The Glasgow School of Art’s unique printing and typesetting facility The Caseroom celebrates 60 remarkable years, preserving traditional craft while encouraging contemporary innovation, with exhibition of staff and student works
The Glasgow School of Art’s specialised printing and typesetting facility The Caseroom, part of the GSA’s School of Design, celebrates its 60th anniversary in 2025 with an exhibition The Caseroom: 60 Years of Letterpress etc. at The Glasgow School of Art. The exhibition will bring together works by current and former students as well as staff and a wide range of professional collaborators. It will run from the 8 – 26 of February in The Reid Building Ground Floor Corridor Gallery space and launches a year-long programme of commemorative events.
The Caseroom was established in 1964 by staff supported by Douglas Percy Bliss, director of The Glasgow School of Art from 1946 to 1964. His background as a wood engraver likely influenced the decision to establish a facility for traditional forms of printing and typography techniques. Its very name reflects this historical link, drawn from a printer’s term dating back to the nineteenth century, the word Caseroom is taken from the drawers, known as ‘cases’, in which the individual typesetting letters were kept.
The Caseroom was an integral part of Bliss’ vision for the GSA – a modernist, progressive egalitarian vision that championed “useful” arts, which could be applied to anything, by and for anyone. Since its creation, The Caseroom has not only become a key resource for students and the wider Glasgow arts community, but also an important centre of printing and typesetting knowledge across the UK. The Caseroom’s various printing presses (the oldest of which dates from the mid 19th century) and extensive collection of metal and wood type letters and fonts comprises the most significant collection of letterpress printing equipment in a higher education institution in Scotland. It is incredibly adaptable and diverse in its manufacturing processes and design approach, weaving traditional craft with innovative contemporary methods. Fundamental to its working is the importance of collaboration, of working together within the space, steeped in a rich material experience that fosters the possibility of ‘the unexpected’ in the making process.
The Caseroom provides areas of expertise delivered to both students and external arts organisations and individuals; a focus on letterpress printing, which involves using raised metal or wooden type to create impressions on paper; various relief printing techniques, including Lino cutting, polymer plate printing, bookbinding and experimental book design, large format printing, traditional hand printing methods such as woodcut printing, risograph printing and ersatz print ephemera like typewriters, stencil cutters and badge-making equipment.
The Glasgow School of Art’s specialised printing and typesetting facility The Caseroom, part of the GSA’s School of Design, celebrates its 60th anniversary in 2025 with an exhibition The Caseroom: 60 Years of Letterpress etc. at The Glasgow School of Art. The exhibition will bring together works by current and former students as well as staff and a wide range of professional collaborators. It will run from the 8 – 26 of February in The Reid Building Ground Floor Corridor Gallery space and launches a year-long programme of commemorative events.
The Caseroom was established in 1964 by staff supported by Douglas Percy Bliss, director of The Glasgow School of Art from 1946 to 1964. His background as a wood engraver likely influenced the decision to establish a facility for traditional forms of printing and typography techniques. Its very name reflects this historical link, drawn from a printer’s term dating back to the nineteenth century, the word Caseroom is taken from the drawers, known as ‘cases’, in which the individual typesetting letters were kept.
The Caseroom was an integral part of Bliss’ vision for the GSA – a modernist, progressive egalitarian vision that championed “useful” arts, which could be applied to anything, by and for anyone. Since its creation, The Caseroom has not only become a key resource for students and the wider Glasgow arts community, but also an important centre of printing and typesetting knowledge across the UK. The Caseroom’s various printing presses (the oldest of which dates from the mid 19th century) and extensive collection of metal and wood type letters and fonts comprises the most significant collection of letterpress printing equipment in a higher education institution in Scotland. It is incredibly adaptable and diverse in its manufacturing processes and design approach, weaving traditional craft with innovative contemporary methods. Fundamental to its working is the importance of collaboration, of working together within the space, steeped in a rich material experience that fosters the possibility of ‘the unexpected’ in the making process.
The Caseroom provides areas of expertise delivered to both students and external arts organisations and individuals; a focus on letterpress printing, which involves using raised metal or wooden type to create impressions on paper; various relief printing techniques, including Lino cutting, polymer plate printing, bookbinding and experimental book design, large format printing, traditional hand printing methods such as woodcut printing, risograph printing and ersatz print ephemera like typewriters, stencil cutters and badge-making equipment.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Ruth Kirkby and I'm a technician in the case room at the Glasgow School of Art.
00:23The exhibition is The Case Room, 60 years of letterpress at the Glasgow School of Art.
00:29So it's a big mixture of work that's been made by students, alumni, staff, graduates
00:35across those 60 years and there's going to be a big mix of types of work, some more professional
00:41and some student experimentation and so hopefully you'll see a good range of what goes on in
00:48the room.
00:49We've got a range of printmaking processes, most of it is letterpress printing because
00:54that is predominantly what we do in the workshop but we also do a lot of relief printing so
00:58there'll be woodcuts, lino prints and also some people will have worked in combinations
01:04of processes so there's some etchings and screen prints that have gone along with letterpress
01:10prints and also certain things in terms of bookmaking that might be digitally printed
01:17but then bound in the case room or they might have an element of things that have been printed
01:22in here so there'll be some books that the title has been printed but then it's been
01:27scanned in and then produced digitally for sort of commercial printing.
01:32So it'll be a big mixture but all based around letterpress printing basically.
01:38Come along to the case room in the Reid building at the Glasgow School of Art from the 8th
01:44of Feb to the 26th of February.
01:56Today we're in the case room, it's the school's collection of letterpress printing equipment.
02:01It's a really nice, dedicated, well-furnished letterpress printing space and the most significant
02:07of its size and type in a higher education institution in Scotland.
02:11This year is 60 years of the case room.
02:14Printing in letterpress type existed before that in the school but when the case room
02:18was founded with the opening of the Foulis building in 1964-65 that was the first time
02:23the school had a dedicated letterpress printing workshop.
02:28One of the reasons the case room was initiated was for the Foulis Archive Press, a kind of
02:33private press for the school that allowed the school to publish and the Department of
02:37Commercial Art and then Graphics to publish their own books and other types of printed
02:42resources that people were interested in at the time.
02:45It's an interesting time for that to have begun because actually in 65-66 the printing
02:51letterpress printing was the traditional type of printing that had been kind of the main
02:56state of book printing and text printing for 500 years was actually in decline and was
03:01being overtaken by photographic methods.
03:06So I think there was like a real kind of emphasis even in those days in the mid-20th century
03:11on the kind of hands-on material nature of this print and what it could offer that more
03:15modern lithographic printing techniques weren't able to.
03:19We do a lot of different types of work in this room.
03:22So one of its key purposes is for teaching the foundational kind of aspects of typography
03:27and design for students to understand where typography as a discipline comes from.
03:33It links students to like a greater history, a longer history of the history of letters,
03:38the evolution of the alphabet, the evolution of type, the significance of print, the significance
03:43of the printed book.
03:44All of those things are kind of lead out from this collection.
03:50You can take it as a starting point for investigating huge numbers of different strands of cultural
03:57history and the history of learning, history of book production.
04:02One of the things that we're most keen on is Glasgow's visual industrial history and
04:05the wood type collection here is a really great asset for students to get hands-on with
04:10an industrial process that shows the wood type and the typefaces that we have in what
04:17I would call their kind of genesis state.
04:20So a lot of those typefaces didn't exist until the early 1800s when they were necessary for
04:25manufacturers of factory-made commodities to differentiate their product from a competitor's
04:31product.
04:32So things like digestive biscuits and cities like Glasgow that were big industrial cities
04:37were filled with these posters and filled with these new types of letter forms and we
04:41have that direct connection here that the students can investigate and also kind of
04:45understand where we are now in terms of our media, in terms of the internet, in terms
04:49of the way that type, lettering, design work where we are now through the evolutionary
04:55period of the early 1800s.
04:58I began working here in 2005 and at that time the case room wasn't getting a huge amount
05:03of use so my interest was in what was the relevance of this technology, how could we
05:09investigate in interesting abstract artistic ways to understand this huge significance
05:16that seemed to be neglected at the time but also ways that we could speak with this equipment
05:21out into the city and a lot of that began with working with club nights and bands so
05:26people like Conks Unpacks, the DJ, Optimo, Johnny Wilkes, those kinds of jobs led on
05:32to working with record labels so work through Johnny with Franz Ferdinand.
05:38Working with labels like Optimo then allowed things like record production to start happening
05:44so things like record sleeves for people like Warp Records, lots of interesting independent
05:50releases in the city.
05:51The Pastel did a lot of work with the Pastels on some of their releases around 2015 and
05:56that kind of work gave the room some visibility, the equipment some visibility and the way
06:01that we use it here like the artists and designers and other folks started to come
06:07in, worked with Canongate Books on various book covers, Alistair Gray was involved, he
06:13did a great in conversation here with me where I held very little of the conversation but
06:21we worked, Alistair and I and the team worked on a typeface directly for him which can be
06:28seen around the city now in a lot of his works.
06:30We can test colours, we can change things, we can do all kinds of stuff that would be
06:34very expensive to do outside as we're working together and that leads to some really weird,
06:40odd, interesting independent outputs that couldn't be made in any other way.