Albert Screenprint Inc history

Vitachrome Company, Los Angeles In 1916, Young & McCallister, an important letterpress printer located in Los Angeles, adopted the Selectasine process and set up a separate department for graphic screen printing work, which was given the name Vitachrome.

Vitachrome became an independent company in 1926, and today it is probably the oldest active screen printer in the world.

Vanton Company, Los Angeles At some point before 1928, Tonge and the art publisher John Henry Van Patten started the Vanton Company in Los Angeles, which absorbed the existing Tonge Art Company.

In July 1929 Daneman published the first screen-printed advertising supplement in Signs of the Times: "A New Way to Make Silk Screen Stencils! Revolutionary! Speed! Economy!" it proclaimed.

Thanks to modern materials, good printing results that once required years of professional experience can now be achieved by laymen, sometimes after just a one-day training course. "It used to take a stencil maker a day to make a screen that is now cut in 30 minutes," Bert Zahn recalled in 1950.

In 1962, just back from Korea, Al Basse, Jr., a Brown University grad, took the helm from his Dad.

In 1976, after Al, Jr. passed, his wife Ellen was faced with the challenge to continue the business or sell.

In 1983, Ellen’s new husband, Tom Dietz joined the company as President and helped to once again lead us to a level of prominence in the Industry.

He began full time with the company after graduating with a business degree from Rollins College in 1984 and has been involved in every phase of the business since.

In 1993, Ed Basse came on board and now serves as Vice President of Sales and Marketing.

In 1997, the company transitioned into its third generation under the direction of Albert “Chip” Basse, III. Chip’s involvement with the company goes back to the early days of working summers with his Dad.

The Vanton Company did not use the Selectasine single screen process, but rather created one screen for each color printed (multiple screen process). About 2000 copies per original could be produced in a period of three months.

In the fall of 2001, the company expanded their capabilities and became the first screen printer in New England to install a 65”x 84”- 5-color inline screen printing press.

Guido Lengwiler is a teacher of screen printing at the Schule fuer Gestaltung Bern und Biel, Switzerland (Bern and Biel School of Design). He was elected to the Academy of Screen and Digital Printing Technologies (ASDPT) in 2009 for his work on the History of Screen Printing.