Lynn M. Jones Carves Out Her Niche 

Looking through the window at Just My Type Letterpress Paperie's new location on Second Street, you see a humming scene: a miniature letterpress, with delicate fair-trade Himalayan paper rosettes hanging above. Behind are displays of cards, prints and stickers. In keeping with the shop's theme, it has an old-timey feel. Shops all over the country sell owner Lynn Jones' hand-printed stationery, cards, notepads, art prints, tea towels and calendars, all of which feature her linoleum block prints. Stationery Trends Magazine named her one of ten designers to watch in 2022.

"I've always loved making things. My favorite part of school was anything that involved using my hands," says Jones, who moved from the East Bay to Humboldt County in 1996, attending Humboldt State University and majoring in studio art. Neither of her parents was artistic, but she ended up one of a few hundred letterpress artists in the country.

One summer during college, she interned with legendary Berkeley graphic artist and printmaker David Lance Goines, who taught her how to hand-carve linoleum blocks and use a letterpress, where the text or image is on a raised surface, as on a rubber stamp. 

After graduating, Jones moved back in with her parents, a period that lasted only for the three days she needed to figure out where her relationship with Andy, her college boyfriend and eventual husband, was going. The couple ended up living in the Bay Area for three years but moved back to Humboldt in 2005, when the former Lambert & McKeehan Printers sold her their letterpresses. She had started acquiring printing equipment in 2003 and this was the collection she needed to fully set up a studio. They now live with their two teenage children in a home they designed themselves in Blue Lake.

Jones has three main letterpresses: a 1964 fully automatic Heidelberg Windmill, built in East Germany; a labor-intensive hand-fed 1925 Chandler & Price, owned by Dick Taylor Craft Chocolate; and the 1947 Vandercook 219OS, on which she prints her limited edition art on sheets up to 18-by-24 inches with beautiful ink coverage. 

Much of her early business entailed printing custom wedding invitations. In 2015, she started printing letterpress packaging for Dick Taylor Craft Chocolate, with its trademark nautical images and vintage feel. A turning point came in 2016, when Jones opened a retail storefront at 501 Third Street, into the restored historic Carson Block Building. About 20 brick and mortar stores sell their own in-house letterpress stationery in the U.S., but Just My Type is the only one using hand-carved linoleum block prints.

Since childhood, when Jones would play, walk, run and bike in the East Bay Regional Parks, the natural world has been important to her, and she now includes nature in much of her work. Her images cover a broad spectrum, from California poppies to scorpions, Victorian buildings to skulls, some whimsical like a floral skateboard and a cat with a book.

Though Jones has gone beyond the print medium on occasion. In 2019, she departed from her letterpress activities for over a month to paint the wall-length mural of redwoods, "Reverence for Elders," in the Melvin Schuler Sculpture Garden of Morris Graves Museum of Art during the Eureka Street Art Festival. It's 36 feet tall and 17 feet wide. The image is based on her linoleum block print of the same name and was created especially for that space. "Reverence for Elders" is visible from Seventh Street even when the museum is closed. "It was an opportunity I couldn't pass up," Jones says, "I'd never painted a mural, but to have a piece at the Morris Graves that might never be taken down, I had to give it a shot."

"Retail wasn't my dream," Jones says. "Actively selling makes me feel like a carnival barker." Still, the shop did so well that in 2020 she moved around the corner to the big space in the front of the building. She had already started selling her products on the wholesale market in 2019, now under the name Lynn-oleum. She goes to wholesale trade shows all over the country and sells through her website and the San Francisco-based website Faire, which "is trying to be the Amazon of wholesale business."

Wholesale is now 60 percent of Jones' business, while retail is 30 percent and Dick Taylor just 10. She'd like to increase the retail share but foot traffic in Old Town has decreased. "Plenty of locals supported us during the pandemic," Jones says, "but now everybody seems to be back to normal and not as many locals are coming to Old Town. People need to realize that for local businesses to survive, they need consistent patronage. Old Town isn't just for tourists and holidays."

On June 1, Just My Type Paperie moved to 324 Second St. Jones didn't want to deal with the upcoming roadwork on F Street ("no one wants to come into a store listening to jackhammers outside!"). And she wanted to be accessible during the Friday Night Market. When her storefront was located in the Carson Block Building, only a half block away, no one drinking a beer at the market could get near it due to the strictly maintained alcohol boundary.

Jones never tires of the work, especially the carving phase, which involves careful, meticulous attention to detail. She loves pushing a carving tool through linoleum and deciding what to carve away to create the negative space in the final print. Her long-term goal is to focus solely on the creative part of her business, to be an artist doing her work in Blue Lake. "If I had to pick one thing to do for the rest of my life, it would be hand carving linoleum blocks," she says.

Louisa Rogers (she/her) writer, painter and paddleboarder who lives in Eureka and Guanajuato, Mexico.