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Pressroom as Classroom:
The Press at Colorado College

February 2 - March 26, 2005

The Newberry Library
60 W. Walton St.
Chicago, IL 60610
tel.: 312-943-9090 (main); 312-255-3691 (for exhibit information)
hours: Mon, Fri, Sat 8:15a to 5:30p; Tue, Wed, Thu 8:15a to 7:30p;
galleries are closed on Sunday.
http://www.newberry.org/

Pressroom as Classroom: The Press at Colorado College celebrates the letterpress as art and discipline, both elements of the instructional atmosphere of the Press at Colorado College under the tutelage of Jim Trissel, its founder and leader from 1977-1999. These forty-three samples of books and broadsides produced by the Press are spare, elegant and beautiful examples of text in the service of poetry, poetry supported by text: word, typeface, and hand-done printing technique in elegant integration.

Within the disciplines required by typesetting and the technical boundaries of the letterpress itself, the students of the Press produced a satisfying range of variety on these quietly elegant pages. The slow steady process of letterpress print is the antithesis of modern speed and the too-casual ease of electronic layout, and the physical reality of handset type -- type incised as individual leaden letters, assembled piece by piece, locked into the type-frame -- brings its own thoughtful presence to each publication. The Printed Poem/The Poem as Print: Twenty-four Broadsides of American Poetry (Dana Gioia and Alastair Reid, eds.: 1983-1985) shows the set type as integral to the experience of the poetry itself. The broadsides (single-sided pages, unbound, with text and subtle accompanying graphics) hold aesthetic appeal on many levels: the spacing of words; the refinement provided by the familiar letterforms of the typeface; the atmosphere this creates for the reading of the poem or text itself. Twelve Mammal Skulls (Scientific text by Barbara Winternitz, drawings by Sally Hegarty and Jim Trissel: 1988) is an amalgam of fine art book and naturalist's handbook in its precise line illustrations, paired with crisp text and the artistic subtlety of the title header in subdued capitals on each page. Other works on exhibition include original fiction, a one-act play, experimental works, a proof sheet of the Press's type collection, and Trissel's Color for the Letterpress (1987), an exploration of achieving a variety of color effects with a single ink, a single plate. Several of the books on exhibition are from the Newberry Library's own Special Collections.

"This is not a press hampered by deadlines, high overhead or by demands from clients which compromise our own expectations," Trissel is quoted as stating. "We exist, mainly, to print books which celebrate good texts." The offerings in Pressroom as Classroom show that the Press achieved its goal, and achieved it admirably. And just as its books celebrate good texts, they celebrate the letterpress process itself. Pressroom as Classroom: The Press at Colorado College encourages contemplation of the fine art of letterpress printing, the typefaces, words and the spaces between them -- something we often gloss due to print's ready availability in contemporary life. This is an intimate exhibition, one to contemplate deeply. The Pressoom as Classroom will be at the Newberry Library through March 26, 2005.

A second exhibition at the Newberry, Exploration 2005: The Chicago Calligraphy Collective 19th Annual Juried Exhibition, also runs through March 26 and features sixty-six offerings of contemporary calligraphy.

--Katherine Rook Lieber

Katherine Rook Lieber has edited ArtScope.net's Visual Arts reviews since 1998. Ms. Lieber is Editor and Associate Producer for ArtScope.net.