#booklab op

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letterpress dashboard simulator

🖌️ slapdash-setter Follow

you can just do a shitty lockup. no one cares. be who you want to be

🗜️ century-oldstyle-stan Follow

ummmm no you can't???? your type will fucking wiggle

🖌️ slapdash-setter Follow

fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you

24 notes

🗜️ century-oldstyle-stan Follow

people will just defend the worst printing practices known to man on this website

3 notes

✒️ lines-and-linocut Follow

I spend sixty hours on designing a fucking poster and I get a million comments about how $30 is too much to charge for it. how about you try it

340 notes

🗝️ key-to-the-quoin Follow

people on here really forget that Gutenberg was a fucking hack. he didn't invent shit

#type invented in china and/or korea #so was paper #presses were using in wine and cider making #people just love their white guy blorbos

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🏫 sacramentohistorymuseum Follow

We're going to print a bike for national bike day!

198.3k notes

🗄️ mind-your-ps-and-qs Follow

anyone know where I could get a historical press for cheap? under $50?

🗝️ key-to-the-quoin Follow

UNDER $50??? are you kidding? you'll be lucky to get one for under $200

15 notes

🪧 linoscribes Follow

kissing my metal type on the mouth

🗜️ century-oldstyle-stan Follow

it's made of lead. are you insane

🪧 linoscribes Follow

getting lead poisoning because I love my type so much

🗄️ mind-your-ps-and-qs Follow

it's actually probably not lead! and if it does contain lead it's stabilized in the alloy! you can totally kiss your type :D

🗜️ century-oldstyle-stan Follow

or maybe. consider. don't

35 notes

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made by a student, Fall 2023

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made by Nat

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set and printed by yours truly, slogan by RB. Fall 2023

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from the archive

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Pages from a vintage Women's Peace Camp zine from my visit to the Niels Bohr archives! Not made in BookLab but I thought it was relevant and it'd certainly cool :D

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made for LGBT/ENGL 265

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Amos Kennedy print spotted in the wild at the coffee shop that makes the best coffee I've ever had!

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it's not Friday but someday it will be. set and printed by Rifka

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from the archive

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This was my big project for the semester. It took me probably six weeks. The background is slogans of protest signs I printed, and the foreground is If I Must Die by Refaat Alareer and an original quote. The final image is the laser-etched tikkun olam type piece I made.

Artist's Statement:

We often look at the past as a picture pulled into focus by the writers of history, rather than an entanglement of events and people and messaging. We forget that the student protests against apartheid, against the Vietnam and Iraq wars, were decried as violent unrest. The pieces of art made for those movements were deemed too controversial or political at the time; and now we display those pieces in our museums, on the walls of our reading rooms on the fourth floor of our libraries. Our universities call it a “history of student activism.” We forget that in the days in which the pieces were produced the art curators of the days, the university administrations, the parents, the news media, and the politicians were usually against those movements. When we look at past protest movements we know some opposed them, but we think of them as "bad people," who are nothing like us "good people," because we could never be so blind or so prejudiced.

This piece is made with the type I used for several protest signs--as I made those signs, and as I made this piece, I took the time to reflect on how the opinions I was expressing lined up with my concept of the history of protest and oppression. I used the phrase tikkun olam—"repair the world" in Hebrew—because I feel aligned with the history of Jewish activism and the need to repair our world, but I include it in this piece specifically because I acknowledge that there have always been Jews who were blind and prejudiced; believing that I am following a commandment does not mean I am kind or righteous.

We forget that many people—often those who we think of as “good people”—opposed those movements, and that most of them are ashamed of those opinions today. But when we view history with a lens crafted by the victors and do not turn that same gaze upon the actions and creations of today, we do the world a disservice. We do the people of history a disservice by forgetting that many of them were just as fallible as many of us are today, and we do ourselves a disservice by forgetting we are as fallible as those who came to regret their actions. One day we will join the ranks of the people of history and the people of the future will be looking back at us. There is no perfect way to know we're doing the right thing. But we cannot start from a place of thinking that we would have been just as righteous if we were alive during the history we look back at, or that we will always take the righteous actions today.

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Prints we were sent by @kennedyprints (Amos Kennedy) in exchange for Rifka's piece from last year.

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Matt used the label maker to put a label on his cat

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Intro to UMD BookLab!

Hi! We're BookLab, the University of Maryland's English Department Makerspace. Plaintxt Press is our imprint (the entity that issues our prints [really we just like to put the logo on stuff]). BookLab was started by Professors Matthew Kirschenbaum and Kari Kraus in 2018, and Plaintxt Press was created in late 2023.

Here at BookLab, our primary medium is letterpress art. We also have materials for bookbinding, linocut, stamp making, collaging, and we're looking into screen printing. And we have a lot of random art supplies on the shelves. We also have a library of artists' books (super weird artistic books, like a book that is bound on every side) and books about books.

I made this tumblr bc I thought it would be funny.

Dramatis Personae / Cast List / People who work in BookLab

Matt (he/him): One out of two professors who started BookLab. He has a ton of awards or whatever. Nat says he has tenure for his tenure. He's a super weird guy but pretty cool. He's addicted to Twitter, so you can go see that @mkirschenbaum, it's so academic it breaks my brain.

Kari (she/her): The other professor who started Booklab. I don't know her that well but she seems cool.

A fun fact about Matt and Kari is that they are married. A second fun fact is that you will not hear this from either of them. It's normal to be cagey about being married in the workplace except that half of the English department here is married to the other half of the English department, so most people don't worry about it. Except these two.

Nat (she/her): PhD student with extreme goblinesque bisexual chaos energy. She is extremely accident-prone and yet competent at BookLab things. Also my bestie. She is studying digital humanities. The universe is currently in the process of entrusting her with a child (and we are extremely happy for her).

Diana (she/her): Goth PhD student getting her degree in English. Extremely literary in a dark academia kind of way. She acts kind of shy but is actually good at a lot of things and friendly. My other bestie.

Dylan (he/him): I don't know him super well but he's getting his PhD in something like queer literature. He's super gay and pretty cool.

Nat and Dylan have weird complicated beef that might be more Dylan's fault. I love to know the drama but I do not wish to actually get in the middle.

Rifka (they/them): Me. I like doing experimental letterpress and getting very messy. The fact that I run this Tumblr should tell you a lot about me.

RB (they/them): Occasional specter haunting Booklab (Matt is their mentor for this semester). Getting their PhD in comic book studies, porn studies, and digital humanities. They like BL. They are cool and transgender.

Aaron: Used to work in Booklab and they never took away his swipe access. He is very nice to hang out with. Knows all the drama and I am going to get him to tell me. He's really good at bookbinding.

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this was made by someone's kid lmao