[Laura Shore] Our letterpress friends come from many different schools of experience. Whether you’re a) a refugee from commercial graphic design, b) an old-tyme type aficionado, c) a book artist from the seventies, or d) a pre-industrial technologist . . . you may be ready to reach out and improve your skills, take a sabbatical, or simply find a new community of passionate practitioners.
CULPA, the College and University Letterpress Printers Association, was founded in 2006 to bring together students and educators at international college-level letterpress programs. We love the CULPA logo, so we inquired about its origin. Abigail Uhteg confirmed that she’d designed it when she started the organization and launched the site in 2006.
Abigail told us: The letterforms in the logo are based on the majuscules in a couple of medieval manuscripts. I put them together with the association’s full name in Trajan, as a way of tying the old way of making text – meaning by hand, on parchment – with the “new” way – letterpress; the first “roman” letterforms being based on the inscriptions on Roman columns – together with the current way, Trajan being a typeface first designed for digital format, but based on old style letterforms. I rather suspect that’s all lost when someone pokes around the site, but that’s what I was thinking.
On the CULPA site you’ll find links to over 30 programs at colleges as diverse as the University of Iowa, Oslo National Academy of the Arts, and Montana State. The excellent resources section contains links to platemakers, bookbinding suppliers, type collections for sale, and other networks, like Briar Press. Membership in CULPA is free, and there is even an application on the site. If you are a student or an instructor at a qualified institution that isn’t yet a member, please spread the word.
