Columbia Home Magazine - February/March 2011

In the past two years, the creative duo has invested in two larger motorized presses and produced hundreds of note cards, prints, calendars and custom wedding invitations based on their hand-drawn designs. While also working full-time jobs, the women have grown a wide customer base for 1Canoe2 at the local art shop Poppy and on Etsy.com, an online arts and crafts market through which they sell most of their items.

“We think of things that would be fun to draw and products that people might like,” Snyder says of their casual, playful philosophy. “While we like to sell them, a lot of our projects in the past year were done just because we wanted to do them.”

Fir st i mp re ssi o ns When Snyder received her new hobby for Christmas in 2007, she was working for a Nashville television station. In her downtime, she learned to operate her letterpress by consulting a friend with a similar machine and websites run by “old-geezer printers.”

Snyder became her own first client and produced four-piece invitations for her wedding. “I probably printed 200 just to have 75 that looked halfway decent; that’s how hard it was to print them,” she says. “It’s neat the way they look now, though, because they’re kind of wonky and look handmade.”

Shryock, who was living in Columbia, traveled to Tennessee occasionally to visit Snyder and her letterpress. “Beth was always telling me about how cool it was,” Shryock says. “But at first, I couldn’t even picture what it looked like.”

Invented by Johannes Guttenberg in the 1400s, letterpress printing impresses inked metal letters, etched plates or carved blocks into paper. What was once the most efficient publishing method is now a tedious art form appreciated for its handcrafted, rather than mass-produced, quality.

When Snyder and her husband decided to move to Fulton in August 2008, she and Shryock hatched a plan to work together under the name 1Canoe2, a nod to college summers they spent floating down Missouri rivers (one canoe, two girls), skipping rocks and dreaming big dreams around campfires.

Snyder and Shryock started by selling letterpressed recipe cards in handcrafted wooden boxes and then limited-edition calendars on Etsy. “Once I saw how successful those were, I realized this could work,” says Snyder, who began contemplating the purchase of a larger motorized press that wouldn’t have to be hand-cranked. The question was where to find a place for a 2,000-pound press. They talked about putting it in Snyder’s basement until Shryock asked her dad if 1Canoe2 could operate from their family-owned Shryocks’ Big Red Barn.

“He was all for it,” Shryock says. “My dad really likes old things, and it just kind of fits here.”

In fact, it looks like the kind of Midwestern scene you’d find on a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. Along a quiet road off I-70, the cherry-red barn sits amid acres of farmland. Inside the whitetrimmed door and beyond the tractors being repaired are two iron Chandler & Price letterpresses from a bygone era.

“With the Internet, you don’t have to live in New York to be an illustrator,” Snyder says. “You can live in the middle of a cornfield.”

How customers find their products online is somewhat mysterious, she says, especially because they haven’t done much marketing. “Something will get featured on a blog somewhere, and then we’ll sell a ton of them. By a ton, I mean like 30 or something, which means a lot for us.” columbia home | 57