Review of 2024: Lettering, Printing and Graphic Design Collections

Conferences, workshops and seminars
The LPGDC featured in the SHARP conference collections sessions. As well as the introduction of the lithographic pole press, other sessions featured the Type Design Collection. An exhibition curated by Christopher Burke, Eric Kindel and Sue Walker featured items from the Otto and Marie Neurath Isotype Collection. SHARP included papers by academic staff, research students and alumni that drew on the LPGDC and other University collections.
Emma Minns hosted and supported the New Baxter Society Annual General Meeting in July 2024.This included a display of Baxter plates held the LPGDC and a demonstration of intaglio printing by Geoff Wyeth.
The Friends of the University returned for an afternoon organised by Sue Walker and curated by Emma Minns drawing on the Elizabeth Greig collection of civil aviation ephemera housed in the Centre for Ephemera Studies.
A ‘Typography Working Seminar: research with collections’, 22–26 July 2024 was organised by Gerry Leonidas, Fiona Ross and Borna Izadpanah. In a week immersed in typographic collections participants looked at methodologies for effectively working with and interpreting primary sources, including unconventional material, ephemera, and digital evidence.
We are collaborating with CBCP on Typodiversity, an open, participatory event series combining talks and workshops on the intersection of research and practice in typography and type design. Our agenda raises issues of agency, resource, representation, and inclusion in the development of environments for authoring, design, and distribution. In November 2023 we hosted Typodiversity 01: exploring the Arabic script world with a hybrid online format to minimise the impact of travel and attendance costs, visa hurdles, legal limitations, and time zone differences. There are two conditions for Typodiversity events: 1) that they are run with as little expenditure as possible, taking advantage of institutional resources; and 2) that the recorded content of the talks and workshops will be openly and freely accessible.
Research, impact, engagement
In 2023-24 the LPGDC was accessed in person and digitally by a wide range of users, from A- level students to European galleries and museums. Interest in the Otto and Marie Neurath Isotype Collection continues to grow; items from the collection featured in the first retrospective exhibition of the work of photographer Lucia Moholy.
Xunchang Cheng was awarded a CBCP Fellowship to work with the Chinese metal types recently acquired by the Lettering, Printing and Graphic Design Collections. His study involves a comprehensive comparison of identified printed materials the Chinese metal types to trace their origins and evaluate their significance. Beyond material analysis, he intends to explore the practicalities of using these types for typography, establishing a testing process to facilitate their application in other collections of Chinese types.
Sue Walker received funding from the ‘catalysing heritage’ strand of the AHRC Impact Accelerator Account to enhance research-informed access to Marie Neurath’s books and other material for young people through engagement with publishers, galleries and school in the UK and Europe. A network of partners is furthering reach of this work.
We continue to recruit PhD students working with material from the LPGDC, and also drawing on our collections-based research methods to work with collections elsewhere in the world: three students joined 23/24, and we are expecting four students whose proposals include collections-based research in 24/25. Our MA Res programme continues to attract students, with firmly-embedded collections-based writing as a distinctive feature.
Teaching and learning
Undergraduate, PGT and PGR students have made extensive use of the collections, most notably label collections held in the Centre for Ephemera Studies; the Type Design Collection of global scripts; 20thcentury posters and concrete and visual poetry publications.
Emma Minns’s collections induction sessions for new PGT and UG students continue to be very well-received. In these sessions Emma shows students examples of the kinds of material they will see in their classes. Emma runs dissertation workshops to introduce collections-based topics that might interest them as well as examples of publications and dissertations that feature LPGDC material.
We continue to work with colleagues across Heritage and Creativity to raise awareness of the material we hold and how we use it: a class on material from Paris ’68 continues to be well-received by French-studies students, and will be extended to other students in Modern Languages.
New developments
The Vice-Chancellor encouraged, agreed and supported with endowment funding the acquisition of Professor Emeritus Michael Twyman’s outstanding collection of material that demonstrates the process and use of lithography, and English- and French-language printed ephemera. The collection is supported by a comprehensive listing of all his material to provide information about provenance and context as well as the usual information required for cataloguing.
An exciting development has been the acquisition of space and funding for refurbishment for a research and teaching workshop to house our collection of historic and reconstructed printing presses – an important strategic development for the development of the LPGDC, the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing and the School of Arts and Communication Design. We hope to have a formal announcement and launch in the autumn term, though we were pleased to introduce printing from stone with our reconstructed lithographic pole press to delegates at the SHARP conference. Geoff Wyeth’s demonstration was very well-received and served as a trial run for future research-led workshop sessions. Unlike any other UK university we are able to demonstrate all the major printing processes alongside the resulting printed outcomes in the form of books, prints, books, posters and ephemera.
Sue Walker and Hannah Lyons have begun a series of interviews with Prof Michael Tywman to learn more about the history of Reading’s School of Art. Prompts for the interview were photographs, programmes and other documents held in the LPGDC. Michael was an undergraduate, postgraduate and then a lecturer in the 1950s and 1960s. The first interview recalls visiting staff, details of the location of the School on the London Road campus and the undergraduate classes that were available to students. One of these classes was ‘book production’ which, in time, was developed by Michael, into what was to become the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication. An exhibition celebrating 50 years of this distinctive academic discipline, to be held in the Autumn term of 2024, is in preparation.
Sue Walker, Director of the Lettering, Printing and Graphic Design Collections
Emma Minns, Assistant Curator
July 2024