With digital technology dominating the college curriculum, students hardly get the opportunity to learn manual skills, such as binding and printing.
MSU’s Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, or RCAH, offers a book arts course where professor Anita Skeen, along with five or six others, teach students how to write, print and bind on a printing press.
Snyder Hall currently houses three large printing presses, all of which were brought there by Arie Koelewyn, proprietor of The Paper Airplane Press, an independent letterpress in Lansing.
When Skeen was teaching creative writing at Wichita State University, she decided to take a course on something different. After looking into graphic design, she enrolled in a letterpress-printing course.
“I never took any other courses, I just kept taking the letterpress printing courses over and over again,” Skeen said.
After developing a passion for letterpress, she acquired two large printing presses and brought them with her when she took a job at MSU. The presses sat in her garage for years, until RCAH opened in 2007.
With hopes of bringing her printing presses to MSU, she contacted Koelewyn for advice. He found her presses were too old to function properly, but purchased a new press that he donated to MSU. Skeen then asked him for help developing a class based around it.
The first books arts course was offered in the spring of 2009, and Skeen enjoys sharing her love for letterpress with curious, excited students, she said.
“For me it’s a kind of magic, it’s always been magic,” Skeen said. “I love it and I also am very happy to introduce this old technology to people who are used to all the new technology.”
Koelewyn’s involvement with printing presses started long before his encounter with Skeen.
In the 1970s, Koelewyn trained to be a librarian, but was unable to find a job. While working one of his part-time jobs as a tour guide for a museum, he said he saw a collection of private press books from the 1700s and was instantly intrigued.
He has now been a hobby printer for 40 years and holds a printing club in Snyder Hall on Thursday nights.
After continuing to not find work as a librarian, he shifted his focus to computer programming.
“Except for one small program, everything I worked on in those 21 years as a programmer is gone,” Koelewyn said. “But all of the things I worked on as a printer as a hobby have some potential of hanging around.”
The book arts course offered at MSU not only allows students to create work that will stick around for a while, but it teaches students manual skills that otherwise they wouldn’t learn.
Each year the course has a new focus, and next year the focus will be color. Roughly six instructors work together to teach the course and show students the importance and benefits of collaboration.
“Learning to print on the letterpress was one of the great discoveries of my life,” Skeen said. “It has brought me into contact with so many people I would never have met otherwise. It has allowed me to do so many things. It’s allowed me to be in touch with the history of writing and printing and the book. Even though Gutenberg made his press in 1454, I’m still printing.”
