Grendl Löfkvist, a Blackletter Aficionado and Printer

Grendl Löfkvist is a calligrapher, letterpress printer, and former offset press operator, and the education director at Letterform Archive in San Francisco, California. She teaches extensively, including at the City College of San Francisco, at the San Francisco Center for the Book, in the Type West postgraduate certificate program, and at typographic events all over. Her areas of expertise include the history of graphic design, book arts, typography, and letterpress.

This episode “sponsored” by Six Centuries of Type & Printing! Get a discount off your purchase of the book by listening to this episode’s introduction for a coupon code.

Some photos from the class I took with Grendl and Paul Shaw at the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum’s 2019 Wayzgoose and some general photos from that event

Inkworks Press Collective

AB Dick 360 press

Black Sheep Press

Jon Winston

My hometown of Eugene, Oregon, was described in 1984 by the Wall Street Journal as the “last refuge of the terminally hip”

An example of a “direct imaging” or DI press

Linotype 330

(when I said “guns” I was referring to Grendl’s biceps)

Offset printing process

Visions of Peace and Justice (Inkworks Press, 2007)

Adobe slowly retiring PostScript Type 1 support

Grendl on Toshi Omagari’s Sachsenwald (Toshi appeared on the Tiny Typecast in May 2021)

Grendl on David Jonathan Ross’s Clavichord

Nazis and their embrace and rejection of Fraktur, the German black-letter style (Handelsblatt)

Fraktur and its modern use by white nationalists and fascists (99% Invisible)

The Torah must be written with the blackest ink

My interview with Erik Spiekermann about his digital letterpress approach

Stonecutter and lettercutter Nick Benson’s Instagram account