Communications Intern Colby Meeks, Harvard College ’25, reports on a letterpress celebration at Houghton Library.
The Bow & Arrow Press is a “repository of history and laboratory of imagination,” declared Johanna Drucker, at the beginning of the Fall 2024 Philip and Frances Hofer Lecture.
In many ways, the lecture, which served as an opening celebration for Houghton Library’s new exhibit, Harvard by Hand: The Bow & Arrow Press at 45, was a love letter to the Bow & Arrow Press.
A visual theorist and cultural critic, Johanna Drucker is Breslauer Professor and Distinguished Professor Emerita in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. She is also a book artist who printed three of her books at the Bow & Arrow Press, the historic letterpress printing studio founded 45 years ago in Adams House.
The night began with Drucker asking anyone with personal experience with the press to stand — over half of the room stood up, to loud applause. Drucker spent much of her lecture speaking on the importance of the physicality of books and letterpress.
Framed through a recollection of the books she printed at the press during her 1988-89 time as a Mellon Faculty Fellow at Harvard — The Word Made Flesh, History of The/My Wor(l)d, and Sample Dialog — Drucker invited the audience to consider what it means for something to be made by hand.
Letterpress work sees “the hand as a writing instrument and a design instrument,” said Drucker, highlighting the physicality of everything printed by the press. For her, letterpress work is inseparable from its creation, and the language on the page is embodied and alive.
Letterpress work is also inseparable from its place of creation. This was especially true for her final book at the press, Sample Dialog, done in collaboration with Emily McVarish. Beginning as simply a sample of the fonts and stamps owned by the press, it quickly became an experiment in the process of creating. Inspired by the materials at the press, they created sentences in dialogue with one another without knowledge of what the other was writing, pressing an assortment of images ranging from silly to strange throughout the book. They did all the printing in the night with the leftover ink from whatever project then-resident tutor of Adams House Gino Lee had worked on that day.
Towards the end of her lecture, Drucker mused on the role of letterpress in the digital age. “We still find new things to do with a needle and thread,” she said, claiming there is still plenty to do on a printing press. “I’m a believer in handiwork.”
Following the lecture, the eclectic crowd of Bow & Arrow alumni and letterpress aficionados made its way to Houghton Library’s Edison and Newman Room to see the exhibit, which not only is a retrospective but also ushers in the next era of Bow & Arrow Press, with its new home in Lamont Library.
On display were a wide-reaching collection of the work of the Bow & Arrow Press, including books, cards, broadsides, and Adams House ephemera, everything from concert posters to memorials of late friends — love letters from firm believers in human handiwork.
The Harvard by Hand: The Bow & Arrow Press at 45 exhibit will remain open at Houghton Library until January 10, 2025.