Robert Frost’s casual suggestion in 1939 that members of both the School and Writers’ Conference should publish two or three small books “printed by hand and even set by the authors themselves” was taken seriously by School of English Director Harry Owen. Through the fall and following spring, he and Dean Storrs Lee acquired essential printing equipment and designated the old Hubbard Study as the home of the Bread Loaf Printers.
Master printer Frank DeWitt ‘29, and assistant John Paul Torrey arrived nearly a month before the School opened in 1940, cleaned and renovated the cabin for its new role as print studio, and pulled the first proof of the first job just days before classes started – with Frost in attendance. DeWitt instructed eighteen Bread Loafers that first summer of printing, and they set type for BLP’s first two publications Stops, and Only on the West Wind, the poetry of Florida Watts Smyth. (Image at right: Florida Watts Smyth and Louis Untermeyer reviewing proof of print on Printer’s Cabin porch, 1940.)
The Bread Loaf Printers supported many English School activities by hand printing pamphlets and poetry broadsides, menus, commencement and theater programs, Christmas cards, book plates, and other small format publications.
Offset printing, however, would displace letterpress at Bread Loaf in the 1960s, and though the press enjoyed a resurgence in the late 1980s, led by Professor John Fleming, it would again suspend operation in the late 1990s.
Twenty years later, Fleming’s presses have been reconditioned, and the cabin is electrified and operational. The first proof was pulled in August 2017, and is fittingly a quote by Robert Frost: “Freedom lies in being bold.”