70,000 members

Dear Elizabeth,

Congratulation on this incredible resource. I am amazed at how it has grown. Especially a site about an antiquated method of printing. Praise be to Letterpress.

I sell items occasionally. One thing I would like to see is a box to check with a percentage to be donated back to Briar Press when an item sells.

Thanks you for your wonderful site.

Mike

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This is a great idea. I’ve sold several items here & a simple way to throw a % back to the site would be nice to have.

Reality check: 70,000 past member IDs, but not 70,000 individuals. There aren’t anywhere near 70,000 individuals doing letterpress; all we can say is there are X number who have signed onto BriarPress multiple times, with no record of continuous use or any way to remove previous identity to indicate actual population.
If there were 70,000 active letterpress users, Fritz would be a millionaire, APE/AWT would still be sending out thick fantasy catalogs, and it might only take a few pop-up ads for our list-owners to coast in comfort.
Having said that, I am also grateful for the site. The Nevins have to work harder to keep it going than any other site related to letterpress (against not just ordinary spam but even the ghost of Kemal Ataturk), and for many here it is the sole source of information. That deserves more recognition than any arbitrary numbers. If I ever sold anything here, I’d give a percentage too.

How do you KNOW there aren’t 70,000 individuals who have DONE letterpress who are currently alive and capable of practicing? I’d be curious to see where you get your data/statistics from.

I mean to suggest that, well, no all of them would buy from fritz; not all of them are interested in joining a guild or organization; and not all of them would necessarily even log onto briar press….

Haven

Parallel is telling it how it is. Anyone (letterpress practitioner or no, and even spammers) can click on the membership link at Briar and they are permanently a member; there is no way to get off the membership list. So even if their email address in no longer functional, they are not really interested, or they are dead, they are still counted on the membership roster.

This is NOT an email list like as the old listservs or Y! groups where maintaining an up to date email address is a concern, where moderators have the means to purge non-functioning addresses, or members are allowed to unsubscribe.

So yes, the numbers are not realistic in terms of determining how many folks are practicing letterpress. It actually would be useful if Briar could ping the list to determine who is still out there, and purge who is not, as it would provide a more realistic indicator.

Gerald