Letterpress Printing: Past, Present, Future

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In the basement of the School of English at the University of Leeds is everything required to make a book from scratch, including paper-making equipment, presses and type, and a bindery. This facility was developed piecemeal over fifty years, however, as academic fashions changed the room fell out of use. Similar sets of equipment can be found elsewhere, in other English departments that no longer teach bibliography, for instance, or in printing departments that no longer teach letterpress printing. They can also be found in museums and galleries, representing a way of reproducing text made redundant by newer technologies. This research network brings together those who have, or are working with, letterpress to explore what relevance this print technology has in the digital present. Led by the Centre for the Comparative History of Print at the University of Leeds and the Centre for Printing History and Cultures at Birmingham City University and the University of Birmingham, the network brings together curators, printers, artists, and scholars from a range of disciplines to investigate the place of historical printing today. Such a network is particularly timely. While many print rooms fell into disuse with the decline of bibliography and textual studies, the emergence of the digital humanities has prompted a resurgence of interest in analogue media forms and the technologies that produced them. Similar shifts have occurred in typography and book arts, as practitioners have turned to older practices to inform and complement work in digital media. Equally, beyond the academy, writers, artists and small presses continue to work with letterpress, whether in a deliberate attempt to take control of the production of print, or as part of an investment in historical print culture more broadly. Yet just as the significance of letterpress printing is being recognized, the numbers of those trained in such techniques are declining: bibliography is rarely taught as part of English programmes; letterpress is subordinated to other techniques in schools of art; and printers no longer learn letterpress as part of their formal training (and those who did are now retired). The aims of the network are threefold. Firstly, it is conservational, drawing upon the varied expertise of its participants to document surviving presses and type while exchanging skills and knowledge about letterpress printing and its many histories. Given its constitution, the network will shape approaches to print and printing beyond the academy while scholars, in turn, learn from the practitioners, curators, and artists in the network. Secondly, it will develop practice-based methods of research and teaching that can situate letterpress printing in a range of disciplines. This will allow us to set out the ongoing role for such techniques in knowledge and cultural production, while also reconnecting scholarship itself with its printed heritage. Finally, the network looks to the future. Although we recognize that engaging with historic printing is fundamental if we are to fully understand the way movable type has shaped Western culture, we want to use historical approaches to explore what such technologies can teach us about knowledge production in the digital age. We will interrogate the way that older print techniques underpin newer methods, whether developments in printing, digital typesetting and design, or the ways in which we understand the impact of digital culture. It is only by engaging with historical printing, we argue, we can start to understand the politics of textual reproduction today.