The Caseroom: 60 years of Letterpress etc. | The Glasgow School of Art Exhibitions Department

The Caseroom: 60 years of Letterpress etc.
8th – 26th February 2025
Reid Ground Floor Corridor

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 brings together works by current and former students as well as staff and a wide range of professional collaborators. The exhibition in the Reid Ground Floor Corridor 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 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.

For the students of the GSA, The Caseroom staff encourage and invite curiosity, inspiring iterative ways of working through experimentation – working towards new concepts through combining analogue and digital technologies. This playful process, supported by the knowledge and skills of The Caseroom team, allows new forms of individual creativity to be achieved.

Over the last 20 years The Caseroom has re-emerged as a developing space for design enquiry under staff Edwin Pickstone and Ruth Kirkby (both of whom entered the GSA as undergraduates and were gradually drawn to the innovative and historic space). They have collaborated on projects with a vast diversity of students, artists, writers, musicians, publishers and record labels including the novelist Louise Welsh, the seminal musician and artist Brian Eno, Scottish writer and artist Alasdair Gray (collaborating on the creation of Gray’s own typeface), Edinburgh’s Canongate Books, the visual artists Claire Barclay and Ciara Phillips, UK record labels Domino and Warp, influential Scottish indie band The Pastels, and the internationally renowned club night Optimo, to name but a small selection.