At home with type: Alan Kitching – master of letter press

All photos copyright Jerome Weatherald/BBC. No re-use without permission

To step inside Alan Kitching’s studio is to enter the past and the future present. The rich fragrance of ink and wooden trays transports you to a pre digital world.  This is the world of Sergeant Pepper-style retro font posters and design that mixed old and new to create such rich and beautiful images and book covers and products in the 1960s. For BBC Front Row producer (and photographer) Jerome Weatherald and I got to see round his world and his passion for making beautiful typographical prints for the modern world the old analogue way.

Kitching has proudly stood still as mass printing took over in the 1970s and drove small presses out of business. In the long term it’s meant he has a thriving business as a renewed interest in craft and analogue quality brings clients like Sky Media seeking physically textured designs to market their digital products. In this case, drying from pegs, a poster for a new season of programming, with each drama or film title picked out in a carefully chosen font and colours chosen to express the theme of each. Like vinyl records the niche for letterpress is an interesting part of modern digital based consumption. Though we talked about the strangeness of how the newspapers he helped redesign over the years including The Guardian, are disappearing from the physical world, while his old-style physical typography is increasingly valued and cherished.

But none of it would be possible of Kitching hadn’t kept, and in some cases, acquired further “obsolete” collections of typefaces. He bought up an entire theatrical poster letter press he and his late wife found housed in two medieval barns many years ago: “She told me do you want a pension or do you want this?” He still teaches new generations of students and still loves his work. What emerges from talking to him is that the art emerges from a joy in mathematical puzzle-solving. The physical pieces must be carefully slotted together, but an infinite number of combinations is possible. Details count. In digital formatting who notices that the tip of one letter doesn’t line up exactly with the base of the next one as they do in letterpress?

One of Kitching’s presses is at the graphic design exhibition of his work at Somerset House in London and you can visit to see him printing there for several days this week and next. More info on the link below. And there’s an exquisite book, too, on his career and designs.

My interview with him is on BBC Front Row Wed April 27th and here on iplayer after 

Further reading

Pick Me Up at Somerset House, London – tickets for the Alan Kitching Exhibition