NYC shop handprints Valentine's cards

A Valentine's Day card, hand typeset and printed on a 19th century wooden press, has designs of dainty Victorian women, Cupids and roses on heart-shaped parchment paper that give a texture of intimacy lost in the less personal world of email.

"It's really special to see and hold a hand-printed card that is so beautiful," said Alla Bronskaya, 25, of Manhattan.

Bronskaya was buying $2 Valentine cards at the Bowne & Co. Stationers at the South Street Seaport -- a historic Water Street storefront dating to 1775 that is being preserved and operated by The Museum of the City of New York.

"To send and communicate with a card that is hand printed in a textural way like this is a human gift," said Robert Warner, the shop's master printer for 17 years.

"It's an everlasting card for my friends and family who appreciate the parchment paper and end up using them as bookmarks," said Bronskaya, who lives in the neighborhood and is a freelance filmmaker.

"It's a card that my friends and family care about and keep. It doesn't get lost in the electronic shuffle of emails," she said as she selected another 19th century imprint of the Brooklyn Bridge with a red-heart dimensional tag pasted on.

Bowne & Co. originally was a dry goods store that evolved into a commercial printing shop for lower Manhattan's seafaring industry. Bowne & Co. printed invoices and documents, and was founded by Quaker merchant Robert Bowne, who founded the Bank of New York. His portrait prominently hangs above the wooden press today. Due to financial problems, the South Street Seaport Museum and the print shop closed Valentine's Day 2011, but the shop, under the City Museum's umbrella, reopened in October.

In keeping with the 200-year-old tradition of Victorian valentines, the print shop sells design appliqués such as lightly sparkled, hand-painted bird cutouts, and embroidery threads to decorate a card.

"Back then, people would cut out pieces of scrap paper and glue them down onto the cards, using up to three pieces to make it dimensional," said Warner. "They would even use their mother's embroidery threads to make their own cards."

Warner stumbled onto the shop in 1995. "I came in to buy cards. There were two women in the back of the store printing with no one in front shop keeping. I asked them if I could volunteer and they said I could, but that I could not learn how to print.

"The two women never spoke to each other. Then, finally, one day one of them quit and I got to learn how to print," said the former optician, who fitted glasses for Andy Warhol and Jacqueline Onassis.

Warner's optical precision was a natural for hand-set printing.

"This is a gift. I've never been more passionate," he said as he rolled out the rubber-based red ink over an engraved metal plate of a rose with all its natural petal, leaf and thorny stem details.

To operate the press, Warner leans into its floor board and turns a wooden throttle clockwise to move the ink plate across the paper.

"I can make four cards in a minute," with the 1844 press, he said. "I have 1,600 different typesets of letters I can use."

Said Bronskaya, "This man makes Valentine's fun."