Business of the Month: Casey Rubber Stamp, 322 East 11th Street

Your input is needed! Today we feature our latest Business of the Month — help us to select the next. Tell us which independent store you love in Greenwich Village, the East Village, or NoHo: click here to nominate your favorite. Want to help support small businesses? Share this post with friends.

Whether your thing is bed bugs or butterflies, bridges or brontosauri, burgers or Bette Davis’ eyes, there is a tiny storefront on East 11th street that has nothing you need, but plenty you’ll want. Many have rightfully celebrated the establishment as a standard-bearer of the superfluous, a legend of low-tech, and a titan of tactility. The Village Voice onced named it the best rubber stamp in the East Village owned by a foul-mouthed Irishman. We’re speaking, of course, of Casey Rubber Stamps at 322 East 11th Street (btw 2nd and 1st Avenues) which, to the foregoing titles, it can now add Village Preservation Business of the Month. 

The foul-mouthed Irishman in question is John Casey, a self-described New Yorker (“I’m a real New Yorker. I wasn’t born here!”) from Millstreet, County Cork, who had a career-shaping rubber stamp epiphany at the age of eight. He was tagging along with his father to a print shop that made posters for the family business. The proprietor, knowing that John was into coins, took a printing block of a coin and made a stamp of it for him. John found this incredible. So incredible that, when he came to New York for a summer at the age of 16, he contemplated somehow making a career in the rubber stamp business. He would have, too, had an utter lack of funding and know-how not gotten in the way. The non-mechanically-oriented aunts with whom he was staying could offer no guidance beyond pointing him to the yellow pages and encouraging to wander into a stamp store and ask questions, which is actually not bad, as far as guidance goes. But John did not follow it and thus delayed the launching of his shop by over a decade. In the intervening years, a job as a mover wrecked his body, and theft wrecked his coin-dealing business. But intermittent searching gradually led to the acquisition of the rubber-stamp making equipment that helped usher in the next chapter in John’s career.

John’s first business launched in 1979 at a collectors market on Bleecker Street, just north of 6th Avenue. A year later, he opened his own storefront on 7th Avenue South. John didn’t have many customers at the time. But he didn’t have many competitors either. The few long-time rubber stamp businesses still standing catered exclusively to commercial clients, not to novelty shoppers. But John believed that those shoppers were out there. Maybe. He had come across ready-made image stamps from the first part of the century and saw them as evidence that someone somewhere had made this type of thing before and that, therefore, somebody must have bought them. And if someone did, then someone might again.

John’s intuition proved correct; but only eventually. It took five years for the business became profitable. And then, not long thereafter, this modest success was interrupted by a case of burnout that brought John back to Europe. He stayed there for a few years, but ultimately decided that he fit in better among misfits, and that there were more of those in New York. So he moved back to the city and, presumably looking for a higher concentration of misfits, settled in the East Village. There, his business has grown, over the past twenty years, into a minor destination.

Casey Rubber Stamp has hewed to the same basic concept from the outset. It sells and makes rubber stamps. That’s it. It holds over fifteen thousand of them in stock, some ready for purchase; the rest ready within a couple of hours. The images cover a wide range of themes, including insects, letters, architecture, halloween, flowers, speakeasy ladies, vehicles, anatomy, astronomy, fruit, owls, tools, dinosaurs, snowflakes, erotica, octopi, and much else.

John sources these images from letterpress stock catalogs, children’s books, illustrated encyclopedias, and the like, with an eye for designs that would translate well as a rubber stamp. Because of this criterion and because of his personal preferences, the visual vocabulary of the designs pre-date the 1950s, occasionally by a lot. Side-by-side with Rosie the Riveter, one finds Art Nouveau letters, Beardsley’s macrophallic nudes, John Tenniel’s Allice in Wonderland illustrations, Mother Goose alphabets, 1850s flowers, and 1490s Venetian woodcuts, to name a few. 

If you’ve never used one of Casey’s rubber stamps, you’ll be struck by the level of detail that they capture.

That does not come by accident. John goes out of his way to find high-quality sources for his designs. He will, for instance, track down and acquire the 1880s catalog where a lower-quality reproduction originated so that he can produce a richer image.

More remarkably, he sticks to the traditional and superior method of rubber stamp production, making him the only one to do so on the East Coast and one of the few in the country. The standard process is cheap and fast. You pour a liquid polymer onto a negative, expose it to ultraviolet light, and have a stamp ready in twenty minutes. The traditional method, which you can witness here, goes from a paste up to a negative, then to a sensitized plate, and then to a plastic plate that becomes the mold to which rubber is pressed under heat and pressure. This process takes 7 to 8 hours; it’s much more expensive; and it requires materials that are increasingly difficult to procure. But it yields a far more durable product that is unsurpassed at picking up ink and depositing it onto paper. And so, that’s the method that John uses. 

It’s anyone’s guess whether it’s John’s unsparing commitment to quality that attracts customers to the store. But they keep coming nonetheless. Customers have stamps custom-made for wedding invites, signatures, children’s drawings, bookplates, and photographs.

Small business owners get them for logos and for product labels (e.g., for perfumes, coffees, and bread.) Tourists are likely drawn by the novelty. So are passers-by, young and old. At least once a week, a skeptical grandchild is dragged in, questioning why anyone would ever use a rubber stamp. They tend to leave with half a dozen of them. They often get letters. A plurality of five-year-old girls get insects. A plurality of five-year old boys get skulls. No one knows why.

Casey Rubbers Stamp has by now been in operation for over four decades. Not bad for a guy who insists not to have ever known what he was doing. Whether by luck, intuition, or insight, however, John has developed a business model with considerable advantages: a specialization too niche to attract corporate competition; a product too tactile in its appeal to succumb to digitalization; an idiosyncratic storefront presence that surprises and lures the uninitiated; and a proprietor who’ll shout from the back to give a shout if you need help and will then chat you up as if you were sitting one bar stool over.

Fortunately for our neighborhood (and for the city), John shows no signs of slowing down. His annual St. Paddy’s Day parties are still going strong. So are his annual Christmas Eve parties—a tradition that pays forward the spontaneous party that customers threw on Christmas Eve during the store’s first year, back when John lacked the means to pay for phone service, much less to throw his own party.

John’s love for making stamps also remains undiminished; as does his passion for hunting for new illustrations and his delight in discovering what custom-order shoppers will bring through the door next. And with him at the helm, the store continues to approximate the conviviality of a neighborhood bar, even without the drinking. For all these reasons, John has a hard time envisioning an alternative that could provide as much pleasure as he takes in Casey Rubber Stamp. No wonder he has proclaimed no intention of ever retiring:

I’m going to live as long as I can, and die when I can’t help it; and I’m going to be in business till the day before I die. 

And that’s all the more grounds to wish him a long and healthy future. 

For providing us with low-tech means to find high-quality solutions to problems we didn’t realize we had, we are thrilled to name Casey Rubber Stamp our September 2024 Business of the Month. 

What special small business would you like to see featured next? Just click here to nominate our next one. Thank you! #shoplocalnyc

Here is a map of all our Businesses of the Month: