This interview was conducted via email by one of our researchers, Emma Grace Avery, with Clemens Bak on September 26th, 2023.

 

Emma Grace: Please provide a brief history of your company and how you got involved with letterpress and printmaking? How many presses do you own and what models?

 

Clemens Bak: We are actually a non-profit organization that was founded in 2014 as a project of a local community arts organization. The shop existed from 2015 to 2021 when we decided not to renew our lease due to the covid epidemic. The founders of the Red Onion Press were and are printmakers and in two cases, myself and the late Hugh Mckay, trained and experienced commercial printers at an early age. I am Clemens Bak, and my experience goes back to my childhood, as the son of two immigrant artists who established a print studio in the 1960's in Chicago, where they produced limited edition art books and held classes in relief printing, intaglio and stone lithography among other things. I went on to a 35year career as an industrial engineer, specializing in the design and manufacturing of die cutting and specialized printing equipment for an array of end users in the automotive and electronic market. I have been retired since 2016, maintain a workshop at KSU and in my garage where we continue to support both schools and artists/letterpress shops with repairs and restoration of equipment throughout the south. Our members all have either their own presses or access to presses. Prior to downsizing the shop we had 4 platen presses including two C & P 8 x 12 and a Golding No. 4 Pearl Press, A C & P paper cutter and a Bindery press we converted into a wheeled Iron Hand Press that functions much like the original Gutenberg Press and can be used on field trips to demonstrate how printing was done in the early days of moveable type. 

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Emma Grace: What is the Red Onion Press up to now since closing your physical shop?

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Clemens Bak: Presently the Red Onion, which has a close relation to Kennesaw State University has been focused on restoration of letterpress and printmaking equipment that has been donated to the school and working on a partnership with the Printmaking Studio at Kennesaw State on a fine arts book first edition based around a set of 180 woodblocks that were used in the production of a set of 6 classics of English literature produced as a film strip collection for Encyclopedia Brittanica in the early 1960's.  We also continue to offer short run letterpress printing to the public to help fund our work.