Press Association

When the desk-top publishing revolution arrived in the 80s, few imagined that the old-school world of letterpress and small printing would survive. James Pallister discovers that it’s thriving, and looks to its future

Typographer Vicky Fullick, of letterpress printers and designers Harrington & Squires, points to partner and co-founder Chrissie Charlton’s ink-stained head: ‘You don’t get ink on your forehead using InDesign,’ she says. They left graphic design practices to found the company in 2002, to ‘[get] back to what we enjoyed about design,’ as Charlton remembers, at a time when printing had become ‘ultra sophisticated, ultra smooth and deeply boring.’

It seems that two decades into the age of digital design, letterpress – text is physically imprinted onto paper with metal or wooden pieces of individual type – is refusing to go away. Quite the opposite, says Justin Knopp of the Essex-based Typoretum press. ‘It’s enjoying a strong resurgence. It becomes ever more popular as digital technology advances.’

Perhaps a little context is needed. Apple’s Macintosh Plus – its third model, boasting a memory of 512 kilobytes, then considered massive – was launched in 1986. The following year saw the first desk-top-publishing programme, from Quark. Thanks to the new programme and the increased capacity, designers already experimenting with typesetting could now see their freshly composed copy instantly, on the Mac’s tiny screen (512 × 342 pixels). The toil of expensive photosetting and paste-up seemed over.

Letterpress had already gone through a dark period – indeed Knopp suggests that the late 70s were its low point, rendered almost commercially redundant with advances in photosetting – but was now surely a relic, its cumbersome and lengthy processes a welcome victim of techno­logical progress. Yet in 2010, when your mobile phone alone has more memory than the young Steve Jobs can ever have dreamed of, with extensive electronic type libraries widely available and the ubiquity of email, texting and wireless internet, the older techniques and technologies are once again on the rise. The question is, why are they so attractive now, and where are they headed?

At college (London College of Communication and Hornsey respectively) Vicky Fullick and Chrissie Charlton both trained using letterpress, which they believe gave them the bedrock of their typographic understanding. Indeed, this capacity to instill a sophisticated understanding of all stages of type is perhaps the medium’s lifeline in post-digital typesetting days – certainly many colleges, including the LCC, are keeping their studios on for this reason. Theo Wang from the Society of Revisionist Typographers (SORT) sums up this attraction: ‘With letterpress, you can go from initial concepts to having a printed book in your hands, and it’s all through your own efforts.’

In November, Catherine Dixon, senior lecturer in typography at Central Saint Martins, ran a sell-out one-day event, Letterpress: A Celebration, at St Bride Library, an institution on London’s Fleet Street that bills itself as the ‘world’s foremost printing and graphic arts library’, where Dixon curates the events. A motive behind this celebration, Dixon says, was to bring together what she considers the three disparate groups interested in letterpress today: the interested amateur, established professionals returning to letterpress, and the die-hards who never left it. The amateurs will be kitted out with a few cases of type bought off eBay and a press like the Adana, a small and relatively cheap table-top machine (the going rate seems to be c.£250-£300). Somewhere in the middle are those like Charlton and Fullick, commercial professionals with a primary training in graphic design, either rediscovering letterpress from their student days, or learning afresh. And at the far end are such convinced and lifelong letterpress practitioners as John Grice – whose press, Evergreen, operates from Gloucestershire – and Ian Mortimer of London press I. M. Imprimit, who boasts Britain’s largest collection of woodletter.

What these groups share also divides them. ‘There’s a split ’, says Dixon, ‘that comes from the relationship between the artists and the trades. Most people skilled in letterpress would have trained as a compositor and then moved up the trade. They see repro as a means to an end, and that good letterpress should be invisible.’ An example she likes to give is the depth of impression that a print makes on the paper: ‘For a long period, a good trade printer would not leave deep impressions on a paper. But today people want to see this impression again, so a lot of your designers or letterpress practitioners will leave a deep one – because they or the clients like that affect.’

She cites Alan Kitching as the grand old man of designers-who-use-letterpress, famed for his work for the Guardian: ‘He uses very sticky ink and you can see the grain of the wood in many of his prints. To a printer that’s because he hasn’t put enough ink on! But actually it reinforces the sense of the object, that it’s a result of a wooden block which is what many people find compelling.’ This is an aesthetic that apparently still appeals to some desk-bound designers: wooden finish type was one of the most popular digital typefaces bought in 2009, according to December’s Creative Review.

Certainly this sketch of an amicable distinction of related territories holds true for some. Justin Knopp still chooses ‘to make a distinc­tion between “traditional” and “contemporary” letterpress, as the term itself has become somewhat diluted.’

Moreover, the colloquy of designers and printers has led to fruitful collaborations, in which skills are passed on and new types of work produced. One such designer-printer partnership is Richard Ardagh & New North Press, uniting Ardagh with NNP’s Graham Bignell. ‘The fact is,’ says Bignell, ‘that letterpress printing has been on the margins of being “olde worlde” for a long time. Working with Richard and other young designers is bringing a growing interest from the buying public for interesting artists’ books and posters.’ While for Ardagh the partnership has served as the start of an apprenticeship in traditional letterpress: ‘I come to Graham with ideas but from there on in, I’m the apprentice. A novice will tend to go overboard with distressing the type, or submitting it to excessive amounts of impression – from Graham I’ve been learning authentic pressmanship.’

Does Bignell think that digital design techniques and letterpress can be used together? ‘They can overlap – once a line of type is set and printed it can be scanned and used digitally. I am currently in the process of printing full fonts of my wood types for scanning and producing them in a range of tones so that graphic designers can pick and mix printing density.’

Another pragmatist when it comes to combining old and new is designer Craig Ward, whose portfolio includes webdesign as well as mainstream digital and litho print design work. Ward used letterpress for a poster campaign for the Economist, using a collage of phrases to make up a larger picture. ‘They were all created using my Adana 5 × 3 – which is tiny. I usually lay out the design in Illustrator then ink and print each word or a few words at a time. These are then scanned in and put together finally again in Photoshop which allows for any colour correction or last-minute client amends.’

As with Ardagh and Ward, Anthony Burrill doesn’t solely work in letterpress – but his ‘Work Hard and be Nice to People’ slogan posters, with subsequent spin-off covers for lifestyle magazine Wallpaper*, helped popularise it. His work is on thousands of walls thanks to a conversation overheard in a supermarket, quickly scribbled in his notebook: ‘An old lady was telling someone the secret of a happy life – she said, “You’ve got to work hard and be nice to people.”’ Part of its appeal, he believes, is that it ‘harks back to glory days… and taps into the craft aesthetic that is very popular at the moment.’ He prints at his local print-shop, Adams of Rye, and considers the results a collaboration between him and their skilled printers. Adams is a commercial printer with a good selection of wooden type still – despite years when it seemed of such minimal value that they would ‘throw the wooden type-blocks on the fire to keep warm in the studio.’

Phil Abel’s Hand & Eye is a letterpress printers with clients in mainstream design and branding, including heavyweights like Pentagram and Wolff Ollins. He has a growing client base who want him to make up plates based on their own artwork. ‘They want something different or special. Often they are looking for a “hand-made” look.’ He’s aware of the paradox here: ‘Eric Gill was writing about machines like ours when he was promoting craftsman-made things.’

In Dixon’s view, for all the activity thrown up by designer-printer collaborations, there’s a contradictory client expectation here, for new work that feels old-fashioned. She thinks the concomitant fetish of the hand-made is holding back the medium’s development. Certainly this is what Rose Gridneff and her partner Alexander Cooper believe. The pair – who teach at Brighton University and LCC respectively – formed the print cooperative Workshop, along with Elliot Hammer and James Allen, in 2009, to ‘address the lack of innovative letterpress in the design community,’ say Gridneff and Cooper.