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SUMMARY:Global Perspectives on Lithographic Printing Symposium\, 5-6 March 2026
DESCRIPTION:Building on Michael Twyman’s pioneering scholarship\, this symposium will explore lithography as a truly global medium. It will consider lithography’s circulation across borders and oceans\, its adaptation to diverse linguistic\, artistic\, and commercial contexts\, and its embeddedness in cultural and political life from the nineteenth century onward. \nThe symposium includes invited papers\, demonstrations on a reconstructed Senefelder Pole Press and sessions featuring material from University of Reading and private collections. It is in hybrid format for the papers only & is free and open to all. \nIn-person attendees please note: We are able to support 20 in-person places for the workshop & collections sessions. To join us in person\, please email Beatty Hallas at  b.r.hallas@reading.ac.uk  (Places are limited\, so will be allocated in order of application) \nThe venue for the symposium on both days is the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication\, University of Reading (Whiteknights Campus)\, RG6 6BZ. \nOnline attendees please note: The symposium will run over two days\, with separate MS Teams links for each day. To attend both days\, please make sure you register using both of the links below. \n\nTo join us via MS Teams on 5 March 2026\, please register here\nTo join us via MS Teams on 6 March 2026\, please register here\n\nPROGRAMME \nThursday\, 5 March \n\n\n\n9.30—10.00\nCoffee & registration\n\n\n10.00—10.15\nWelcome & opening remarks\n\n\n10.15—11.30\nSession 1: Early Lithography in Islamic & Scribal Cultures (HYBRID)\nBorna Izadpanah Script\, stone\, and type: visual continuities in Iran’s earliest printed Qurʼans \nWei Jin Darryl Lim Lithography at Riau’s “Gateway to Mecca”\n(Chair: TBC)\n\n\n11.30—12.00\nCoffee break (provided)\n\n\n12.00—13.00\nParallel sessions repeated on Friday (max of 10 in each group) (IN-PERSON ONLY)\ni) Pole Press Demonstration (Geoff Wyeth)  \nii) Michael Twyman’s Lithographic Collection (Emma Minns)\n\n\n13.00—14.15\nLunch (provided)\n\n\n14.15—15.30\nSession 2: Transregional Encounters with the Lithographic Press (HYBRID)\nErin Piñon Ottoman-Armenian encounters with the lithographic press \nMimi Cheng Medium and message in nineteenth-century maps of East Asia\n\n\n16.00\nBook Launch (HYBRID) \nThe Bloomsbury Handbook of Global Typography. Editors in conversation\, followed by discussion \n(Online attendees: please go to this separate registration page for the book launch) \nCurators’ tour of exhibition in Department of Typography & Graphic Communication Display Area: Books and the People. Opening up access to books and reading #Go All In\n\n\n\n\nFriday\, 6 March \n\n\n\n9.30—10.15\nCoffee (provided)\n\n\n10.15—12.30\nSession 3: Modernity and Visual Experimentation (HYBRID)\nHannah Rose Blakeley Belgian lithography and book illustration ca.1900 \nHelena de Barros Material logics of printed colour in European and Brazilian chromolithography \nAsiel Sepúlveda Lithography and the spectacle of sugar manufacturing in nineteenth-century Cuba\n\n\n12.30—13.30\nLunch (provided)\n\n\n13.30—14.30\nParallel sessions (max of 10 in each group) (IN-PERSON ONLY) \ni) Pole Press Demonstration (Geoff Wyeth)  \nii) Michael Twyman’s Lithographic Collection (Emma Minns)\n\n\n14.30—15.30\nCollection Session: Iranian Lithography (Borna Izadpanah) (IN-PERSON ONLY)\n\n\n15.30—15.45\nClosing remarks & Tea in commemoration of Professor Michael Twyman (IN-PERSON ONLY)\n\n\n19.15\nConference Dinner (participants & invited guests)\n\n\n\n  \nSpeakers and their talks \nBorna Izadpanah\, University of Reading\nScript\, stone\, and type: visual continuities in Iran’s earliest printed Qurʼans\nThis paper examines the visual grammar of Iran’s earliest printed Qurʼans to demonstrate how early nineteenth-century Qajar printers negotiated the intersection of established manuscript practices and newly introduced print technologies. Focusing on the first movable-type Qurʼans produced from 1827 and the earliest lithographed editions issued from 1834\, it argues that\, unlike European precedents\, Qurʼanic printing in Iran was conceived as a project of visual continuity rather than a break with prevailing scribal conventions. Printing techniques entering the country through its northern frontiers were selectively and carefully integrated by local craftspeople\, resulting in editions that were framed\, produced\, and received as culturally grounded artefacts. Through a comparative analysis of textual rendering\, page composition\, ornamental devices\, and colophonic formulae\, this study shows that both typographic and lithographic Qurʼans pursued a shared strategy: sustaining manuscript-derived forms of authority while capitalising on the technical possibilities of mechanical reproduction. \n\nDr Borna Izadpanah is a Lecturer in Typography & Graphic Communication. His areas of interest include typeface design\, typography\, lithography\, and the history of printed letterforms\, particularly in the context of languages that have been represented with the Arabic script. He seeks to develop diverse and inclusive theoretical and practical outputs by linking an updated understanding of the past with current practices. Central to his work is decolonising the curriculum and promoting diversity by combining expertise in a wide range of related disciplines that reach beyond European visual cultures and the Latin script. \n  \nErin Piñon\, Kunsthistorisches Institut\n‘In the lithographic studio of Hovhannes Muyhendisyan’: Ottoman-Armenian encounters with the lithographic press\nNo one batted an eye when\, in the middle of the nineteenth-century\, Ottoman- Armenian printer-publisher typographer Hovhannes Muyhendisyan issued three consecutive titles\, furnished with images prepared by three different artists\, using three different methods of printing. This was par for the course in Istanbul’s highly competitive\, collaborative\, and commercialized Armenian language print market. These images\, however\, reflect the earliest encounters Armenian printers had with the lithographic press\, the most cutting-edge method of reproducing images globally. They also mark a point of departure from how Ottoman-Armenian printed books looked in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—filled with muddy impressions of worn and battered Dutch woodblocks that constituted the capital’s “stock” of available images. This paper discusses the role Muyhendisyan’s print enterprise played in shaping Armenian book arts in the nineteenth century and the permanent\, global repercussions his titles set in motion. It is the first to identify and treat Armenian contributions to lithography (վիմագրութիւն)—a troubling misnomer of “stone writing”—often confused in Armenian-language scholarship with the much more popular field of epigraphy. At stake here is a reconsideration of existing views on the development of the Armenian printed book and its images. An examination of the images\, origins\, and functions in new settings\, allow us to move beyond the simple question of European material\, iconographic and stylistic influence and instead ask\, how does Armenian art interact with and build on itself? \n\nDr Erin Piñon is an art historian specializing in early modern Armenian book arts\, spanning cultural networks from Europe to Asia. Her dissertation\, The Illuminated Haysmawurk‘: Ottoman-Armenian Painting and Confessionalism in the Age of Print (Princeton\, 2024)\, explored seventeenth-century Ottoman- Armenian manuscript art\, book culture\, translation\, and ritual practices across Istanbul\, Aleppo\, and Isfahan. Piñon’s research on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century visual and material culture has appeared in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s publications\, the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association\, West 86th Street\, and the Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies\, to cite a few. Her ongoing work examines the aesthetics of the Armenian diasporic condition and print culture between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. \n  \nHannah Rose Blakeley\, Princeton University\nBelgian lithography and book illustration ca. 1900\nThis paper will explore the development of lithography in Belgium in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries\, considering the ways in which book illustration and intermediality were central to the Belgian avant-garde. Focusing on a key example\, Léon Spilliaert’s series of ten lithographs\, Serres chaudes (Hothouses)\, printed in 1918 to illustrate poems by Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck\, this talk will show how artists\, writers\, publishers\, and printers formed a core network in and around Brussels\, and how their collaborations helped to shape the trajectories of Belgian modernism. \n\nDr Hannah Rose Blakeley received her PhD in art history from Princeton University\, where she is now a faculty member in the Princeton Writing Program. Her current book project explores how Belgian artists James Ensor and Léon Spilliaert transformed carnival from a social practice into a radical artistic strategy\, offering a new and emphatically visual conception of the carnivalesque. She has published “Le 17e siècle de Rops : vers la modernité” with the Musée Félicien Rops in Belgium\, has an upcoming article on James Ensor in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide\, and recently recorded a short video interview with leonspilliaert.be. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Scholars program and the Belgian American Education Foundation. \n  \nHelena de Barros\, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro\nMaterial logics of printed colour in European and Brazilian chromolithography\nThis talk examines chromolithographic production and practices in Europe and Brazil from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century\, drawing on research carried out at the University of Reading’s Department of Typography and on Brazilian archival collections. Grounded in Michael Twyman’s documentary approach\, the study investigates technical\, material\, and chromatic evidence in ephemeral prints\, children’s books\, and progressive proofs. Special attention is given to the material logic of printed colour\, understood as the interplay between tonal construction\, sequential presswork\, chromatic decision-making\, and the economic and cultural factors that shaped lithographic workflows. Through magnified analysis of colour-layer structures\, a purpose-built chromatic scale with descriptive universal naming\, and visualisations of complex datasets\, the study outlines a methodological framework that highlights the layered complexity of chromatic techniques and offers a material-based perspective on printed colour across different cultural contexts. \n\nDr Helena de Barros is an associate professor in the Design programme at ESDI/UERJ\, where she teaches graphic design\, digital imaging\, and visual technologies. She received the CAPES Award in 2019 (doctoral thesis) and in 2025 (supervision) and was a Research Fellow at Brazil’s National Library (2018–2019). She is a member of the CNPq research group Memoráveis and coordinates the Special Interest Group on Graphic Memory of the Brazilian Society for Information Design. In 2025 she was a visiting researcher at the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing\, University of Reading\, where she studied chromolithographic techniques in the Michael Twyman Collection. Her work as a researcher\, designer\, visual artist\, and collector of printed artefacts explores visual language\, graphic techniques\, graphic memory\, books\, and ephemeral prints\, with emphasis on Brazilian chromolithography. \n  \nWei Jin Darryl Lim\nLithography at Riau’s ‘Gateway to Mecca’: print and scribal labour in Penyengat island\, 1856–79\nLithography found its way to a C19 Malay world in 1826\, imported First by Dutch and later English missionaries. Yet the ingress for local adaptation and adoption of lithography was arguably through oceanic routes that were linked by port cities along the pilgrimage path of the Hajj to\, and from the centres of Islam. Through these streams\, religiously-oriented literature and ephemera found their way back to the Malay world. This ushered a broader acceptance of lithography as a viable means of religious textual production\, and reproduction. \nBy 1856\, at least one lithographic press was at work on the island of Penyengat in Riau – possibly the earliest royal press extant in the Muslim-Malay world. This press was likely acquired by the court of the Yang dipertuan Muda (Viceroy of Riau who resided at Penyengat island). From the literature\, this lithographic press seems to have been procured as a means to supplement scribal labour in the production of texts. Islamic histories\, translations\, ephemera\, and legal documents were products that were lithographed by the court; and the lithographic press’ primary function it seems was to serve the bureaucratic needs\, and Islamic literary production of Penyengat’s courtly elite. \nThis paper will focus on technical aspects of these lithographed texts that emanated from the Penyengat press; and will examine print within this specific nineteenth-century Muslim-Malay milieu\, and expand on the court’s links to Singapore-based Muslim commercial lithographers. Despite the lithographic output of Penyengat’s printers\, there is a distinct exclusion of the press from epistolary\, notary\, and bureaucratic documents kept by the Penyengat court; little to no information about its presence\, purchase\, or use is extant except for the lithographed artefacts themselves. This absence\, I will argue\, is of significance – and questions and hypotheses surrounding this lacuna within Penyengat records will be discussed. \n\nDr Wei Jin Darryl Lim is an independent book and printing historian. His research remit focuses on the histories of the lithographic book in Southeast Asia in relation to global histories of printing; the movement of printing materials and technologies\, and missionary printing and typefounding projects in the Malay archipelago. His doctoral research on the early history of Muslim-Malay lithography and has been published in the journal Indonesia and the Malay World. Darryl was previously the American Printing History Association’s Mark Samuels Lasner Fellow (2019)\, and an Early Career Research Fellow at the University of London (2022–23). \n  \nAsiel Sepúlveda\, Babson College\nPicturing “the fog effect:” Lithography and the spectacle of sugar manufacturing in nineteenth-century Cuba\nThis paper will examine the cloudy visuality of Cuban sugar plantations. It focuses on the representation of fog\,  smoke and steam that emerges from industrial machinery\, boiling houses and burning landscapes. During the early nineteenth-century\, Cuban planters became avid technocrats. They invested in industrial machinery\, railroads\, steamships and many other technologies including lithography. This modernizing campaign attracted European artists who began to produce images for local elites. The paper argues that “capturing the fog effect\,” a phrase that one lithographer used in his image\, became an imperative to represent the modernization of the Cuban landscape. The fog\, I add\, also served to obscure the relationships between industry\, environmental destruction and the exploitation of slave labor. \n\nDr Asiel Sepúlveda is Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at Babson College. His research focuses on the development of lithographic arts in late colonial Cuba. Sepúlveda’s forthcoming book Picturing the Planters’ Metropolis: Art\, Slavery and Global Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Havana\, explores how lithographic artists imagined a modern Havana built under the cultural regimes of Spanish colonialism and plantation slavery. \n  \nMimi Cheng\, Kunsthistorisches Institut\nMedium and message in nineteenth-century maps of East Asia\nThis paper examines an unstudied series of maps published in China and Japan between 1875 and 1898. Each is titled “Map of East Asian Territories” [亞細亞東 部輿地圖] and shows the eastern Qing empire\, southern Manchuria\, Japan\, Korea\, and Taiwan. In addition to having the same title\, they are also remarkably similar in both content and composition. By tracing the genealogy of each unique copy and attending to their aesthetic forms and epistemological claims\, this paper seeks to chart a way to think about modern maps not just as expressions of sovereignty or territoriality\, but also as material artifacts that contain the traces of their making. While they are just some of the countless examples of how foreign printing technologies were introduced and assimilated into local print cultures and economies\, this series of maps also serves as a reminder that exchanges occur not just between metageographic categories of east and west\, or binaries of foreign and indigenous\, but at other geographic scales and relational categories. \n\nMimi Cheng is a cultural historian of the global nineteenth century whose research focuses on transnational visual culture between Europe and East Asia\, comparative histories of cartography and the built environment\, and the relationship between knowledge and imperialism. She is a postdoctoral researcher with the Lise Meitner Group Coded Objects\, where she is completing her first book manuscript. Previously\, she was a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Newberry Library. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Historical Geography and has been supported by the ACLS\, SSRC\, German Historical Institute Washington\, and the Forschungzentrum Gotha at the Universität Erfurt. She earned her PhD from the University of Rochester in 2022.
URL:https://research.reading.ac.uk/centre-for-book-cultures-and-publishing/event/global-perspectives-on-lithographic-printing-5-6-march-2026/
LOCATION:Department of Typography & Graphic Communication\, University of Reading (Whiteknights Campus)\, 2 Earley Gate\, RG6 6BZ\, United Kingdom
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SUMMARY:Book launch: The Bloomsbury Handbook of Global Typography\, 5 March
DESCRIPTION:The Bloomsbury Handbook of Global Typography takes the broadest possible view of typography\, defining it as ‘design for reading’. It considers all kinds of reading matter and visual communication systems; digital\, environmental\, printed\, and produced by hand. \nBy offering a rich collection of texts that are genuinely international in authorship and in scope\, it seeks to rebalance the Western bias of so many books on the subject. It gives space to new voices and emerging standpoints about the global nature of design\, the needs of particular communities of readers\, and about the need for inclusivity and historical understanding in design practice and research. \nThirty-seven chapters by forty-three contributors show the interdisciplinary range of research in typography today\, exemplifying the relationship between history\, theory\, and practice that is at the heart of the discipline. They feature over 500 illustrations\, mostly in colour\, and full bibliographic references. \nJoin the editors in conversation and discussion \nThe event will be hybrid: \n– in person in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication\, University of Reading (Whiteknights Campus)\, RG6 6BZ \n– or on-line (via MS Teams): please register here
URL:https://research.reading.ac.uk/centre-for-book-cultures-and-publishing/event/book-launch-bloomsbury-handbook-of-global-typography-5-march/
LOCATION:Department of Typography & Graphic Communication\, University of Reading (Whiteknights Campus)\, 2 Earley Gate\, RG6 6BZ\, United Kingdom
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DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20260530
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SUMMARY:Exhibition: Books and the People. Opening up access to books and reading #Go All In
DESCRIPTION:“I say that this revolution has been for some time overdue\, because from one aspect it is\, of course\, only part of the great change in selling policy which some have called the ‘democratisation of production’. […] Books are only just beginning to feel the influence which\, in the course of a generation\, has brought gramophone records\, silk stockings\, foreign travel\, and smoked salmon (to take four examples at random) within the reach of small purses.”\n(Margaret Cole\, Books and the People\, 1938) \nOne hundred years ago\, a group of publishers\, writers\, businesses\, and libraries were challenging who had access to books while defending the importance of reading for pleasure. In her Books and the People (1938)\, socialist Margaret Cole described the new book clubs and commercial high street libraries of the 1920s and ’30s as the “opening stages of a real revolution […] in the world of English-language book production”. \nThis exhibition looks at a moment before book-buying was possible for most people. We look at some of the changes interwar that made access to new books easier\, more convenient\, and sometimes cheaper\, helping to develop more democratic\, shared cultures of reading. We also include examples of everyday printed ephemera that book clubs and societies produced and that tell us about how access to books was encouraged and promoted. \nIt is curated by Nicola Wilson\, Sue Walker and Emma Minns and will be held in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication\, University of Reading (Whiteknights Campus)\, RG6 6BZ. It is open from 30 March to 29 May 2026\, Monday to Wednesday only\, from 10 am to 4 pm. \nGroup visits can be made by appointment. Please email lpgdc@reading.ac.uk. \nThe exhibition is part of the National Year of Reading National Year of Reading 2026 | Go All In initiative. 2026 is the National Year of Reading\, a Department for Education scheme supported by the National Literacy Trust\, which aims to tackle a decline in reading enjoyment and reconnect people of all ages with reading as a relevant and rewarding activity. \nThere will be a CBCP exhibition event on Thursday 30th April 5-7pm. More information to follow soon. \nPieces on display at the exhibition
URL:https://research.reading.ac.uk/centre-for-book-cultures-and-publishing/event/exhibition-books-and-the-people-opening-up-access-to-books-and-reading-go-all-in/
LOCATION:Department of Typography & Graphic Communication\, University of Reading (Whiteknights Campus)\, 2 Earley Gate\, RG6 6BZ\, United Kingdom
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