that way. I’m a dinosaur. But it's satisfying. It's so satisfying to make something that you feel good about.”

Bradley’s pouring a teaspoon of black ink onto the roller of a machine the size of buffalo, which creates a sound that pretty much mimics the sizzle of bacon frying. He’s making a poster for Lucinda  Williams right now. It’s taken him two full days just to set the type. He scrapes off excess ink bumps -- 'hickeys' in print shop talk -- with a razor blade and his finger.

“Everyone thinks this is so glamorous when they come in here,” he says. “But you know, I'm a dirty monkey every day with ink all over me, and my clothes are ruined. And that's how glamorous it is, you know? I'm a glorified janitor in most ways.”

Bradley has the janitor look down pat. He wears a rumpled work shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and his splattered jeans look like a printing press threw up on them. But the shoes are a different story: vintage black and white wing tips that could have come from the closet of a Tennessee Williams lawyer.

There’s ink on the shoes too, but it goes with the work. And one-man-show Bradley certainly works, often seven days a week, well into the night as James Brown, Will Oldham and George Jones keep him company blasting from the stereo. He designs and prints everything from business cards to album covers to wedding invitations.

For the last decade he’s created posters for the Ponderosa Stomp, the yearly New Orleans roots music festival.

“To be honest, when he does posters for the Stomp, I don't even know what they are until he sends them to me,” says Dr. Ike Padnos, who founded the Stomp. He became a Church of Type disciple after seeing Bradley’s posters displayed at New Orleans’ Jazz Fest.

“It was that old school letterpress that just was so cool,” reveals Padnos. “People don't do that anymore. And then he's just taken it to another level and started going back and doing posters that almost look like the ‘50s and ‘60s with the coloring and photos, and the subject matter. Here was a guy doing wrestling stuff. You'd see the Ox. I mean, who puts the Ox on posters? Who puts Link Wray on posters? Who puts Robert Johnson on posters? It’s things that people weren’t doing at the time that made it so cool.”

But Bradley also creates pieces for himself, unexpected combinations of words, images, block print and primitive, outsider drawings. It’s striking, raw and original stuff, but is it art?

“I think that Kevin does make art and is an artist. It’s not his fault that he’s not rich and famous,” says painter and musician Bob Neuwirth. He produced the traditional country music documentary "Down From the Mountain," hiring Bradley to do some design work.

“One of the things that might be standing in Kevin's way is his authenticity,” continues Neuwirth. “I mean, he actually means it. I better keep my mouth shut after saying that, but part of what goes with being an artist are the vicissitudes of the art world.”

“My overriding idea coming to L.A. with this was I wanted to present letterpress as an art form,” Bradley says.

The Los Angeles art community apparently didn’t see it that way.

“I haven't fit into the art scene proper hardly at all. I'm such an outsider, I work on the outside of almost everything, but I can live there and do my thing.”

But he won’t be doing his thing in Los Angeles much longer. Bradley, who shares a Tennessee hometown and a passion for coonskin caps with the late Davy Crockett, will soon be returning to his roots.

“You know, it works better in the South and I think I'll be moving back there as my lease comes up here next year,” he says. “You can afford real estate, you can afford to live. It's a labor of love to be here. There's no money to be made. I wanted to share this so much with L.A. and I'm so glad I did, but they just never seen it before, and I don't know that they'll see a big operation like this again.”

With 30 tons of equipment to haul, relocating the Church will be a tribulation to be reckoned with. But moving the spirit behind the place is an effortless task for a man driven by faith.

“I want it to live and breathe and get people excited about it,” Bradley says. “And usually if I can get'em in my door I can win 'em over and at least sell 'em a poster on the way out. So that's just the uphill battle that we're all going to face with it, is trying to keep it alive.”