News / Publishing

At Letterform Archive Books, the team has the honor and the privilege of crafting books that tell the story of our collection.  This year, we have been delighted to deliver up a dozen beautiful titles — ranging from an entertaining and visually splendid autobiography by lettering artist Michael Doret to a dynamic facsimile edition of Piet Zwart’s famed 1928 catalog for a Dutch cable company to Letter Love, a pleasing sampler of letterforms presented in a pint-sized postcard booklet.

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.

At Letterform Archive we’re always looking for stuff that shows the way a designer thinks, and reveals how their work was made. People visit us not just to see final works on paper — books, ephemera, posters — but also to see all the other artifacts produced along the way to the final piece, including  sketches, proofs, and variations that never made it to print. That’s why we were so thrilled in 2018 to accept a donation from Michael Doret that includes about half of his working archive. (The other half went to the Herb Lubalin Study Center at The Cooper Union in New York where he got his start.)

Through the use of bold language, graphic typography, and colorful layers, Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr.’s prints embody an intensity that catches the eye and provokes the mind. He is extremely outspoken about the impact of white supremacy and racism. These themes are reflected in Kennedy’s work and encompass the evolving trajectory of Black liberation in the United States. From growing up in the 1960s during the Civil Rights Era, to the rise of Black Nationalism in the 1970s, to the present Post-Civil Rights era, Kennedy has seen how these movements shaped Black identity in the United States and has drawn from this as inspiration.