A program for hands-on instruction in the history of printing texts and images, connecting UVA’s experts with faculty, students, and members of the broader community.
Established in 2018 through a generous grant from the Jefferson Trust, an initiative of the UVA Alumni Association, Presswork provides custom teaching labs for UVA courses and visiting groups, while training UVA undergraduate and graduate students in the technologies of printing through its RBS-UVA Presswork Fellowship Program. Presswork also hosts events, such as open houses, for the local community.
The Presswork project began with RBS’s commissioning of a wooden rolling press, modeled and designed after diagrams published in Denis Diderot’s famous Encyclopédie (of which UVA owns a unique copy, annotated by Diderot himself). We know of no other university, whether in the U.S. or farther afield, that has two eighteenth-century period presses positioned side by side, allowing faculty, students, and visitors to compare, in a hands-on research setting, the intaglio and letterpress technologies that were necessary for producing the illustrated books that Thomas Jefferson and his contemporaries read. These presses, currently housed in UVA’s Special Collections Library, were essential for interpreting how early modern and Enlightenment-era printers worked, how books and prints were fashioned, and how those processes influenced the culture of learning that fostered the growth of libraries and universities.
Schedule a Presswork Printing Lab
Presswork offers customized, hands-on printing labs for UVA classes, local educators, and other groups from the community. A small number of labs are available for free each semester on a first-come, first-served basis. Most labs run 1.5–2 hours.
When inquiring about reserving a free printing lab for your class or group, provide a brief description of the kind of lab or demonstration you wish to schedule, as well as the number of participants you hope to include.
Sample themes for labs include: “Printing Technologies in Colonial America,” “Nature Printing on the Intaglio Rolling Press,” and “Comparative Technologies for Printing Relief and Engraved Images.”