On Friday, Sept. 5, downtown Lancaster City was abuzz as its annual Print Crawl returned to the streets to create an immersive print experience for the community. Located in Central Pennsylvania, the small city is not only known for its rich history and notable horse-and-buggy sightings – it’s also home to a thriving arts culture, myriad small businesses, and, of course, print.
Now in its ninth year, the Print Crawl is a self-guided tour through Lancaster’s local print shops and creative spaces where participants create a printed, take-home poster. The crawl features a pay-what-you-can model where visitors receive a blank poster and set out on a one-mile loop. Each stop showcases a different style of printmaking – screen printing, letterpress, laser cut, 3D printing, and more – that adds a unique element to the poster. By the end of the crawl, the once-blank posters have transformed into a finished, collaborative piece of art.
“Lancaster has always been a printing hub, both locally and even internationally,” Megan Zettlemoyer, owner of Lancaster-based Typothecary Letterpress, and the driving force behind the Crawl, notes. “We also have a great design community locally, between our colleges and universities, and design agencies that call Lancaster home. In a world where ‘print is dead’ has become a pretty common phrase, I felt we needed to let our community know that it is very much alive and well here at home.
Lancaster Print Crawl Strengthens Community Through Print