When is a font not a font? Where is the lead in leading? Learn typographic history by experience as you hand-set metal and wood type and print it through letterpress on both 19th-century clamshell platen presses and 20th-century cylinder presses. Movable type ended the European Dark Ages and ushered in the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution and literacy for the masses. Further east, movable type spread Buddhism through China, Japan and Korea several centuries earlier. See how changing styles in graphic design, advertising and architecture have interacted down through the ages, through manuals, catalogs and other ephemera shown in this course.

Dikko Faust
Hand typographer; letterpress printermaker; founder, Purgatory Pie Press

Collections include: Museum of Modern Art; Tate Gallery, London; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; New York Public Library

Retrospective exhibitions include: Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; The Metropolitan Museum of Art