00:00Ruth Kirkby and I'm a technician in the case room at the Glasgow School of Art.
00:23The exhibition is The Case Room, 60 years of letterpress at the Glasgow School of Art.
00:29So it's a big mixture of work that's been made by students, alumni, staff, graduates
00:35across those 60 years and there's going to be a big mix of types of work, some more professional
00:41and some student experimentation and so hopefully you'll see a good range of what goes on in
00:48the room.
00:49We've got a range of printmaking processes, most of it is letterpress printing because
00:54that is predominantly what we do in the workshop but we also do a lot of relief printing so
00:58there'll be woodcuts, lino prints and also some people will have worked in combinations
01:04of processes so there's some etchings and screen prints that have gone along with letterpress
01:10prints and also certain things in terms of bookmaking that might be digitally printed
01:17but then bound in the case room or they might have an element of things that have been printed
01:22in here so there'll be some books that the title has been printed but then it's been
01:27scanned in and then produced digitally for sort of commercial printing.
01:32So it'll be a big mixture but all based around letterpress printing basically.
01:38Come along to the case room in the Reid building at the Glasgow School of Art from the 8th
01:44of Feb to the 26th of February.
01:56Today we're in the case room, it's the school's collection of letterpress printing equipment.
02:01It's a really nice, dedicated, well-furnished letterpress printing space and the most significant
02:07of its size and type in a higher education institution in Scotland.
02:11This year is 60 years of the case room.
02:14Printing in letterpress type existed before that in the school but when the case room
02:18was founded with the opening of the Foulis building in 1964-65 that was the first time
02:23the school had a dedicated letterpress printing workshop.
02:28One of the reasons the case room was initiated was for the Foulis Archive Press, a kind of
02:33private press for the school that allowed the school to publish and the Department of
02:37Commercial Art and then Graphics to publish their own books and other types of printed
02:42resources that people were interested in at the time.
02:45It's an interesting time for that to have begun because actually in 65-66 the printing
02:51letterpress printing was the traditional type of printing that had been kind of the main
02:56state of book printing and text printing for 500 years was actually in decline and was
03:01being overtaken by photographic methods.
03:06So I think there was like a real kind of emphasis even in those days in the mid-20th century
03:11on the kind of hands-on material nature of this print and what it could offer that more
03:15modern lithographic printing techniques weren't able to.
03:19We do a lot of different types of work in this room.
03:22So one of its key purposes is for teaching the foundational kind of aspects of typography
03:27and design for students to understand where typography as a discipline comes from.
03:33It links students to like a greater history, a longer history of the history of letters,
03:38the evolution of the alphabet, the evolution of type, the significance of print, the significance
03:43of the printed book.
03:44All of those things are kind of lead out from this collection.
03:50You can take it as a starting point for investigating huge numbers of different strands of cultural
03:57history and the history of learning, history of book production.
04:02One of the things that we're most keen on is Glasgow's visual industrial history and
04:05the wood type collection here is a really great asset for students to get hands-on with
04:10an industrial process that shows the wood type and the typefaces that we have in what
04:17I would call their kind of genesis state.
04:20So a lot of those typefaces didn't exist until the early 1800s when they were necessary for
04:25manufacturers of factory-made commodities to differentiate their product from a competitor's
04:31product.
04:32So things like digestive biscuits and cities like Glasgow that were big industrial cities
04:37were filled with these posters and filled with these new types of letter forms and we
04:41have that direct connection here that the students can investigate and also kind of
04:45understand where we are now in terms of our media, in terms of the internet, in terms
04:49of the way that type, lettering, design work where we are now through the evolutionary
04:55period of the early 1800s.
04:58I began working here in 2005 and at that time the case room wasn't getting a huge amount
05:03of use so my interest was in what was the relevance of this technology, how could we
05:09investigate in interesting abstract artistic ways to understand this huge significance
05:16that seemed to be neglected at the time but also ways that we could speak with this equipment
05:21out into the city and a lot of that began with working with club nights and bands so
05:26people like Conks Unpacks, the DJ, Optimo, Johnny Wilkes, those kinds of jobs led on
05:32to working with record labels so work through Johnny with Franz Ferdinand.
05:38Working with labels like Optimo then allowed things like record production to start happening
05:44so things like record sleeves for people like Warp Records, lots of interesting independent
05:50releases in the city.
05:51The Pastel did a lot of work with the Pastels on some of their releases around 2015 and
05:56that kind of work gave the room some visibility, the equipment some visibility and the way
06:01that we use it here like the artists and designers and other folks started to come
06:07in, worked with Canongate Books on various book covers, Alistair Gray was involved, he
06:13did a great in conversation here with me where I held very little of the conversation but
06:21we worked, Alistair and I and the team worked on a typeface directly for him which can be
06:28seen around the city now in a lot of his works.
06:30We can test colours, we can change things, we can do all kinds of stuff that would be
06:34very expensive to do outside as we're working together and that leads to some really weird,
06:40odd, interesting independent outputs that couldn't be made in any other way.
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