Elysa Voshell

Letterpress printing is a powerful act of human expression that can inspire connection and dialogue. For 40 years, Minnesota Center for Book Arts has been cultivating community through educational and artistic programs centered around letterpress printing at its studios in the Open Book building in downtown Minneapolis and through community partnerships.

To increase access to letterpress printing for the diverse communities that call Minneapolis home, in 2021 MCBA commissioned the creation of new wood type that would allow more languages to be printed. MCBA worked with the Hamilton Wood Type Museum to create diacritic marks to be printed with MCBA’s existing wood type (English language characters) to print Swedish, Spanish, and other languages. Then, MCBA identified languages that contain about 30 or fewer characters that can be arranged to print any word in the language. Of those languages, MCBA considered cultural community-based organizations the organization had an active relationship with and a desire to letterpress print in that language, and commissioned the creation of Arabic and Hebrew wood type language sets. Hamilton cut the diacritic marks and Hebrew type from maple using a pantograph machine and a chisel. The Arabic typeface was designed by type designer Nadine Chahine and cut using a CNC router by Ryan Molloy.

Since commissioning the type, MCBA has been leveraging this unique asset to build community and amplify artists’ voices. This talk will focus on the artistic and community projects made possible by this new type, and MCBA’s plans for continuing to build our wood type collection and expand access to the empowering act of letterpress printing.

A book artist and letterpress printer, Elysa Voshell has served as the Executive Director of Minnesota Center for Book Arts since 2019. She loves how hand-printed objects can connect communities across space and time, and the sense of discovery that comes from the process of making. Prior to joining MCBA, she was Associate Director at Venice Arts, Staff Writer at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Associate Editor at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Artist in Residence at the Oregon College of Art and Craft. Her artist’s books have been featured in 500 Artists Books and the Lark Studio Series: Handmade Books, and are held in over two dozen international museum and university collections. When she’s not printing or making books, she can be found exploring by bike, balancing in awkward yoga poses, pickling random vegetables, or playing with her pup.

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