Eye Magazine

Both events focused on new ways of approaching letterpress printing. Both presentations featured specially commissioned short films. New North Press partner Richard Ardagh has commissioned a new font called A23D from designers Henrik Kubel and Scott Williams of A2-Type. [Disclosure – I’ve written about this project for the forthcoming issue of Pulp magazine.]

Another personal link is that both Kubel and Williams attended Kitching’s letterpress workshops at the Royal College of Art.

Alan Kitching gave a comprehensive talk about his 50-year career in design and typography, ending with a description of his new project for Monotype, a set of five posters featuring monograms of designers whose centenaries fall in 2014: Tom Eckersley, Abram Games, FHK Henrion, Josef Müller-Brockmann and Paul Rand. [Disclosure – I wrote the short biographies printed litho on the reverse of each poster.]

Anyone who has studied with Kitching will know that he’s long advocated the ‘use what you have’ philosophy of making the most of the materials in your own studio. He admitted in questions at the end of Saturday’s talk, that he never thought he would use type that wasn’t in his own, vast collection of wood and metal tpe.

However Kitching’s premise for this new project was that one letter of each monogram would be made from a Monotype typeface while the other would be a letter from his wood type collection. To realise the idea, he cut giant version of the letters – a Gill Shadow ‘P’ for Paul, a Futura Black ‘A’ for Abram – out of thick card. The artwork for these colourful posters was made in Kitching’s Kennington studio using letterpress, but the final edition was printed by silkscreen at Advanced Graphics in London.

The A23D project also breaks with the convention that letterpress fonts should be either wood or metal. The eighteen-line, capitals-only font, whose printing surface was fabricated by Chalk Studios using a polyjet 3D printer, stands at the same height as conventional wood type, and can be locked into a forme on the type bed alongside other characters and furniture such as rules and spaces.

Alan Kitching often says that he was ‘liberated by letterpress’ – that this supposedly obsolete method of printing enabled him to find new forms of expression. A23D and Kitching’s Monotype project – in their separate, but similarly experimental methods – may point a few new ways in which letterpress itself can be liberated from the previous millennium.

John L Walters, Eye editor, London

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