Talk
The Print Shop at the End of the World
The Print Shop at the End of the World is a reimagination of some of the earliest Finnish printing types for contemporary use at the Letterpress House printing press in Turku, continuing the lineage of the first Finnish printing press established in Turku in 1642. The project is a collaboration between type designer Frode Konstantin Helland and letterpress printer Sakari Männistö.
To create a contemporary interpretation of an old typeface is certainly not a straightforward process. Uneven inking and paper are par for the course, and the crudeness of 18th-century type founding obscures the details, leaving a lot to the imagination.
Working from a wealth of printed sources and an intimate knowledge of their respective craft traditions, Männistö and Helland have reimagined the letters for a new age. Far from a facsimile, the project attempts to capture the defiant spirit of early Finnish typography and embraces the local vernacular that arose from limited resources and relative isolation.
Sakari Männistö is a letterpress printer and operator of the Letterpress House Turku. Männistö trained as a neophyte under the master printer Thomas Gravemaker in Amsterdam. His print shop houses two manual printing machines, a 1920’s English Arab platen press (aka. “The Old Lady”) and German Korrex Hannover proof press (aka. “The Young Lad”).
Frode Helland is a visual artist, graphic designer and type designer – a reader, observer and maker of letterforms, drawing upon historical research, socio-cultural perspectives and creative collaboration to shape and challenge visual language. He gratuated with a Master’s degree in graphic design and illustration from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts in 2023. Frode makes up one third of the Norwegian type foundry Monokrom Skriftforlag, a tiny, not-so-cool, and painfully slow, independent publisher of original high quality typefaces.
