Welcome! I donāt yet know the name for our new DH book arts (project? press?), but Iām hoping collecting our public documentation here will eventually reveal a perfectly punny, im-pressive press name.
How is this different from other local book arts resources?
Weāre focusing on 3 areas currently less supported by Charlottesvilleās 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 Libraryās ethos of learning and practice for all, and Scholarsā Labās 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
Collecting areas:
- Multilingual
- DIY & experimental
- LGBTQIA+
- DHy
- Dogs
- History, especially re:print culture, social justice, tech, libraries, & weird old letterpress stuff that makes you go āwhy the heck did they want to be able to print this repeatedlyā or āwhat does this even meanā
What does this website currently offer?
- Grid and table views of a digital āspecimen bookā (metadata and print examples from all the type and cuts SLab and staff personally own)
- Overview of our areas of focus (above)
What will this website offer in the future?
- A research and learning roadmap, similar to my Zine Bakery research roadmap
- Information about presses weāve access to
- Zines teaching book arts methods
- Tutorials on following in our (just beginning to tread now!) footsteps related to public pedagogy, inclusive and multilingual printing, and DH+makerspace book arts experimentation
- A gallery of photos and writeups of our experiments and learning
- Integration with my Zine Bakery project
Until Iāve a moment to develop this site further, Iāve created the following resources elsewhere pertinent to this work:
- Look!! Hereās your unusual letterpress blocks invitation to joy: a collage mini-zine Free zine introducing you to the weird world of historical letterpress cuts available on Ebay
- A web app with two little tools I created to aid letterpress typesetting/text choice when you only have 1xA-Z type on hand
- Research blogging on recent practice with a screw press, building a tabletop press, book binding, and my intensive typesetting and Vandercook press training work (not documented in a blog post yet, but skim the media tab of my Bluesky profile for lots of photo-enriched goodies).
About me
Iām a new printer, and longstanding textual scholar, librarian, and digital humanist whose experience includes operating several types of letterpresses, as well as participation in the longstanding digital humanities makerspace thatās part of the DH center I direct (the Scholarsā Lab at the University of Virginia); the RBS BookLab and CalRBS Feminist Bibliography courses; the inaugural BookBeetle āAlphabuzzzzā public-teaching cohort; and training toward Vandercook certification with the Virginia Center for the Book Arts printshop. Iām particularly interested in hands-on printing practice; feminist, queer, trans, and anti-racist book history; overlaps between book arts and experimental/digital humanities research; and inclusive, accessible, public, joyful book arts play and practice.