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Tag: alan kitching

Alan Kitching: “I always try to have some logic to the job”

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Related to my post earlier today, typographer Alan Kitching also talked to It’s Nice That this week about printing with letterpress, and a new monograph documenting his work:

Kitching started Omnific studio with Martin Lee and Derek Birdsall, who he had met through Anthony Froshaug, in the late 1970s. They worked from a studio in Covent Garden, then still surrounded by typesetters and other service people, until rents shot up and they moved out to a toy factory in Islington. By this time some foundries were starting to sell off their type, and Omnific bought up a press and installed it at their new studio: “All this type was selling off cheap, cheap-ish, and it was the last chance to get this stuff. So we bought it all and I continued printing there for around three years until I decided I wanted to leave. I didn’t really know what I was going to do but I wanted to buy the press and the type and go and print somewhere”, Kitching says. “I didn’t want to be a jobbing printer but I wanted to start out on my own. It was a very precarious thing to do because we were successful, well-established, and I was taking a backwards step, it was a bit of a leap in the dark.”

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The new book, Alan Kitching: A Life in Letterpress, will be published Laurence King on April 7. A ‘Collectors Edition‘ of only 200 copies featuring a limited edition, numbered print by Kitching will also be available. Laurence King have produced four short teaser trailers for the book:

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Inside Typographer Alan Kitching’s Home

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The Guardian visits the London home of designer, artist and typographer Alan Kitching:

The rooms in Alan Kitching’s home are arranged like one of his letterpress prints. Some are stacked, some are wedged, some aren’t in the right place. One dominates, while others bow out. But each room, like each letter, makes an impact and has a purpose.

From the outside, it’s obvious this isn’t an ordinary home: three large, shop-style window panels showcase Kitching’s iconic prints – word-based images in big, bold type. A fourth is given over to local notices: jumble sales and student art shows. “That was Celia’s idea,” Kitching says. “She was more gregarious than me.” Celia Stothard, his late wife, bought the property 19 years ago. She chose it for its flexibility: a place for them to live and hold talks, exhibitions and performances. She was a designer and artist, too, as well as a jazz singer.

The building is a former alehouse in Kennington, south London, buttressed up against a courthouse (local folklore has it that Charlie Chaplin used to come here to fetch jugs of ale for his mother). Storage rooms cascade off the back of the ground floor, where Kitching runs the Typography Workshop, into a cellar crammed with his extensive, 19th-century type collection. Upstairs, a high-ceilinged mezzanine has a reading nook reachable only by the swivel of a library ladder.

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Alan Kitching’s A-Z of Letterpress

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I just received an advance copy of Alan Kitching’s A-Z of Letterpress from UK publisher Laurence King, and it really is a lovely little book for type and letterpress enthusiasts.1

The accordion-playing Kitching has featured on the blog before of course, but over the course of his career he has worked as a compositor, typographer, graphic designer, teacher, and poster artist. He founded the Typography Workshop in 1989 and, according to designer Derek Birdsall (renowned for his cover designs at Penguin amongst other things), Kitching single-handedly “breathed new life into the dying embers of letterpress” by teaching a new generation of designers how to compose type by hand.

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A collaboration with Pentagram partner Angus Hyland, and designed in-house by Alexandre Coco, the book itself contains 39 alphabets shown letter by letter, presented from A to Z. All the founts are wood letter founts from Kitching’s collection, and every image in the book was printed by hand on a Vandercook no. 3 proof press.

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It really is a thing of beauty. Printed on thick, creamy paper, the letter forms and page layouts are quirky and charming. The colours and metallic ink are vibrant and surprising. Even better, it is also a teaser of sort — Laurence King recently announced it will be publishing a monograph of Kitching’s work in 2016. Can’t wait.

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Alan Kitching and Monotype

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Well, this is absolutely lovely — a short film about letterpress typographer, designer, artist (and accordion player) Alan Kitching, and a set of posters he created with Monotype to celebrate the centenary of five influential designers born in 1914: Tom Eckersley, Paul Rand, FHK Henrion, Josef Müller-Brockmann and Abram Games:

(via David Pearson)

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