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Chairs: Cathie Ruggie Saunders and Martha Chiplis

Participants: Vida Sacic, Jen Farrell, Jill Gage, Jeremy Botts, Ben Blount

As an important railroad hub and home to historic Printers Row since the 1885 construction of Dearborn Street Station, Chicago has been a center for letterpress printers who served their community from the 1800s until today.

Letterpress printing speaks with a voice, increasingly varied, which continues to be heard. With universities adding letterpress to their curriculum, design firms meeting client’s demands for the “different” kind of visual statement that letterpress can give, and artists taking on the medium to tell their stories, the letterpress resurgence is palpable.

Letterpress as a technological innovation with continuous dominance in the printing industries for nearly five centuries has, despite digital advances in the industry, much to offer current and future generations of artists, designers, and collectors.

In this roundtable, we will discuss the following: what has happened in recent history that has affected letterpress within academic programs and outside of them? How has the use of the media by artists and designers changed? How do you build a support network for letterpress within a school–with faculty, administration, and students–and without–with librarians, private artists, and the letterpress community at large? How do you pass on the love of letterpress, and the knowledge of it, to students today?