Inside Citizen Printer
Letterform Archive’s monograph of Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr., packs a lifetime of letterpress achievement into an ecstatic meditation on the power of print.
I do not want to put blackface on so-called “fine printing.” I want to print negro. To use printing to express negro culture. To do to printing what the blues and spirituals did to music.
So begins Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr.’s Citizen Printer, a compendium of works spanning the 35-year career of a storied letterpress printer and righteous maker whose practice demands justice while delivering joy.
In 800 full-color reproductions, divided into chapters on social justice, shared wisdom, and community, Citizen Printer immerses readers in Kennedy’s bold and colorful output. Armed with salvaged ink and type, the self-described “humble negro printer” layers his audacious calls to action over dense typographic or geometric backgrounds. Sourced from civil rights activists across U.S. history, ranging from Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth to Malcolm X and Rosa Parks, Kennedy’s chosen messages revive the ongoing fight for abolition and ensure that its lessons still reverberate today.
Supported by texts from New York Times bestselling author Austin Kleon, American studies scholar Myron M. Beasley, and design educator Kelly Walters, who is also the curator of the Letterform Archive exhibition by the same name, Citizen Printer situates Kennedy’s life and work within the entwined histories of Black protest and Black printing.