Richard Rose (5.4)

Richard Rose is a tall thin man in his early 60s with a slow, deliberate voice that curls at the ends with a touch of the South. He first fell in love with the art of letterpress at U.C. Berkeley, as a graduate student. There, in the back room of the Rare Books Library, amongst dusty manuscripts and Persian carpets, he learned to set type. The coalescing of the physical and intellectual that presented itself in the act of hand printing was wildly appealing to him. As a student of architecture, he thought of each lead letter as a brick; he was building pages, building art. But it wasn’t until 12 years ago, when he purchased his own press, a SP-20 Vandercook bought from a defunct South Carolina newspaper, that he was able to pursue letterpress. 

In an era dominated by printer-friendly technology printing presses have become in many ways obsolete. But Richard argues that letterpress offers something to the designer that computers and programs like Photoshop cannot. To him it is an art grounded in the details of reality, in which the artist has to respond directly to his art and environment. Particular hues are achieved by mixing oil-based inks not by clicking on a desired font color.  If while setting a page of type a printer runs out of a heavily used letter or “sort”, he must rethink, rework and recreate his piece; this is such a common occurrence it inspired the old saying “he/she is out of sorts”. The art of letterpress is filled with limitations, physical limitations of iron, lead and steel which create the necessity for increased creativity and experimentation.  

It also has an undeniable connection to history. It is the art of Guttenberg’s bible. Every typeface has a story deeply rooted in the practices of its time. Garamond, Bembo, Gaudy: Richard knows the designer and story behind each. The history of printing is parallel to the history of the modern intellectual tradition: from its genesis in illuminated manuscripts to the rise of newspapers and with them popular culture.  

Richard creates mostly broadsides (posters that combine text and images) and short books. Many of his pieces reside in the Haas Special Collection, in the basement of the Arts and Architecture building. I was able to view, one afternoon, a small accordion book entitled “Lattice, Thicket, Thistle, Thorn”. The piece was printed on thick, eggshell cardstock and in black and bright green inks. The design, which was clean and simple, was obviously the product of an architect. Every page had been built beautifully. Each of the four words had an accompanying quote, the latest dated 1737, and an image, all modern and black and white. First there was a shattering white lattice above a tangled mess of thick and thin strokes, then a thicket of straight lines arrayed like a dropped handful of spaghetti, then a sparse thistle with strong elegant strokes like those of Japanese calligraphy, and finally a scattering of thorns that looked like shattered blades of grass. The juxtaposition between the ancient gravity of the text and the contemporary elegance of the images was striking. And everything, the pictures and quotes, had been printed on an old press, the kiss of the lead on paper stamped into the cardstock.