Collections and collaborations

In November 2018 I was invited to work on a collaborative project to create a poster designed to celebrate and highlight the rich and varied collections held within the St Bride Library and the building itself. The brief specified that the invited artists, designers, writers, illustrators and musicians work in pairs. My collaborative partner was Michael (Mick) Clayton, compositor or ‘journeyman’, who worked on Fleet Street in its heyday of newspaper publishing and now manages the St Bride Print Workshop.

Mick was from a trade letterpress background and operated within the networks of newspaper printing that once defined the immediate location of St Bride and were at the heart of its original remit. The August–September issue of The British Lithographer (1894) announced the near completion of the St Bride Foundation Institute reporting that, ‘promotion of technical education [is] one of the chief objects of the Institute’, with ‘classes [to] be held in subjects connected with the different branches of the printing and allied trades.’

This connection between practical trade knowledges and St Bride Library offered the focus for our collaborative poster and creative exchange – my conceptual creative input and contextual approach to history with Mick’s hands-on understanding of presswork and lived experience.

The poster features printers’ trade slang with the idea of St Bride Library offering a final resting place of this soon-to-be-lost language. Terms were collected at the St Bride Print Workshop from Mick and fellow members of the St Bride Chapel (trade people of the same Union working within a department), Barry Felsted and Steve Linehan. I typeset, while Mick and the Chapel oversaw the presswork, drawing from their collective 167 years printing experience.

Contribution to knowledge:
. to research the material culture of vernacular trade printing through collaborative practice.
. to situate the contemporary St Bride Print Workshop within the history of Fleet Street trade printing
. to situate St Bride Library as a focal point for a living community of knowledge-building in printing history through practice as well as academic scholarship
. to surface the humour of trade slang and the camaraderie of the communities who used it

Approximately 100 two-colour (red and black) posters were printed. The story of this collaborative exchange of typographic knowledges was shared at an in-person event held at St Bride Library on 14 May 2019. The poster remains on display at the St Bride Foundation.

With thanks to Justin Hobson (Fenner Paper) and Andrew Long (St Bride Chapel)

• https://sbf.org.uk/whats-on/view/collect...
• https://stbridelibrary.bigcartel.com/pro...