There’s a moment in letterpress printing when the machine goes quiet and you lift the sheet to see whether the ink, pressure, and paper all agreed with one another. For Broadside, we recently spent the afternoon hand-printing posters on a Vandercook proof press surrounded by trays of type, ink rollers, and decades of printing history. While the Vandercook is a 20th-century machine rather than an 18th-century common press, it still shares some of the qualities that made colonial broadsides feel alive: the slight bite of the type into paper, the unevenness of ink, and the sense that every sheet carries the mark of the human being who pulled it.
Broadside is a musical about words becoming action, long before social media existed.
That physicality matters to us. Broadside is a musical about words becoming action, about pamphlets, songs, satire, and printed pages shaping public opinion long before social media existed. Standing in a working print shop, watching fresh ink roll across metal type, it suddenly becomes very easy to understand how a single broadside could stir up an entire city. You can fake the look of an old broadside on a computer screen. But there’s something different about hearing the rollers turn, smelling the ink, and holding the paper in your hands.
