"Although the printing offices of Branford, Timothy Dwight, and Jonathan Edwards Colleges have been in operation but three years, the idea that lies behind them is at least as old as the Colleges themselves. At an early stage in the consideration of plans for the employment of self-supporting students, under what is now called the Bursary System, and well ahead of the opening of any of the Colleges, the training of a number of men in the craft of printing was suggested, and it was a natural further proposal that men so trained might be set to work in printing offices within their own Colleges. The place which a college press might take in the life of this community was then only dimly foreseen, since that life itself was still but a vision of the future; and in these early discussions, the emphasis fell rather upon the advantages of offering employment of an interesting sort to men who might with to study a craft that could take its place in their lives as a permanent hobby."

The presses flourished in the hands of the students who used the facilities to produce advertising ephemera for campus activities and as a means to self-publish. In the days before desktop publishing and the PC, letterpress was the method of choice for accessible and esthetically pleasing printed materials. As computer production became easier and better, student interest in the presses did wain to some degree. However, recently there has been a resurgence of interest in the art of letterpress
printing.

The below images are selected examples from the archive of student printing housed in the Arts of the Book Collection.
 

	click to enlarge:
Branford	Timothy Dwight	Jonathan Edwards