Reverting to Type Portfolio 1:
Ten typographic collaborations

Organised to coincide with the Reverting to Type exhibition, ten leading artists, poets and designers were invited to produce prints inspired by the title. These were hand set by them and printed in short runs which are now available together as a bound portfolio.

Collaborators were: Phil Baines, Vikram Seth, Fraser Muggeridge Studio, David Pearson, Catherin Dixon, Gabriel Gbadamosi, Stevey Scullion, Beatrice Bless, OPX Design and Peter Ashton-Jones.

Edition of 35 copies.

Price £1,200.00 (inc VAT)

Various postage options available,
please call 020 7729 3161.

NB: Print numbers 1-10 will be sold individually (as listed below).
Numbers 22-35 will be sold as complete sets with a title page, colophon and hand-made portfolio (as shown here).

Reverting to Type Portfolio 1:
Willesden High Road
in 1958
by Phil Baines

"I was seduced by the incredible variety of decorative types at the press and felt that they shared an affinity with old shopfronts. I have re-imagined Willesden High Road in the year I was born using copy from Kelly’s Directory for London (courtesy Brent Archives)."


10 prints of the edition of 35 are available to buy individually
—portfolio not included

Price £60.00 (inc VAT)

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A poem commissioned by Veronica Stewart for The Lady Digby to celebrate the 45th anniversary of the Summer Music Society of Dorset.

10 prints of the edition of 35 are available to buy individually
—portfolio not included

Price £60.00 (inc VAT)

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The most commonly-used letter in the English language is the letter ‘e’, with 12.7% frequency. This is the case in fiction and non-fiction writings, journalism, religious and scientific works and even Morse code.

10 prints of the edition of 35 are available to buy individually
—portfolio not included

Price £60.00 (inc VAT)

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"The piece was created by our whole studio. Our brand colour is 'yellow', so we asked everyone to submit suggestions that could work either as a prefix or suffix. Setting it all in yellow was a clue to the reader."

10 prints of the edition of 35 are available to buy individually
—portfolio not included

Price £60.00 (inc VAT)

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Hagamos Un Trato (Let’s Make a Deal) is a poem by Uruguayan writer and poet Mario Benedetti expressing the importance of relationships: “you can always count on me”.

10 prints of the edition of 35 are available to buy individually
—portfolio not included

Price £60.00 (inc VAT)

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Reverting to Type Portfolio 1:
Characters of Note
by Catherine Dixon

"A first visit to New North Press was to see the types from Nicolete Gray’s Nineteenth Century Ornamented Typefaces and other favourite old wood type catalogues step beyond the printed pages I have become so familiar with, and out into the cases before me. So many curiosities. So many great characters of note."

10 prints of the edition of 35 are available to buy individually
—portfolio not included

Price £60.00 (inc VAT)

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“It is not difficult to find words in praise of the ‘letterpress’. After all, it is itself an orchestrated play on words. Yet with all its latent potential, its numerous processes and attention to detail, it can be as elusive as a portrait or the captive emotions held within the lines of text, and like the comforts to a bereft lover or the diseased lung struggling for breath—they would be inadequate.”

10 prints of the edition of 35 are available to buy individually
—portfolio not included

Price £60.00 (inc VAT)

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"My father was a printer, he was away in Liverpool a lot learning to be one when I was too young to know how long he'd be gone. Putting my hands on the tiny metal blocks of letters, wedging in hair-line splints to stiffen their resolve, fiddling the upside down, mirror layout of the lines, all that, was a long meditation for me on the man's absence, then and now. So my setting of the poem, Valediction, which looks at the end to hold him through its last gasp ruse, that old Indian rope-trick, joins me and my fingers with him and his, through the prick of metal, in print."

10 prints of the edition of 35 are available to buy individually
—portfolio not included

Price £60.00 (inc VAT)

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Reverting to Type Portfolio 1:
An Exploration of a Railway Tunnel
by Peter Ashton Jones

"The text is from a poem I published in the poetry magazine Navis in 1996, and the visual quality of the phrasing seemed to lend itself to a collage or abstract arrangement. The block print - the 'taking out in contrast with the 'filling in' of the text - is a negative structural drawing of Bruegel's Hunters in the snow."

10 prints of the edition of 35 are available to buy individually
—portfolio not included

Price £60.00 (inc VAT)

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