The Information Age has the U.S. careening madly at warp speed thanks to the Internet, cell phones, iPods, voice mail, text messaging, cable television and the image bombardment of MTV.

So why not consider a revolutionary if not long-forgotten information concept: a book; a book whose pages have texture that can be felt; a book whose letters make a slight indentation in the paper yet jump off the page; a book with hand-stitched binding.

"I'm trying to get people to see a book as an aesthetic artifact, not as a generic container," says Dave Wofford, who operates the one-man letterpress Horse and Buggy Press. "I like the concept of attention to detail, tactileness, intimacy. To me books can't be beat for those things.

"A book is a very intimate experience heightened when aesthetic elements are there."

The N.C. State University design graduate has designed and/or printed 12 books since he began his press in 1996. Between book projects he designs and prints by hand literary broadsides, brochures, posters, menus and business cards.

"I don't view myself as an artist, but as a designer, a craftsman who wants to collaborate with others ... help them achieve their goals," he says.

Wofford, 36, shares a pin-neat space at 401-B1 Foster St. with two Vandercook flatbed cylinder letterpresses and four other craftsmen.

Equal-opportunity enthusiasm is Wofford's mode. Working on a short story by Hillsborough writer Allan Gurganus elicits the same excitement as a recent business card he turned out for the "Dolly Mama," who makes homemade chocolate. "I like to collaborate with people like that," he says.

Gurganus' 1998 short story, "It Had Wings," is typical. Wofford designed the $85-a-copy book, which included Gurganus' drawings and text. He also made the dyed paper, mixed the ink and hand-printed 300 copies with hand-stitched bindings.

Not so typical is the 135 copies of Rob McDonald's 60-page "Birdhouses" (2007). The 22 photographs were printed on 10 different types of handmade paper with three varieties of end sheets (reinforced soft covers). The cost ranged from $145 to $295 each.

Wofford realizes that he can't live off books alone. He takes on a steady flow of projects, specifically: 150 broadsides of a poem by Natasha Trethewey, poet in residence at Duke's Center for Documentary Studies in 2006; the menu for Watts Street Grocery; a three-color chipboard jacket for a record and CD.

"It's up and down," he says of his niche business. "I'm a one-person shop. It doesn't take that much work to stay busy."

Wofford has 120 cases of hand set metal and wooden type, which he uses in about two percent of his work. His workhorse is the computer. He calls up thousands of typefaces and sizes, which are patched into page designs.

From the computer-generated design, a plate maker fashions a raised relief plate of photo polymer plastic. The plastic plate is slapped on the flat-bed letterpress. Wofford makes test runs to calibrate the ink color, flow and depth of the type's bite into the paper. Then he cranks.

Letterpress production costs 15 to 75 percent more than machine printing in part because each color requires a separate run on the press.

Wofford has been factual, focused and passionate about the craft he learned in college. After graduation, he studied and worked at Penland School of Crafts for 20 months before joining the Antfarm collective in Raleigh in 1996. He moved to Durham in 2003 and has been at Foster Street for two years.

"Human beings still crave aesthetic experience, something they can touch," Wofford says. "Technology has its limitations."