Projects

Book Arts & Letterpress @ Scholars' Lab

Details

  • When: 2023-Current
  • Project type: Internal Projects & Community Service
Book Arts & Letterpress @ Scholars' Lab logo or decorative image

Scholars’ Lab staff have active research, teaching, and practice around book arts, particularly letterpress printing and zine-making. Our makerspace frequently offers free public workshops on methods like bookbinding, book-based sculpture, and linoleum carving and printing; is host to the tiniest 3D-printed press; and maintains a variety of equipment helpful in this work (e.g. lasercutter and CNC router for making experimental custom letterpress type).

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

Our book arts work

Amanda Wyatt Visconti and Shane Lin are active in book arts collectives and training, including past intensive training with the Virginia Center for the Book’s Book Arts printshop and Penland School of Craft; coursework with Rare Book School; membership in the Virginia Book Arts Steering Committee and member collective; work in the Alphabuzzzz public letterpress pedagogy cohort; a letterpress artist residency and craft fellowships; and teaching at the Mellon-funded Building BookLabs Symposium.

Plans

Currently, our BookBeetle, C&P Pilot, and Provisional presses; type; and letterpress cuts are not available for public use. We’re working to refurbish donated items, develop training and safety practices, and plan workshops to support this. We hope to lead informal staff-led explorations in Spring 2026 (keep an eye out on our events page or join our newsletter to hear more), followed by more work toward formal support in Summer 2026.

Book arts in a DH center?

Book arts, and particularly letterpress, are part of Scholars’ Lab’s work with critical and creative technologies, digital and otherwise.

  • Beyond locating both history and current (including analog) technologies in our work, Scholars’ Lab applies digital approaches to book arts through book-adjacent data science research, makerspace fabrication of book arts materials, and digital innovations around the same
  • Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture at University of Wisconsin-Madison is one example of the many “BookLabs” and other centers recognizing the continuum of historical and digital textual technologies
  • The Mellon-funded Building BookLabs Symposium attendance strongly overlapped with digital humanists

Zines!

We hope to add a list of SLab-authored zines here soon. You might also be interested in our free public zine distro (Zine Bakery @ Scholars’ Lab) and its surrounding research project.

Collaborators: