Post Digital Letterpress Printing

This book presents an overview of the convergence of traditional letterpress with contemporary digital design and fabrication practices. Reflecting on the role of letterpress within the emergent hybrid post-digital design process, contributors present historical and contemporary analysis, grounded in case studies and current practice. The main themes covered include the research on letterpress as a technology and medium; a reflection on the contribution of letterpress to arts and design education; and current artistic and communication design practice merging past, present and future digital fabrication processes. This will be of interest to scholars working in graphic design, communication design, book design, typography, typeface design, design history, printing, and production technologies.

Digital technology is now a normal part of everyday life. The mutation of music and film into bits and bytes, downloads and streams is now taken for granted. For the world of book and magazine publishing however, this transformation has only just begun. Still, the vision of this transformation is far from new. For more than a century now, avant-garde artists, activists and technologists have been anticipating the development of networked and electronic publishing. Although in hindsight the reports of the death of paper were greatly exaggerated, electronic publishing has now certainly become a reality. How will the analog and the digital coexist in the post-digital age of publishing? How will they transition, mix and cross over? In this book, Alessandro Ludovico rereads the history of the avant-garde arts as a prehistory of cutting through the so-called dichotomy between paper and electronics. Ludovico is the editor and publisher of Neural, a magazine for critical digital culture and media arts. For more than 20 years now, he has been working at the cutting edge (and the outer fringes) of both print publishing and politically engaged digital art.

Part travel diary, part cultural anthropology, part philosophical musing, part poetic digression, The Itinerant Printer book is a series of interconnected yet independent vignettes that tell the story of two and a half years on the road visiting letterpress shops throughout America & Canada. The large-format, hardcover book comprises over 300 pages and over 1,500 photos from the 2015-17 journey. This is the ultimate index of this printing adventure, the culmination of all the miles, all the ink, all the paper, all the type, and the blood, sweat, and tears.

The revival of traditional printing methods has been afoot for the last decade, and the tactile charm of letterpress has ensured that its popularity is on the rise. Ladies of Letterpress is an organization that champions the craft, and in particular seeks to showcase and promote the work of women printers. A gallery of art by its members, the work in Ladies of Letterpress ranges from greetings cards to broadsides and posters, and is offered in a cornucopia of type and illustration styles. What comes through clearly, though, is the quality of the work: every one of these pieces is worthy of display on your wall, and with 80 detachable pages, you can create an instant and beautiful gallery of your own.

This groundbreaking book establishes Post-Digital Printmaking as a distinct area of printmaking practice both technically and conceptually. Radically different from digital print production (inkjet on high-quality paper), Post-Digital Printmaking integrates Computer Numeric Control (CNC) devices such as laser cutters and CNC routers with matrix production for lithography, intaglio and relief. This contemporary practice incorporates the strengths of both digital and traditional, resulting in hybrid printmaking techniques. A comprehensive and accessible technical introduction to this important area of printmaking, this book explains techniques and processes in detail, discusses the contexts within which Post-Digital Printmaking has arisen, and includes examples and case studies of artists applying these hybrid techniques in their work.

Letterpress Printing: Past, Present, Futurebrings 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.