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Letterpress Printing: Past, Present, Future brings together scholars, curators, collectors and printers to assess the current state of letterpress printing. It acknowledges the decline of letterpress as a commercial printing technique and considers the risks this poses for letterpress's future. However, in describing the many uses to which letterpress is put and the diverse communities of printers who still work with it, the book celebrates the tenacity of letterpress as a process which continues to thrive despite such challenges. Letterpress Printing examines the continuing life of letterpress and applauds its revival through describing the circumstances in which it flourishes and the many ways it is now used. By setting this revival in the context of its ostensible decline, the book sets out the ways in which current practice draws upon and preserves the history of printing while taking it in new and unexpected directions.
List of contents
Contents: Designers in the Composing Room: A Progressive Tale of Typographic Transgression - A Tangible Space: Letterpress Printing within Artists' Books and Small Publishing Practice - An Education in Letterpress: Charting the History of Letterpress Education in the United Kingdom and Ireland - Preserving Historically Correct Letterpress Printing in Theory and Practice - Between Theory and Practice: Bringing Letterpress and Digital Together in Printing Museums - Inmediate Writing: Pavel Büchler and the Logic of Letterpress - Letterpress in Portugal: The Future of Design and Its Engagement with Past Printing Techniques - P22 Blox: Space- Age Letterpress Modularity - East Meets West: Merging Technology, Language and Culture.
About the author
Caroline Archer-Parré is Professor of Typography, Co-director of the Centre for Printing History & Culture at Birmingham City University, and Chairman of the Baskerville Society. With an interest in typographic history from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, Caroline has published widely. She is the author of three books, contributes to numerous journals and edited volumes, and writes regularly for the trade and academic press.
James Mussell is currently Professor of Nineteenth-Century Print Cultures at the University of Leeds and Deputy Director of the Centre for the Comparative History of Print (Centre CHoP). He is the author of Science, Time, and Space in the Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press (2007) and The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age (2012). He is one of the editors of the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018), , a pioneering digital resource, and the books W.T. Stead: Newspaper Revolutionary (2012) and A Pioneer of Connection: Recovering the Life and Work of Oliver Lodge (2020).
