Welcome! I don’t yet know the name for our new DH book arts (project? press?), but I’m 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?

We’re focusing on 3 areas currently less supported by Charlottesville’s 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

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 ā€œwhy the heck did they want to be able to print this repeatedlyā€ or ā€œwhat does this even meanā€

What does this website currently offer?

  • Grid and table views of a digital ā€œspecimen 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 we’ve 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 I’ve a moment to develop this site further, I’ve created the following resources elsewhere pertinent to this work:

About me

I’m 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 that’s part of the DH center I direct (the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia); the RBS BookLab and CalRBS Feminist Bibliography courses; the inaugural BookBeetle ā€œAlphabuzzzzā€ public-teaching cohort; and training toward Vandercook certification with the Virginia Center for the Book Arts printshop. I’m 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.