The New Old School
We walked into Mary Bruno’s shop and the first thing we noticed was the smell. Ink, oil, paper—it hit like nostalgia and joy. Bruno Press isn’t just a letterpress studio, it’s a time capsule, a community clubhouse, and a creative laboratory all rolled into one. And Mary? She’s the whirlwind keeping it all spinning.
Mary didn’t set out to become a letterpress legend. In fact, she laughs about the detours. She studied art but assumed, like many of us, that unless you taught it, it would always be a hobby. It wasn’t until her father passed away suddenly in 2003 that she returned home to St. Joseph, Minnesota. Her dad, a graphic designer, professor, and type nerd, had collected presses and type over decades, building a garage-turned-print-shop around it all. After his death, Mary found herself back in the studio, trying to reclaim it—not just physically, but emotionally.
At first, she and her niece would print swear words on cards just to lighten the mood. It was hilarious. It was therapeutic. And it planted the seed. She started printing funny cards, long before everyone and their mom had a snarky stationery line. “Some of them were atrocious,” she laughs. “But funny. The funny was always there.” Soon, local stores picked them up. People were buying. People were stealing—she recalls a proud moment when a store told her some of her cards had been swiped from the dressing room. “I was like, I made it!”
The breakthrough was Bruno Press’s logo—a little chick with a rooster inside it, her dad’s original logo reborn with her own identity. “He’s at the heart of it,” she told us, eyes lighting up. “I wouldn’t have any of this without him.” That logo marked the moment she realized she had a real business. Between wedding invitations, greeting cards, and wholesale orders, it started to take off.
Mary printed her first wholesale orders around 2010. By 2011, she was fully self-employed, living solely off her letterpress work. She hit the art fair circuit, which back then was far less saturated and far more lucrative. She remembers old ladies buying stacks of her sassiest cards. “Humor is humor,” she said. “It doesn’t matter the age.”
She also dove into the National Stationery Show in New York, sharing booths with her friends from Bench Pressed, Power and Light Press, and others. They’d pool resources, stake out corner booths, and throw illicit cocktail parties for buyers. “We’d just manhandle that place,” she said, grinning. But the glitz wore off. The costs, the pressure, the saturation—it all became a bit much. “Going to New York for a week and partying like an idiot was great,” she admitted, “but eventually I’d come home and think… this isn’t sustainable.”
Still, it was through that show that she learned one of her most powerful lessons. The letterpress world had shifted. Buyers would walk into her booth and rub her cards, confused that her work didn’t have the deep bite impression they expected. “They’d say, ‘You should really let a letterpress printer do your cards,’ and I’d be like… what do you think this is?” She was printing with wood and lead type—traditional materials that don’t lend themselves to the heavy “punch” that photopolymer and deep cotton stock create. It was eye-opening to realize the industry had redefined the aesthetic without her noticing.
And yet, her cards stood out. While everyone else followed trends, she was just doing her thing. French Paper, colorful envelopes, strange imagery, jokes that landed like a surprise left hook—buyers noticed. “It didn’t look like anyone else’s,” she said. “Total accident, but it worked.”
When it comes to success, Mary will be the first to admit it’s been a winding road. She’s worked every job you can name: bartender, camp counselor, cake decorator. She’s also been fired more than a few times, and it doesn’t bother her one bit. But finding her lane in letterpress took years, and so did setting boundaries.
For a long time, she said yes to everything. Every client, every weird request. She was running on desperation, afraid to say no, eager to prove herself. “I thought I had to educate everyone who walked in my shop,” she said. “I’d spend hours explaining letterpress to someone who wanted a hundred wedding invites for a dollar a piece. Like… what the fuck am I doing?”
Now, she knows better. “If your budget doesn’t match what I do, go to Kinko’s.” It took years to internalize the value of her work—and to stop undervaluing it just to be agreeable. “There’s power in saying no. You don’t have to be a dick about it, just… nope.”
Now, she’s leaning into that clarity. She’s narrowed her offerings, focused on what she’s best at and what she enjoys most. The result? More freedom, more money, and less resentment. “When I stopped chasing every dime and just trusted myself, it started to come back to me.”
She talks openly about how trauma with money—passed down from her parents, shaped by her industry—has impacted her. Her dad, for all his creativity, didn’t always value his own work. He’d take a case of beer as payment. Her mom, by contrast, worried endlessly about stability. Mary inherited both perspectives, and for a long time, they collided inside her. Now, she’s trying to model something different: creativity that’s respected, boundaries that are enforced, and pricing that reflects the years of experience behind every job.
And she’s not keeping those lessons to herself. One of the most admirable things about Mary’s business is how much she gives back. She hosts print parties for local groups—kid birthdays, banks, even a group of 16 nuns who went wild for a lino cut of the Sacred Heart chapel. She mentors interns from nearby colleges and lets them get their hands dirty: printing, designing, interacting with customers. “It’s a time investment,” she said, “but once I’ve trained a few, they start training the others. It’s good for them, and it’s good for me.”
She’s also fiercely protective of the letterpress community and honest about what threatens it. “If you’re giving your work away for free or underpricing it, you’re fucking the rest of us,” she said. “I get sensitive about that stuff. You have to think about the bigger picture. When someone thinks your price is high because they got it cheaper somewhere else? That hurts all of us.”
She recalls partnering with another printer years ago who charged next to nothing and would over-deliver every time. “He thought he was doing people a favor. I had to be like, bro, you’re messing it up for the rest of us.” It’s a reminder that community means accountability, too.
Mary’s shop is full of humor, heart, and the scent of ink on paper—but it’s also full of quiet resilience. She’s lived through personal loss, industry shifts, burnout, and all the chaos that comes with creative independence. She’s still standing, still laughing, still making magic happen—and still telling people not to show up uninvited. “I have an open house once a year,” she said. “That’s when you can come in here and ask all the fucking questions you want. Other than that, don’t knock on my door.”
There’s something about her presence—this mix of honesty, hilarity, and hard-won wisdom—that makes you want to work harder but also smarter. She’s proof that doing what you love doesn’t mean doing it all, and that confidence doesn’t come from nailing every job—it comes from knowing when to walk away from the wrong ones.