The Glasgow School of Art’s specialised printing and typesetting facility The Caseroom, part of the GSA’s School of Design, celebrates its 60th anniversary in 2025 with an exhibition The Caseroom: 60 Years of Letterpress etc. at The Glasgow School of Art. The exhibition will bring together works by current and former students as well as staff and a wide range of professional collaborators. It will run from the 8 – 26 of February in The Reid Building Ground Floor Corridor Gallery space and launches a year-long programme of commemorative events.
The Caseroom was established in 1964 by staff supported by Douglas Percy Bliss, director of The Glasgow School of Art from 1946 to 1964. His background as a wood engraver likely influenced the decision to establish a facility for traditional forms of printing and typography techniques. Its very name reflects this historical link, drawn from a printer’s term dating back to the nineteenth century, the word Caseroom is taken from the drawers, known as ‘cases’, in which the individual typesetting letters were kept.
The Caseroom was an integral part of Bliss’ vision for the GSA – a modernist, progressive egalitarian vision that championed “useful” arts, which could be applied to anything, by and for anyone. Since its creation, The Caseroom has not only become a key resource for students and the wider Glasgow arts community, but also an important centre of printing and typesetting knowledge across the UK. The Caseroom’s various printing presses (the oldest of which dates from the mid 19th century) and extensive collection of metal and wood type letters and fonts comprises the most significant collection of letterpress printing equipment in a higher education institution in Scotland. It is incredibly adaptable and diverse in its manufacturing processes and design approach, weaving traditional craft with innovative contemporary methods. Fundamental to its working is the importance of collaboration, of working together within the space, steeped in a rich material experience that fosters the possibility of ‘the unexpected’ in the making process.
The Caseroom provides areas of expertise delivered to both students and external arts organisations and individuals; a focus on letterpress printing, which involves using raised metal or wooden type to create impressions on paper; various relief printing techniques, including Lino cutting, polymer plate printing, bookbinding and experimental book design, large format printing, traditional hand printing methods such as woodcut printing, risograph printing and ersatz print ephemera like typewriters, stencil cutters and badge-making equipment.
Despite the advent of digital printing, when the facility had to decamp from its former home in the old Foulis Building, The Glasgow School of Art chose to incorporate a prominent new Caseroom into the design of the replacement, the Reid Building, which opened in 2014. This decision was largely driven by Dame Seona Reid (GSA Director 1999–2013), who recognised the Caseroom’s potential to immediately communicate the creative workshop character of the School’s education to important visitors.
Over the last 10 years The Caseroom has continued to change as a developing space for design enquiry under staff Edwin Pickstone and Ruth Kirkby (both of whom entered the GSA as undergraduates and were gradually drawn to the innovative and historic space). They have collaborated on projects with a vast diversity of students, artists, writers, musicians, publishers and record labels including the novelist Louise Welsh, the seminal musician and artist Brian Eno, Scottish writer and artist Alasdair Gray (collaborating on the creation of Gray’s own typeface), Edinburgh’s Canongate Books, the visual artists Claire Barclay and Ciara Phillips, UK record labels Domino and Warp, influential Scottish indie band The Pastels, and the internationally renowned club night Optimo, to name but a small selection.
At the heart of The Caseroom is its extensive metal type collection, originating in the early Foulis Building with Monotype and foundry faces, including types from Scottish publishers such as Collins and Blackies, and printer Bell & Baine. Since 2005, the collection has grown with types from notable foundries including Effra Foundry, which in 2025 will add Baskerville and Baskerville Italic types specially cast for Scots Gaelic, enhancing the collection’s historical and linguistic depth.
For the students of the GSA, The Caseroom staff encourage and invite curiosity, inspiring iterative ways of working through experimentation – working towards new concepts through combining analogue and digital technologies. This playful process, supported by the knowledge and skills of The Caseroom team, allows new forms of individual creativity to be achieved.
Edwin Pickstone describes The Caseroom as a space that blurs the distinction between research, teaching and technical making, which fosters an atmosphere conjured through the unique combination of technology and community.
“In The Caseroom, we can engage with both design and print as a combined iterative process, a craft of making with words, less fractured than the standard division of disciplines” says Pickstone.
“It is a space for the reintroduction of crafts like bookbinding to design education but not regressing into the simulated safety of nostalgia. Instead, in feeling for new meaning and opportunities through use, the collection provides a link between aesthetics and technologies drawn out in black and white through centuries of typographic development.”
For further information please contact press@gsa.ac.uk
NOTES FOR EDITORS
All images photo credit to Ross Finnie.
About The Glasgow School of Art
The Glasgow School of Art (GSA) is internationally recognised as one of Europe’s leading independent university-level institutions for education and research in the visual creative disciplines. Our studio-based, specialist, practice-led teaching, learning and research draw talented individuals with a shared passion for visual culture and creative production from all over the world.
Originally founded in 1845 as one of the first Government Schools of Design, the School’s history can be traced back to 1753 and the establishment of the Foulis Academy delivering a European-style art education. Today, the GSA is an international community of over 3500 students and staff across architecture, design, digital, fine art and innovation in our campuses in Glasgow and Altyre (in the Scottish Highlands) and a thriving Open Studio programme delivering non-degree provision to over 1500 students annually.
