Linocut, Letterpress, and an Analog Recipe for Retrofuturism
Why the revival of analog printing methods are a perfect opportunity for imagining the future.
Few things in my life have so acutely brought an understanding of and appreciation for the past than operating a letterpress machine. Letterpress is what comes to mind when you think of movable type: it encompasses relief printing processes that use a printing press to transfer ink applied to a variety of print forms – typically a composition of wooden or metal type, but also engraved wood or linoleum blocks and etched zinc – to paper. Letterpress was the go-to commercial printing method for much of modern history, responsible for transmitting an immense amount of information, until it was eclipsed by offset printing in the 20th century. Now letterpress continues as an artisan craft.
A Vandercook press in action!
Nowadays, the holy grail of letterpress machines is the Vandercook. There’s many different styles of Vandercooks, but they all follow the same idea: ink is applied to motorized rollers that roll against each other, resulting in an even distribution of ink across them. The rollers are housed on a cylinder that you hand-crank to move across the bed of the press, applying ink to your print form. Then, you roll back the cylinder, affix paper to the cylinder, and then roll it out again, impressing the inked print form onto the paper, resulting in a completed print. It’s physical and tactile: cranking out more than a few prints on a Vandercook is a workout. I’m lucky enough to have access to not one, but three Vandercook presses at a local print studio, and I have been having a lot of fun with them.
One of my letterpress experiments on a Vandercook press.
Letterpress is modular: within the bed of a press or the frame of a chase, you can compose whatever print form you wish, arranging your type and any blocks or plates you are printing on in any way you please. You’ll probably have a specific notion of what you’re printing, but more often than not, something about your plan will change in the course of your lock-up (securing your print form within the press). You might see some kerning you’d like to change, or catch a typo at the last minute, or see some noise in your linocut block you want to clean up. The process of preparing your print form is both mathematical and spontaneous; it’s comparable to building with legos. This mixture of precision and spontaneity scratches a special part of my brain that seeks an interplay between inspiration and expression, and seeing a print take shape and change in real time is exactly the kind of satisfaction I crave from creative work.
I’ve been pressing letters for only about four months, and I am thoroughly hooked – I am a little fascinated and a little confused as to what aspects of letterpress have me so entranced. I know the physical nature of of the craft is a big part of it, and that’s true in both process and product: preparing your print form and using the press is a physical activity, and the product has a distinctly “letterpress” feel, with prints often having an embossed impression. But there is something more than merely the physical or aesthetic qualities at work in letterpress: my imagination is captured by continued artistic innovations being made on decades-old machines in a centuries-old process, and I am energized by letterpress’ ability to combine multiple forms of artistic expression.
I love letterpress’ ability to combine visual art with writing, and I came to letterpress as a means of combining my writing with my linocut illustrations. My linocut explorations began as the first foray of a harebrained scheme: seeking to self-publish a short story of mine with a distinctly physical feel, I planned to carve my entire story on linocut blocks. After carving the first four words took me over an hour, I realized the great folly I was attempting to embark upon and gave up the scheme. But something in me was awakened, and I continue to explore linocuts as my main visual art discipline. Linocut is all about the tactile for me – carving into linoleum feels much more physically engaging than drawing, and I feel more in control of a carving tool than a pencil. I shied away from visual art for years because I felt self-conscious about my drawing abilities, and that feeling of control gave me an in.
Linocut carving!
I wanted to keep experimenting with those tactile feelings, and so I resolved to print a short story I wrote using a typewriter on hand-recycled paper, illustrated with linocuts. The project was a mild failure: I only completed three copies of the story, and broke two typewriters in the process. I felt no small guilt at rendering two functional tools from the past no longer so, but I also believe that the functional is a gift that should be used despite the risk of rendering it no longer so inherent in its use. Those typewriters are not truly destroyed; they could still sit happily and prettily in a museum (admittedly, I haven’t yet undertaken a serious repair attempt, so they are not truly destroyed). But isn’t it a sad thought that devices that still have functional utility to them could languish behind glass? These things don’t have to be mutually exclusive: the Sacramento History Museum preserves and operates letterpresses to much fanfare on social media. We risk damaging relics of our past every time we physically interact with them, in much the same way that the act of remembering actually changes our memories, but accepting that risk and doing the work of preservation allows us to keep those relics truly alive, rather than just relics.
That relic quality is another important part of the draw of Letterpress for me, and I’m fascinated by the preservation of letterpress machines and the resurrection of a culture of craft around them. This is kind of miraculous considering that, from a commercial perspective, letterpress is almost totally obsolete: offset printing can output much higher volumes with greater consistency than letterpress. But that obsolescence has not brought about letterpress’ extinction: rather, it has transformed it from an industrial, commercial venture to an artisan craft, still financially viable at small and specialized scales. The physical properties of letterpress printing are unique; they are not merely physical, but human. It is easier for me to imagine the human behind a greeting card with the embossed “letterpress feel” than a perfectly clean, mass-produced greeting card wrapped in plastic at Target.
Clearly, that human feel is something a lot of people crave these days. This is not at all an original idea, but the interconnectivity promised by social media has actually made me feel more disconnected from other people: I was very active on social media in my youth, posting on instagram once or twice a day, and probably got a little addicted to the gamified numbers of likes and followers continuing to go up. Eventually, I got off social media, and stayed off for a good four years. I only returned in the past 6 months and I am still trying to reacquaint myself with an unfamiliar digital culture on a platform populated by people I haven’t spoken to for over four years (or never met at all). Amidst the algorithmic glut of clean, corporate ads, sponsorships, and AI generated art and writing, the real people I have established emotional connections with are increasingly hidden from view.
Analog printing, and creative work in general, is my personal remedy to this. For me, creating art is fundamentally about trying to access and share a human feeling. Currently the physical process, product, and medium blending that letterpress encompasses is the most consistent expression of that human feeling I have. When I consider how working with linocut and letterpress makes me feel, I wonder what the broader impact and influence of analog printing could be: obviously, I don’t think everyone is going to become a letterpress printmaker, but I don’t think I’m the only person who feels a human connection in the “letterpress feel,” and I wouldn’t be surprised if more people looked at analog printing and its products as a way to get more of a human feel from art and writing.
That may sound strange given how ubiquitous social media and smart phones are and the economic obsolescence of mass-producing analog print goods, but many facets of using a handset actually come from analog printing. Upper-case letters and lower-case letters are so called because upper-case letters of a font were stored in the “upper case” of a type cabinet, while lower-case letters were stored in the “lower case.” The QWERTY keyboard we’re all still using right now originated as a layout for typewriters that placed letters unlikely to be typed in sequence next to each other as a means to minimize the potential for jams. Despite society as a whole moving away from analog printing, the historical influence of analog printing has survived in several facets of our culture and language. These surviving influences combined with the resurrection of letterpress as an artisan craft leads me to believe that letterpress is probably going to continue to survive – in a general sense, entire art forms seem pretty resistant to extinction (film has failed to kill theatre, photography has failed to kill painting, etc). It also inspires me to imagine what the far future could look like if letterpress did not merely survive but somehow came to occupy the position of influence on culture, language, and the transmission of information in a way that it once did. This is mostly a science-fictional kind of imagining, but I imagine any kind of apocalypse situation, likely climatological or atomic, where a global power grid fails or computers and servers otherwise become useless, and the letterpress machines craftspeople have kept alive for centuries hum to life with new meaning, now once again the main tool used to share knowledge and information far and wide.
I’m currently developing an idea for a retrofuturist sci-fi tabletop role-playing game called Retrograde that is heavily rooted in letterpress. The guiding notion of the world is that faster-than-light travel is made possible by starships that are in effect massive printing presses: printing starmaps (something like this or these) using the blood of mutants as ink teleports the starship to that vantage in the galaxy. This allows for humanity to spread itself across the stars, and news is spread once again by letterpress, as couriers teleporting across the galaxy with news pamphlets can travel faster than radio waves. I haven’t worked out all the kinks yet, but it’s a juicy enough idea that I am committed to continue exploring it. It has so many things within it that have really captured my imagination, and I’ll be really curious to see what other people do with it, too.
A letterpress star map, “Astronomy, Diagram, Solar System, Smith’s Astronomy, Antique Prints, American, Mid 19th Century”
Clearly, something about the past, the “retro,” inspires our thoughts of the future: there’s an immense amount of retrofuturism out there, but Fallout is a personal favorite of mine. Its expression of a 1950s American exceptionalism that sustains itself through atomic energy until it finally, dramatically destroys itself is aesthetically captivating, and taps deep nostalgia reservoirs I have from The Twilight Zone and my dad’s collection of Cold War era novels. Mike Rugnetta has a great video about how technological developments in the Fallout world that diverge from our own world affect the culture of that fictional world and serve to comment on our world. The idea that technological developments can have such an impact on culture is a major component of my thoughts around Retrograde, which is in and of itself informed by our own history: the shift from hand-copied manuscripts to printed copies made possible by the development of medieval printing presses radically increased literacy and allowed greater dissemination of information, and the development of the internet, social media, and the algorithmic spread of information feels like it is having a comparably dramatic impact on how information is being distributed.
Retrograde is fundamentally about how the distribution of information changes the information we distribute, how the ways we communicate change what we communicate. Those questions are asked implicitly in all conversations about news and social media and AI art and living at this point in the Anthropocene. Something about letterpress gives me a new way to express myself creatively, channeling my art and writing into a physical medium that feels distinct and personal in an increasingly depersonalized virtual world. I hope to print Retrograde on letterpress sometime next year, and I envision it as a perfect marriage of content and form: the physical print expression of Retrograde’s narrative will be a component of the narrative itself. I want the narratives of Retrograde to be open to whatever accesses the human feel for its players. That’s a big reason why I’m making Retrograde as a tabletop RPG rather than a set, linear narrative: I want the players to explore questions of communication, change, and the impact our past has on our future in whatever ways feel the most facile to explore – and, I admit, I hope that letterpress hits those points for Retrograde’s players in the same way it does for me.
I have always been interested in both the past and the future, always compelled by history, alternate history, and science fiction, and letterpress represents me trying to bridge the past as I understand it with the future I want to create for myself. Retrograde is an expression of the past’s relevance to future, and I hope that Retrograde makes its players think about both the “What?” and the “Why?” of how we communicate and how the changes in our communication methods throughout history affect the ways we construct societies, communities, and personal identities. I hope that the storytelling Retrograde players embark on together sparks questions about where our patterns of communication and information consumption come from, what they could become, and how we might try to make them what we want them to be.
The first draft of the introductory scenario for Retrograde, Overprint, is available on my website here. I’d love to hear if my experiences with linocut and letterpress get any thoughts churning – I want to talk about a lot of the ideas I introduced here in greater detail, so let me know which ones you’re most eager to explore, and I’d love to hear about any experiences you have giving Retrograde a try. Thanks for reading!
–Nathaniel
