COMMUNITY
Chris Decker
Bringing the Vineyard into the Digital Ad of Print Production
By Abby Remer
Walk into the Tisbury Printer and, even if you haven’t been there before, it feels like home. On any given day, folks will come in wanting them to print a sweet little plaque for their child, a newsletter for a local nonprofit, a wide-format poster for fundraisers, or business cards for an entrepreneur who is just starting out.
Like many things in life, Chris Decker became the owner of the Tisbury Printer through a series of unexpected events.
When Decker’s high school girlfriend, now wife, Nelia, graduated from college, she worked at a bookstore in Santa Barbara. The owners decided to move the store to Martha’s Vineyard and opened the Book Den East in Oak Bluffs in 1978. Decker recalls, “They really wanted her to stay on the Vineyard, so they thought, ‘Well, why don’t we buy a business that Chris can run so we can keep her here?’ They looked at a couple of options, including a laundromat. Thankfully, they didn’t buy that.
Instead, they bought a small, run-down print shop across from their current location near Five Corners in Vineyard Haven. “I came out September 1, 1978. I knew nothing about printing. At the end of the second year, I became a partner.” Eventually, the owners sold the business to Decker in 1982. “We had contemplated moving back to California, but the Island kind of grows on you. The longer you’re here, the harder it is to get away because it’s quite lovely. The community is unlike any I’ve experienced elsewhere. The support, the connections, the care. And it’s a wonderful place to live and raise children.”
Decker shares, “Originally, as the first and only employee, I was the Tisbury Printer. When I had to go back to finish my college degree. Dan Waters took over for the winter and stayed as the resident typographer. Then we grew fast. By the mid-1990s, I had 11 employees because there were no real computers. Janet Holiday was my longest-serving employee. Kevin Cain and Don Groover are the current members of the dream team. Before then, people had to go to a printer for everything. Nobody had their own copiers or publishing software. Way back then, it was different. We had so much work because anything that was ultimately printed had to be done by a professional printer. We did lots of envelopes, letterheads, business cards, flyers, posters, and carbonless forms. It’s not that way now, with people using their own copiers, the internet, or buying things online.”
Decker recalls an example of the kind of project that would come in before computers were available. “A carpenter came with a sketch of a business card on a shingle. I said, ‘Why don’t we photograph the shingle and print it in brown, with the type in black?’ He said that would be great.” Printing was much more labor-intensive in those days. “I think people forget or have never lived in a society where printing was very hands-on. We had to create every single document for pre-press, including the layouts, before printing, and then paste them down with wax.”
Decker describes what now feels like an archaic process. “We had three offset presses that required loading ink into the machine. If the job involved color, you had to wash out the previous color, prepare the ink you needed, print that one job, and then wash the ink out again. My hands were dirty for about 30 years, with ink under my nails.” Given the labor and time involved, Decker says, “In the olden days, printing 1,000 colored sheets took two or three weeks and might have cost $1,000 or more. Now that same job takes 15 minutes and costs $100 or $150.”
Decker has invested in digital equipment, including an envelope printer and a large color production machine that prints books, which come off collated and stapled, with a cover of a different weight than the insides. “All I have to do is face trim them along the right-hand edge, then box everything up.” And it’s fast. A 48-page booklet that used to be an all-day job can now take just a bit over an hour.
“But,” Decker continues, “I don’t think printing is going to disappear, at least not in my lifetime. There’s something tactile and sensory about holding something in your hands and flipping through it. How many people have art books on their laptops? You want to look at art in a book, turn a page, and leave it open. Printing does that for you.”
Of late, Decker has been thinking about retiring. “The nature of the business has changed a lot. But the reason I like it and am having a hard time leaving the work is that the people who walk through our door are fascinating. A human story comes in, and it charges you up. It gives you a sense of fulfillment that is important to me because it helps me feel connected. And it’s nice to be trusted and to have that as part of what we do.”
The Tisbury Printer is located at 52 Lagoon Pond Road in Vineyard Haven, 508-693-4222, tisburyprinter.com