Welcome to the Chase Alley Press!

I’ve been distant on my blogging these last months, as we have had extensive family upheaval. After moving in January 2016, and spending a full year moving / working on the old house / finally selling the old house, my aunt was in a car accident in November 2016. This led to the most trips between Tennessee and Maryland that I ever thought possible. Trips to sort out her things, to clean out and sell her house when it became obvious she could not return home, and to move those family heirlooms that I wanted from her home. Then in January 2017, my grandfather fell ill with pneumonia, and without my aunt to assist, we brought him home with hospice car in February 2017 to his home in Maryland. We made many trips to visit family over the year, and my grandfather died in December 2017.

In these first few months of 2018, we have been frantically cleaning out my grandfather’s home (which he purchased over fifty years ago) of all of the items that we wanted to keep — including his printshop. My grandfather, Jacob LaRue Warner, was a hobby printer for over 50 years. Here is an article he wrote in his monthly journal The Boxwooder, which was reprinted in Type & Press in 1989.

http://vandercookpress.info/downloads/articles/T&P%20articles/t&p-warner.pdf

And here is a very well researched obituary article written about my grandfather, written by Dave Tribby for The Fossil:

http://www.thefossils.org/fossil/fos374.pdf

All of this leads to the birth of the Chase Alley Press. Marc and I are very grateful to be done with the printshop moving process, (which included riggers using cranes to move equipment from the basement to our truck) and have taken possession of all of the presses, type, printed matter, and other equipment from the Boxwood Press and are naming our private press the Chase Alley Press. We shall be publishing a series of articles about the presses and the shop as we complete our inventory and restoration process.

Edit: This didn’t happen yet, but if you want to see my husband’s digital inventory of our collection of printed amateur journals, you want to go here: https://jakesjournals.com

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