Book Arts & Letterpress

Scholars’ Lab staff have active research, teaching, and practice around book arts, particularly letterpress printing and zine-making.

We’re focusing on 3 areas not currently well-supported by Charlottesville’s relative wealth of bibliographic and book arts resources:

• Low-barrier, friendly, safe/hard-to-break printing experimentation available for no cost (including for UVA classes, students, staff, faculty, local community, and hopefully beyond via virtual workshops and async means such as zines), following the UVA Library’s ethos of learning and practice for all, and Scholars’ Lab’s staff expertise in pedagogy, practitioner-building, and community design
• Work toward support for inclusive and multilingual printing, especially for non-Latin scripts, Braille, and other typefaces uncommon or difficult to procure in the U.S.
• Experimental & digital humanities explorations: applying our makerspace and prototyping expertise to develop custom, cheaper, and/or otherwise unavailable typefaces and printing apparatus (e.g. to address dearth of multilingual options); explore other connections between hands-on book arts practice and our DH skillset

Amanda Wyatt Visconti and Shane Lin are active in book arts collectives and training, including intensive training with the Virginia Center for the Book’s Book Arts printshop, the Alphabuzzzz public letterpress pedagogy cohort, and the Mellon-funded Building BookLabs Symposium.

Currently, our BookBeetle press, type, and letterpress cuts are not available for public use. We’re working to develop training, safety practices, and workshops to support this.

Collaborators:

• Amanda Wyatt Visconti, Director
• Shane Lin, Senior Developer