The Printer's Grandson

Erin Doom

Sep 22

6 min read

Updated: 4 days ago

A Family Inheritance Takes Form in Podvig Press

Commemoration of St. Phocas the Gardener

Anno Domini 2026, September 22

SOMETIMES we receive an inheritance without realizing it.

We leave it behind, follow what appears to be an unrelated road, and only years later discover that the road has quietly wound its way back toward it. Something we thought belonged merely to our childhood—or to another member of the family—turns out to have been waiting for us.

I recently began developing the first line of stationery for Podvig Letters. The idea is simple: beautiful paper made for words worth keeping. This is not for another disposable email or a piece of digital content, but for an actual letter—something written by hand, folded, placed in an envelope, carried to another person, opened, read, and perhaps kept.

There was never much question in my mind about who would print it.

My aunt owns Fast Print, and I had already used her for years for much of the printing we did at Eighth Day Institute. Sending the Podvig stationery to her was familiar and practical—pretty much automatic.

But somewhere in the process, I began to see that this ordinary decision carried far more meaning than I had ever realized before.

My aunt bought the business from my grandfather.

The same family print shop that had produced so much of the material surrounding my twenty years at Eighth Day Institute would now produce the first printed materials of Podvig Press. What looked like a simple continuation of an established working relationship was also the continuation of a family inheritance.

And suddenly I could see that this new work already had roots.

The salesman

My grandfather Pat was a salesman at Montgomery Ward. He sold appliances and was one of their top salesmen. After he retired, he and his wife Linda looked into purchasing a print shop.

The first attempt would have moved them to Arizona. Fortunately, that deal fell through.

But they tried again. Eventually, they purchased Fast Print.

I was probably about fourteen years old when they bought it. In addition to my newspaper route, for a period of time I also worked there part-time.

I wish I could say that, at fourteen, I understood what I was being given. But I didn’t.

It was simply the family print shop. It was a place where adults worked and where I sometimes worked alongside them. Paper went in; printed things came out. Orders had to be completed. Machines had to be operated. Customers expected the finished product to be right.

At that age, you rarely recognize inheritance while you are standing inside it. You don’t understand which sights, sounds, habits, and ways of working will remain in you. You can’t see the shape of your own life clearly enough to know what will return.

You certainly don’t imagine that decades later you may begin a publishing house and ask that same family business to print its first sheets.

A life among words

My own road seemed to lead somewhere else: through bookselling, teaching, reading, writing, and eventually twenty years of work with Eighth Day Institute.

It led me deeply into the Church Fathers and the Great Tradition. It filled my life with books, lectures, symposia, conversations, friendships, and the persistent question of how ancient and timeless wisdom can become embodied in a human life for the good—and renewal—of culture.

Then that long season came to an end.

What followed did not look much like the beginning of a publishing house. There were ruptures, uncertainties, and jobs I had never expected to be doing at this point in my life. I found myself in sales—driving across Kansas, entering strangers’ homes, testing water, listening to families, and learning again what it means to earn a living one conversation at a time.

Only recently did I notice the symmetry. My grandfather was a salesman who moved toward printing. His grandson has become a salesman who is moving toward printing too.

That doesn’t mean our stories are identical. Providence seldom repeats itself so neatly. But it does frequently rhyme.

The work I am now building is called Podvig.

Podvig is a difficult word to translate. It names struggle, effort, ascetic labor, and the difficult movement by which a person offers himself to God and becomes more fully human. Its simplest expression is Choose Hard—not because hardship is automatically good, but because love, faithfulness, attention, strength, and genuine formation usually require us to resist the easiest path.

Podvig Letters grew from a conviction that people do not need more content passing rapidly before their eyes. We need things that can accompany us. We need words we can live with, return to, practice, and hand on.

That conviction has gradually begun taking physical form: letters, stationery, commonplace books, small publications, and eventually books from Podvig Press.

The goal is not to produce content.

The goal is to produce companions.

Words on paper

A printer takes words and gives them material form.

That may sound obvious, but we live in a time when words have become increasingly weightless. They appear on a screen and disappear with a swipe. We read them while distracted, react to them quickly, and replace them with the next thing. Even words that deeply move us usually vanish into the endless stream.

Printing slows the word down.

A printed word occupies space. It has weight, texture, proportion, and permanence. Someone must choose the paper, set the type, prepare the image, run the machine, examine the result, and correct what has gone wrong. The word becomes an object that can be held, carried, marked, mailed, placed on a shelf, or passed from one person to another.

My grandfather bought a shop that put words on paper.

My aunt kept that work alive.

Now his grandson is trying to build a small publishing house devoted to recovering neglected works, preserving enduring wisdom, and handing it on to another generation.

I didn’t plan that connection. For most of my life, I didn’t even see it.

But perhaps that is how inheritance often works.

We imagine inheritance as something deliberately transferred: a house, a piece of land, money, a watch, a book, a tool. But some inheritances are transmitted more quietly. They remain hidden in memory and practice. They lie dormant until another season of life calls them forth.

Perhaps what I inherited was not the print shop itself, but something less tangible: my grandfather’s willingness to begin again when the first attempt failed; my aunt’s faithfulness in keeping the work alive; and a conviction, formed through years spent among books and letters, that words deserve to be given a durable form.

The keeper of the craft

My aunt carried the shop forward. That part of the story belongs to her, and I need to hear it properly before I try to tell it.

How did she come into the business? What did she learn from my grandfather? What did she preserve, and what did she have to change? What risks did she take? What did it require to keep a local print shop alive while the world moved increasingly toward screens, large online companies, and disposable communication?

Those questions matter because inheritance is not automatic.

Something survives because someone keeps it. And a great deal of work is involved in keeping it alive.

A craft survives because someone continues showing up. A business survives because orders are filled, equipment is repaired, customers are served, and a thousand ordinary responsibilities are carried when no one is watching. What looks like a seamless family legacy from a distance is usually made possible by years of hidden faithfulness.

My aunt kept the shop alive. Because she did, its work has accompanied me much longer than I understood.

The first sheets

The first work produced there for Podvig will be modest: letters and stationery bearing the Podvig seal and the words Words Worth Keeping.

But their modesty is part of their meaning.

Podvig Press does not begin with a warehouse of books or a carefully orchestrated publishing launch. It begins with paper. It begins with a letter. It begins with one person writing to another.

It begins in the same kind of place where my grandfather once began: a local print shop, with work to be done and something worth putting on paper.

When the first Podvig sheets are printed at Fast Print, the moment will mean more than the production of stationery. It will make visible an inheritance that has been present all along.

My grandfather retired from sales and decided to purchase a print shop. His first attempt failed, but he tried again. A fourteen-year-old grandson worked there without understanding what any of it might mean. His daughter carried the work forward. Throughout his adult life, the grandson continued working among books, words, letters, and printed pages. Now that work is taking another form in Podvig Press.

I did not really leave the world of paper, ink, letters, and books. The inheritance did not disappear and then wind its way back toward me. It had been running beneath the work all along.

Only now am I learning to see it.

The first pages of Podvig Press will not come from nowhere. They will come through the hands and labor of my own family. They will carry a story older than Podvig itself—a story of work, risk, persistence, and words made tangible.

Before there was Podvig Press, there was a salesman who tried to buy a print shop.

The first attempt fell through. But he didn’t quit. He began again.

Now it’s my turn.