Never Too Old to Get Rich

CHAPTER 7Write Stuff

Amy Bass, Nota Bene

In 2007, Pittsburgh stay-at-home mom Evvy Diamond found herself getting restless. With two of her three sons college bound, she felt it was time for her to earn an income.

Meanwhile, her friend Amy Bass, a VP at a small Pittsburgh money-management firm, was facing a mid-life crisis after two decades in the business: “As I approached 50, I decided I could no longer work for someone else. I needed to own something,” Bass recalls.

In time, the two friends’ ambitions would connect.

As Diamond contemplated what to do, she remembered her love of notepaper. “Even as a child, I would save the last piece of stationery of every set because I didn’t want to part with it,” she says. Motivated by the memory, she shelled out $1,000 to purchase a century-old cast-iron letterpress from a printing shop in nearby Duquesne, Pennsylvania, that was closing.

The singular press, which weighs a ton, was hauled by an auto transporter to her home and set up in the garage. She painstakingly restored it by canvassing flea markets to buy vintage dies. And then she taught herself how to manually print by reading blogs and poring through books on the art of letterpress printing.

Before long, she was hand-coloring cards and lining the envelopes. Painting and illustration had been Diamond’s creative pursuits since she was a teenager. Within a few months, she was peddling ...