The Press
Sell provenance, not posters.
There are ten thousand three-dollar Declarations on the internet, and every one of them was made in a browser. What nobody else can sell is what we already own: a working press, a family that has printed in Austin for decades, and someone who will check the quotes.
The story is ours by trade. The Revolution was made by printers. Benjamin Franklin was one. On the night of July 4, 1776, John Dunlap set the Declaration in Caslon and ran roughly two hundred broadsides before dawn. Isaiah Thomas moved his press out of Boston days before Lexington and later wrote the first history of printing in America. No relation, same trade — and we say so.
A print shop that prints the founding documents is not a novelty store. It is the original business.
The three house rules
Cited
Every quote carries its source, date, and document — on the product page and on the sheet. If we cannot cite it, we do not print it. No spurious Jefferson.
Pre-partisan
The store belongs to the founding era, not to a party. The founding documents belong to everyone.
Printed here
Every physical print comes off our press in Austin and says so. Not print on demand. Not a fulfillment warehouse.
The family and the floor
Jacob E. Thomas, PhD
Chooses the documents, checks every citation against the archives, and keeps the store honest.
Ben Thomas
Runs the shop floor, the stock, and the shipping bench. If a tube reached you early with the label on straight, that was Ben.
David Olivo
Prints, inspects, and numbers every edition by hand. Nothing leaves the shop without passing his eye — nothing ever has.
The information side of this shop — the catalog, the letters, the ledger — is kept by machines that read; every sheet, every price, and every claim of “cited” is approved by a human being.
Paper, inks, and the runs
Shipping. Rolled loose around a core, kraft-wrapped, capped, and shipped in a tube from Austin. Free in the U.S. on prints over $75; sets ship in one tube. Framing. Editions can be framed through our local framer before shipping — write the desk for the current rate.
Our sources
National Archives and Library of Congress transcriptions; portrait art from National Gallery of Art open access; maps from the Library of Congress; Texas documents from the Texas State Library and Archives. Every product page reads like a museum label — source, typeface, paper, press, edition — because that label is the product.
Write the shop
A question, a wholesale inquiry, a school order, a quote you think we got wrong — the desk answers by letter within two working days.