Mission

The Artificial Thinking machine has arrived. It promises – or threatens – to do all the hard work for us. AI has collected/gathered/stolen phantastillions of images, words, facts. But it has not been able to collect our experiences – the things we know without ever having said them, read or written them or drawn pictures or taken photographs of them. Our cognitive abilities have grown over thousands of years and now we are in danger of losing them as a result of wiping on glass panes only and waiting for an instant solution to all our problems. But something is missing: We may see the world with our eyes, read facts, exchange instant messages across the globe, but we still “grasp” things with our hands. This is how babies learn: they touch things and find out whether they are hard, soft, agreeable or no use to them.

Our letterpress workshop brings us back to that experience: things are things there, not pictures of things. Ink smells and sticks to your fingers. Paper looks and feels different depending how you hold it, fold it or tear it. Machines need oil and grease and so do our elbows. Letters are also things, made of metal, wood, plastic. They are beautiful but mean nothing until we arrange them into words, sentences, columns and pages. Add ink and paper, crank the handle and you have created meaning.

In our manual workshop everything takes a little longer and there is no command-Z. We don’t need billions of colours or 150,000 fonts. Instead, we have fonts made of lead and wood that are 100 years old. New letters we make ourselves, using lasers and CNC milling machines. We send data directly from the computer to our Heidelberg cylinder from 1954 – something Gutenberg would have liked to have done 600 years ago.

There are proper museums dedicated to Gutenberg’s legacy, albeit with machines and equipment protected from us behind barriers. Instead of celebrating such memorials to past technology, at Hacking Gutenberg we expressly invite you to touch them: all our type is ready to be used, proof- and platen presses are up and running during our workshop sessions.

The old printing presses are indestructible and will outlive us. But knowledge of their use is disappearing, so we have to preserve it. Preservation Through Production is the motto: as long as we work with them, they will be preserved. They are of no use to anyone in a museum.

Workshops → One of the joys of running a letterpress workshop is sharing the experience with others. At Hacking Gutenberg, we offer workshops for individuals or small groups and teams.

The workshops begin with a brief introduction to letterpress printing and an overview of the various printing processes and the typographic measurement system. This is followed by a tour of the premises. Participants familiarize themselves with our most beautiful wooden letters and learn about the printing presses and some of their technical details, so that by the end of the day they are able to operate them themselves. We then demonstrate how printing works at our workshop. We explain the structure of the printing press and how to build and close a printing form.

Participants learn how to set and lay out a page, which they then print in a small print run. We encourage participants to come up with ideas for quotes or short sentences they would like to print before the workshop. It may happen that a text does not fit perfectly because we do not have all fonts in all sizes and because some letters are missing—for example, German fonts never have enough y's to typeset English texts. So, the solution is to change the text! We see the experience of working with limited resources as a key advantage of our work. We don't have millions of colors and all the fonts in the world here. Many of the best ideas come about when you have to work with what you have available.

The workshop ends with tidying up the materials we have messed up during the day. Putting rulers, squares, and other blind materials back in the right order, sorting letters and assigning them to the correct type case, and cleaning ink residue from the printing rollers are all tasks that are just as important as designing and printing.

Would you like to do a workshop with us as a group with friends or as a team with your colleagues? Then please contact us by email

→ [email protected]

As an individual, you can book a ticket for an open workshop here → Sign up here.

Collection → We have more than 500 ­cases of poster type made from wood and alterna­tive materials, ranging from 8 to 60 Cicero (the German equi­valent of a “line”) and around 450 ­cases of foundry type from 6 to 96 point. ­Gauges for measuring the height of ­rollers and type as well as the thickness of paper are tools we use daily. We also have type specimens and a large collection of books—old and new—about printing, typesetting and typography.

Post-digital printing → We expose polymer plates, cut large size type from digital data, mill punches to make matrices for casting new hot metal type and will be 3D-printing poster type as soon as the materials be­come affordable. We use a direct-to-plate process to output digital plates for letterpress-printing books on a Heidelberg Cylinder and a giant (130×96cm) ­Johannisberger stop­-cylinder press from 1924. 

Suhrkamp Letterpress does not seek to serve a bibliophile market. Our aim is to produce pieces of literature that exceed the pleasure of reading and also satisfy other senses. Many trades are necessary to produce a book. A book is only a book, once it has become a book.

2020 we joined forces with TOC The Other Collection.

TOC is the product of our belief that important literature deserves books made of the finest materials, using the most sophisticated printing techniques. At a time when most reading has become a fleeting experience, we will create a more permanent space for important thoughts and ideas, by lodging them in handsomely printed books. Our books – placed on a curated bookshelf – will be a quiet place in today’s information pandemonium. But we shall also choose books that spur lively dialogue with other readers. TOC focuses on contemporary literature, books that will form the canon of the future.

The books are printed in limited editions, signed and numbered – individually designed to enhance each text.

At TOC we combine the advances of modern typography with the quality and artisanship of centuries-old book printing. While classic letterpress offers a pleasant analog reading experience, its limitations, including the high cost of traditional metal type setting, have so far made it prohibitive for modern book production. By transferring the layouts onto polymer plates with our in-house laser setter and improving print quality, step by step, on our Heidelberg Cylinder press, we combine the virtues of analog and digital processes. This results in the best of both worlds: refined digital typography and a smooth analog reading experience.

Publishing → Our journal P98a Paper is a collection of stories, opinions and illustrations by people we know and whose work we like. In its first volumes, the project began on a Risograph, a “digital silkscreen” printer used for small publications with spot colors. Through Paper we continue to explore different printing technologies: letterpress, offset, post-digital letterpress, and digital ­printing. Buy it here.

Material → Wir experimentieren mit verschiedenen Materialien und Methoden zur Herstellung unserer eigenen Plakatschriften. Wir haben Plexiglas ausprobiert, 3D-Druck, Aluminium und Fräsen aus hartem Holz. Das gute alte Resopal, das wir noch von Küchentischen kennen, scheint erfolgversprechend. Das größte Problem ist es, die Buchstaben exakt auf die Schrifthöhe von 23,56mm zu bringen, denn im Druck zeigen sich selbst Abweichungen von einem Hundertstel Millimeter.

p98a.berlin
typographic workshop
Potsdamer Str. 98a
10785 Berlin, Germany

+49 (0)30 8321 9070
[email protected]
instagram → @p98a
twitter → @galeriep98a