Meet the Makers

Within Brooklyn Army Terminal is a studio filled with letterpress type, handmade paper, and decades of creative energy, the founders of Purgatory Pie Press—artist couple Dikko Faust and Esther K Smith—carry on one of New York’s longest-running hand-printing collaborations. What began as a project at University of Wisconsin has become a living archive of printmaking, book arts, and design ingenuity.

“Dikko started the press when he was doing grad work,” Esther recalls. “But we’d already been collaborating, even before we were officially together.” Their first collaboration wasn’t a book—it was a haircut. “He asked if I had scissors. I said yes, and he asked me to cut his hair. I didn’t even know him! But he was very happy with the result,” she laughs.

From that odd beginning, the two built a partnership that merged art, humor, and relentless craft. Esther, trained in costume design and writing, moved from Chicago to New York when they were engaged. “Our wedding invitation was our first printed collaboration,” she says. From there, their shared love of paper took root. Esther began working at the legendary New York Central Supply art store, where she discovered fine handmade papers that would shape the studio’s future.

Their early projects were as modest as they were ambitious. Esther designed her first date book by hand on acid-free graph paper. “I thought the hard part would be the lines,” she says, “and it was.” They refined it the following year—and have made a new edition nearly every year since. Later, Esther proposed a making postcard as a portable version of the traditional broadside (a single sheet of inexpensive paper printed on one side, usually with a ballad, rhyme, or news). “We lived in a three-room apartment with a bathtub in the kitchen,” she explains. “We didn’t have space to store big prints. So I said, instead of broadsides, let’s do postcards. You can send them, collect them—and it’s still poetry.”

When their first two poetry postcards didn’t sell, they launched their “postcard subscription series”, sending an order blank to everyone invited to their wedding. It worked. The small-format limited edition prints reached readers who couldn’t afford gallery prices but valued the tactile intimacy of hand-printed art.

The press grew from these experiments into a vibrant publishing practice. One of their early collaborations, Colorful Tales by Peter Churches, began with crayons and a typewriter in a cramped East 10th Street apartment. The result was a hand-printed book filled with color, humor, and humanity. “He thought it would be easy,” Esther says, “but there’s no such thing as an easy letterpress book.” The edition sold out quickly—proof that their instinct for marrying words and image resonated.

In later years, the press became known for its artist books and mathematical collaborations with artist and mathematician Susan Happersett. When a curator told Susan (about her hand-drawn books), “No one’s going to buy more than one,” Esther replied, “They will—once they see them side by side.” That curator bought every copy she brought. Their limited editions explore Fibonacci sequences and geometric structures in intricate, folded constructions. “We want to bridge math and art,” Esther says. Their four interlocking accordions project, Box of Chaos lived up to its name—“First the paper wasn’t available, then Hurricane Sandy hit, then the press broke,” she recalls. “But it turned out beautifully.” The edition is almost out of print, rising in value with each box sold.

Another signature project emerged from Dikko’s fascination with ancient pattern systems. While teaching non-Western art history, he discovered a mud-wall fresco whose red and black motifs mirrored one another. “If you flip the red over, it’s the same as the black—and the negative space is the same pattern in white,” he noted. That discovery inspired a series of tessellation prints, postcards, even a Brooklyn Army Terminal installation project, and artist books—visual puzzles that evolve from page to page.

Looking ahead, Esther hopes to see more young makers find a way to sustain handmade craft in a city where space and time are luxuries. She imagines new collaborations that connect book artists, mathematicians, and poets—projects that keep tactile art alive in the digital age. “Printing is a slow art,” she says. “It teaches you to listen—to the paper, to the rhythm, to each other.” In every impression, the press preserves that rhythm: ink, pressure, and human touch, leaving behind not just pages, but proof that craft and love can still be one and the same.

Explore Esther and Dikko’s fantastical works at their website.