Erik Spiekermann on p98a’s innovative revival of the letterpress

“Since the advent of computers in our studios, we’ve all spent hours looking for the right typeface from thousands of choices, fussed with tiny increments in size, introduced refinements in OpenType fonts containing hundreds of ligatures, alternate characters, and content-sensitive positions. And now ‘letterpress’ is back” writes renowned designer and founder of MetaDesign (1979,) FontShop (1988,) Edenspiekermann (2002,) and p98a (2013) Erik Spiekermann.

The latter, p98a, is an experimental letterpress workshop in Berlin Tiergarten dedicated to letters, printing and paper.

“Suddenly we’re happy to take a lowercase l and use it for a figure 1 because that particular typeface doesn’t have enough figures? WTF? Wood type sucks when it comes to kerning because you would have to cut away bits of the letter itself in order to achieve ‘perfect’ spacing… Why do we bother?” he argues. Of course, he is more than willing to shed a light on the newly launched exploration of letterpress in the 21st century through p98a.

“Nobody who has ever held a large piece of wood type has been able to resist the fascination that these objects evoke. There is nothing like setting up a forme (yes, with a silent e at the end) from bits of lead, steel, aluminum, brass and wood – a very messy sight, as these materials have all been around and aged differently – and then running a clean white sheet of paper through the press and over that colourful forme. Suddenly and quite magically, there is a message: words on paper, exactly where you wanted them” he adds before laying out three practical reasons on why he alongside other type designers 9Ferdinand Ulrich, Norman Posselt, Axel Nagel, Jan Gassel, Alexandra Pawłowska, Laureen Mahler, John Peck and Susanna Dulkinys to name a few) decided to start making their own large type at p98a.

“1. A lot of the more than 800 cases of display type in our workshop, (not all of it is made from wood), have characters missing, damaged, not available in sufficient amounts. And, of course, nobody had a need for hashtags, @-signs, €-characters or other recent additions. Fonts from the US or Britain don’t have the umlauts like ä, ö, ü and other accents that languages beyond English require – it being the only language that manages without any diacritical marks. So we need to make new letters to complete or augment the character count.

2. Some of our favorite type is only available in one or two sizes, and often not the one we would like to use. So we need to make other sizes for the same design.

3. There are fantastic new typefaces being designed today that look really good in large sizes. We don’t always want to evoke the old times by using type that was designed more than a hundred years ago. Instead, we want to move letterpress out of the nostalgic niche where is has been sitting since its revival through the application of polymer plates. When we make new digital designs available as large display type, we can decide which characters we want, which size exactly and how many of them”.

Read Spiekermann’s insightful Making Display Type at p98a in Berlin entry here.

p98a aim is to explore how letterpress can be redefined in the 21st century through research, printing, collecting, publishing and making things.

“We work with hot metal- and wood-type, several proof- and platen presses and other traditional analogue equipment, and combine those with digital techno­logies. We have a Ludlow caster, a Risograph, a Glowforge laser. We built our own laser to make polymer metal-backed 50×70cm (20×28") plates direct from data (no negs), and we print those plates on a 1954 Heidelberg Cylinder” reads the initiative’s manifesto. 

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