*Rudolph Ruzicka was an American printer and type designer, who worked for the Merganthaler Linotype Company, one of the largest manufacturers of typesetting equipment.

*Rudolph Ruzicka was an American printmaker, whose wood engravings were collected by major institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago.

While both of these sentences are accurate as ‘nutshell’ descriptions of a career that started with boyhood art classes at Hull House in Chicago and ended with numerous accolades such as the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, they connote professional trajectories that often have been considered separate disciplines, both in their practices and in historical and critical engagement with them. Whether they have been classified as commerce or art, engaged with text or image, produced by machine or by hand, studied by book history or art history, or, indeed categorised as ‘printing’ or ‘printmaking’, Ruzicka’s work is an excellent case study to consider the commonalities across these seemingly artificial borders. This paper will examine key examples of Ruzicka’s work to understand how his practices and products—from the tools he used, to the rigour of his approach to structure and composition, to his frequent invocation of landscape—demonstrate interdisciplinary cohesion.