A publication produced to mark sixty years of The Caseroom as the dedicated Letterpress collection and workshop of The Glasgow School of Art. The book contains an introduction; inventory; photo-essay by Ross Finnie and an essay by Dr Frances Robertson based on interviews and archival research conducted by Edwin Pickstone and Dr Frances Robertson.

Introduction:
There is a poster on the wall of the Caseroom which reads ‘why would anyone do this?’. It was made by a student quoting a member of staff during an introductory class in Letterpress typography. It is a fair question but we had better start with an easier one: what is The Caseroom?

The Caseroom is The Glasgow School of Art’s collection of Letterpress Printing equipment. Letterpress is the method and technology of setting and printing text using small interchangeable metal letters called type. This method,
known as typography, began in Europe in the mid 15th Century, though it existed in East Asia centuries earlier with metal types used in what is now Korea at least seventy years before Gutenberg in Germany. Letterpress printing spread rapidly across Europe. It supplanted the slow, laborious work of the scribe writing out each word by hand, in the making of books to allow large-scale production, a shift which had an incalculable effect on our modern world. Remaining the dominant means of print well into the mid twentieth Century, Letterpress technology, it’s systems, typefaces, terminology and aesthetics are engrained in all of our digital technologies from word processing and design software to email and text messages. The name Caseroom itself reflects this. A printer’s term dating back to the 19th Century, the word Caseroom is taken from the drawers, known as cases, in which the impactful little letters are kept. The upper case, for capital letters above the lower case for, well, lowercase letters.

This publication has been produced to mark sixty years of The Caseroom at GSA alongside an exhibition and bold, beautiful billboards and posters situated across Glasgow, designed by Letterpress Technician Ruth Kirkby. The exhibition in the Reid building of GSA shows a wealth of works made in the facility, outputs of many different kinds made by many hands. But the intention of this book is to get a little deeper into the room itself. An essay by Dr Frances Robertson gives a historical account of the Caseroom, starting with its embryonic stages in the Department of Commercial Art, official formation in the 1960s and subsequent development in the Departments of Graphic Design, Visual Communication and today’s Communication Design. Pairing our research in the GSA archives and Special Collections with interviews with staff and former students, Frances’ writing acts as a key to understanding the place of print in an art school context. A photo-essay commissioned from our colleague, Photography Technician, Ross Finnie provides a record of the room as it stands, giving the reader a sense of the atmosphere conjured by a unique combination of technology and community. Lastly, for those with a beady eye there is an inventory of equipment which gives a little more detailed history. It also hints at the direction of future travel through recent acquisitions and the re-materialisation of digitally designed typefaces.

Back to that question: why would anyone do this, especially in a society no longer dependant on print media? The answer is tricky, mainly because the room provides as many answers as there are people using it. The material possibilities of ink on paper, alternative ways of making, communal space, play, research, discovery, the genesis technology of poster manufacture and a great cd collection all come to mind. Here, one can engage with both design and print as a combined iterative process, a craft of making with words, less fractured than the standard division of disciplines. It is a space for the reintroduction of crafts like bookbinding to design education but not regressing into the simulated safety of nostalgia. Instead, in feeling for new meaning and opportunities through use, the collection provides a link between aesthetics and technologies drawn out in black and white through centuries of typographic development. This window into the evolution of communication through print in turn presents a stepping off point for explorations into the merit of materiality amid the constant flux of the digital age. Questions of class and values arise through the breadth of printing culture and our location in Glasgow encourages focus on the friction between access to ‘fine print’ equipment and hands-on experience with our shared industrial visual culture. A key accelerant in the growth of universities at the turn of the 16th century, print is a meeting point of technological culture with all academic disciplines, of craft with industry, the private press with radical printers. The lore, practices and equipment of a centuries old trade rub up against the professional designer of the twentieth century. This potent cocktail of themes is seen in the work of students, staff and guests from The Caseroom’s establishment through to the present day.

So why would anybody do this: inhabit this room, collection, printshop, bindery, studio, archive, bridge to the written history of all subjects and portal to the innards of text technology? Well, it is what each of us makes of it and with all of these possibilities, maybe the enriching of our thinking, experience, studies, research and most importantly, our making is reason enough.

Edwin Pickstone
Lecturer, Researcher & Typography Technician
Communication Design/TSD
Design School
The Glasgow School of Art