Letterpress Printing

This book originates from an AHRC-funded Research Network, Letterpress Printing: Past, Present, Future (AH/P013473/1). Between 2017 and 2018 the Network organised three workshops: ‘Historical Letterpress’ at Winterbourne House, University of Birmingham; ‘Using Letterpress’ at the National Print Museum, Dublin; ‘Letterpress in the Digital Age’, Bath Spa University; and a final conference, ‘Letterpress Printing: Past, Present, Future’, at the University of Leeds. Our contributors all took part in the network at one event or another and we are grateful to the AHRC for enabling such engaging and fruitful conversations.

The editors would like to acknowledge the support of Lee Hale and the staff at Winterbourne House; Carla Marrinan, Gretta Halpin-Dodd and the staff and volunteers at the National Print Museum; and Ian Gadd, Penny Grist, Tim Jollands, Tom Sowden and their students and colleagues at Bath Spa University. We want to thank the speakers at all of the events, but particularly the keynote speakers at the conference: Johanna Drucker, Will Hill and Dafi Khüne. Throughout the project we were supported by Pamela Rhodes, at the University of Leeds. We are particularly grateful for the work of our project administrators: Emma Trott, who oversaw the launch of the project and the first event, and Vic Clarke, who brilliantly steered the project through the remainder of the events and to a successful conclusion.

The Network was organised by the Centre for the Comparative History of Print (Centre CHoP) at the University of Leeds and the Centre for Printing History & Culture at Birmingham City University and the University of Birmingham. We are grateful for the support of our colleagues in both Centres. We also acknowledge the support of our respective institutions, particularly with regards the production of this book.

Finally, Lucy Melville, Group Publishing Director at Peter Lang, has been a supportive and encouraging guide through the publication process. We thank her and her team for seeing this project from manuscript into print.

Letterpress Aesthetics

The current revival of interest in letterpress is often accompanied by a fetishisation of some of its aesthetic qualities. Reverent sighing takes place over the impression of the metal type in thick paper, the use of serif fonts and layouts with wide margins. An excess of respect for retro-conservatism in the grand-old-man tradition emerges without any awareness of its historical roots in the Euro-centric humanist revivals of the early twentieth century. Alternatively, a pleasure in neo-Dada free-for-all playing-with-type explodes, expressed in massively over-printed layers of inked letters and random images. But the connections between the conceptual aspects of letterpress’s aesthetics and the technological constraints that give it inherent qualities are not usually addressed in this process.

After all, letterpress is a fifteenth-century, western Renaissance technology whose modularisation of production provided a paradigm of early modern labour and economy. Its aesthetics are undergirded with technological features that have cultural implications. In the medieval format of the guild, workers were often responsible for the full lifecycle of a product. But in modern labour, tasks are broken into specialised skills and rationalised processes marked by discrete steps in production. Though manuscript production already divided illuminators from scribes and binders from either, emerging degrees of specialisation slotted print shop workers into increasingly distinct tasks (composing, proofing, printing, damping, inking and so on). But the modularity of letterpress is key to its aesthetics on an even more granular level: the specific properties of cast metal type.