About
Brabant Letterpress operated from a converted weaver's loft on the Heuvelstraat in central Tilburg between 2014 and 2024. The workshop printed broadsides of Dutch folklore poetry, harvest almanacks, and folk-song chapbooks on a 1908 Heidelberg Original platen and a 1956 Vandercook proof press. It closed in spring 2024 when the building was sold. This site is the archive.
The workshop was a single room, a converted weaver's loft on the third floor of a narrow house on the Heuvelstraat. North-facing window. Heidelberg in one corner, Vandercook against the opposite wall, type cabinet to the left of the stairs, inking bench in the middle. The whole room about thirty square metres. Two printers could work at once if neither was at the cabinet. Mostly there was one, which was me.
The workshop is closed. The presses are at a printer in Antwerp who has agreed to host me one week per quarter, indefinitely. The cabinet is with them. The paper, the ink, and the rest of the inventory are in a friend's barn outside Boxtel. The archive is here.
Founder & sole printer: Joris Vermeulen
Operated: 2014 to 2024
Location: Heuvelstraat, Tilburg, North Brabant
Contact: archive@example.invalid
Broadsides of Dutch and Flemish folklore poetry. Annual almanacks. Chapbooks of folk-song lyrics from Brabant and Limburg, set in Caslon or Bembo, printed in editions of 80 to 240. Occasional commissions, wedding announcements, posters for small concerts in Tilburg and Den Bosch, a series of harvest-festival broadsides for villages in the south-east of the province. Roughly forty-eight broadsides over ten years, plus a dozen chapbooks and three annual almanacks.
The originals are not for sale. The archive is not selling reproductions. The broadsides exist as physical objects in flat files at a friend's house outside Boxtel and, when permanent homes are eventually identified for them, will go to collections that have not yet been chosen. This site is the public record of the work. There is no shop attached to it and there will not be.
The loft on the Heuvelstraat is no longer accessible, it is being converted into apartments. The Antwerp printer who has the presses takes visitors by appointment only and is best contacted directly through his own site. I do not facilitate visits to him. If you want to see metal type and a Heidelberg in operation in 2026, write to him.