Letterpress workshop, 2009

This short project was undertaken alongside MA Design Writing Criticism students at LCC. It provided both an induction to the process of letterpress printing, and also the opportunity to engage with a set brief that, although not directly relevant to place in terms of its content, revealed the potential of an engagement beyond the surface of the page, at ‘the level of the text’, and the human link between text and page that Ingold fails to see.



The brief was to create a poster to illustrate a particular rhetorical device, in this case, the ‘parergon’, which Derrida describes as ‘that which is outside of the work, external to it, yet undeniably and unutterably part of it’ (Gibson nd:np). The solution employs the idea of the text of a book, with multiple ‘texts’ used to create a text block on the page. One ‘ex’ within the ‘texts’ is printed in red, highlighting the concept of something that is ‘out’, as in ‘ex’, but also within the word ‘text’. Other elements of the traditional page format are used to further emphasise this idea—the running header implying the ‘whole’ text and a footnote explanation of the term being seen as a smaller secondary text, yet still part of the whole.



Whilst letterpress is clearly not the primary means for generating printed matter, it is perhaps an appropriate example to use, as it is the advent of mechanical print—which in the West is seen as Gutenberg’s 1455 invention of moveable type—that Ingold sees as the catalyst in the ‘silencing’ of the page.



The images of the work clearly reveal an engagement with a craft that demands a level of skill to execute, and which in its complexity, could hardly be described as ‘merely technical’ or lacking human presence. Letterspacing is deduced by eye; registration on the page by a process of paste up, measurement and test printing; each print requires careful positioning of the paper and turning of the roller by hand; and this process is repeated for each separate colour.



The design process also illustrates an engagement ‘at the level of the text’, working both with meaning and with visual elements to generate a holistic solution.