Poesis and purposes – lessons in making

It is easy to romanticise letterpress and to mythologise it’s history as we, as contemporary designers, would like to think it happened. Yet the reality of the craft of the composition of printed textual matter is that, as a trade, it shared an often uncomfortable relationship with graphic design practice as it began to take shape in the second half of the twentieth century.

This became all to clear when investigating the history of the composing room at my own institution. As a study it surfaced some unexpected twists and turns in the story of the use of letterpress within the context of the education of a designer and acknowledges a debt owed by a current generation of teachers and students to their predecessors. Some 65 years before it was they who had negotiated the fiercely protected teaching territories of trade typography and printing, in order to allow design teachers and students an opportunity to access letterpress and work with type in a hands-on way.

This presentation will explore the impact of the trade orthodoxies in keeping design students out of the composing room, and the particular demarcation of typographic practices based on production. It will also highlight the contributions of key figures who challenged these orthodoxies. In 1952 the designer Anthony Froshaug managed to creatively negotiate the timetable at the Central School in London in order to gain access to a printing press, and set-up a hands-on evening class for designers in experimental letterpress printing (1952–6) run by the designer Ed Wright. Students such Ken Garland and Germano Facetti were quick to recognize the value in this new teaching strategy and word quickly spread through their design networks of its benefits. In 1958 the designer Romek Marber arrived to teach at St Martins and set up a letterpress teaching facility with the help of printers Desmond and Libertad Jeffery to similarly equip design students with a first-hand experience of working with type.

I will argue that in challenging the existing trade orthodoxies these educational pioneers used letterpress to establish an alternative model for the typographic training of a designer, and that this model quite considerably predates current exemplars of post-digital hands-on learning. I will also show how the ramifications of this pioneering work extended even to Portugal in the early 1970s through the practice of emigré designer Robin Fior. In conclusion, this presentation will reflect on the lessons to be learned from a better understanding of historical practice in the invigoration and reimagination of the possibilities for contemporary practice.