Movable Feast

Virginia Book Arts

Previously the Virginia Center for the Book's Book Arts Program, the Virginia Book Arts' (VBA) type collection is the largest public collection of movable type in the mid-Atlantic region.

VBA is the current member-run, non-profit version of organization that's existed under several names for over three decades; its previous home was the Virginia Center for the Book (ended after grant defunding, early Summer 2025). VBA secured a new physical space in Fall 2025 and became a non-profit under the fiscal sponsorship of Richmond's excellent Studio Two Three—you can read more on VBA's new website), or by joining VBA's listserv to hear first when the space opens to the public, restarts offering workshops and community events, etc. (scroll to fill out form at bottom of vabookarts.org).

Amanda Wyatt Visconti and Josef Beery captured photos of every open typecase, a top-down view of all the type in the collection, during a short-notice period when it looked like the type would leave Charlottesville. Descriptive, evaluative, and historical details for the type are also included; the VBA type inventory/database/website by Amanda Wyatt Visconti was built on built on past inventory creation and maintenance work by Kevin McFadden, Garrett Queen, Kristin Adolfson, Josef Beery, Amanda Wyatt Visconti, Richard Cappuccio, and other past and present VBA members.

VBA's collection consists of 15 full type cabinets; a large four-column galley organizer where each galley contains multiple new, unopened foundry type; and a large, ongoing loan of larger-size wood type from a past Italian type foundry awaiting maintenance. Much of the type in VBA's type cabinets is represented by well-designed specimen prints reproduced in the Speaking in Faces volume.

Penland School of Craft: Letterpress Studio Type Collection

Penland School of Craft is one of the oldest craft schools in the U.S., starting in 1929 as a weaving school and expanding over the decades to plethora of methods and studios. Penland's Letterpress Studio has hosted established artists as teachers, students, resident artists, and more over multiple decades.

I volunteered to help with type collection organization, documentation, and this online project starting with my Winter 2026 artist residency & fellowship there. The current database builds on Letterpress & Print Studios Coordinator Adam Leestma's documentation of the wood type collection in photo and list; and on Visconti's scan and transcription of the current paper type list that was created by Sean P. Morrisey and Jay Fox.

See Leslie Noell and Eileen Wallace's project printing the backs of some of Penland's Gothic wood type, for a neat exploration of the all-over beauty of used wood type.

Visconti collection

This is the type I've personally created or acquired (see my forthcoming free "My First Type" zine for advice on doing the same in as financially accessible a way as possible; time and community are your friends). I also include a separate section on the cuts (image printing blocks) and catchwords (whole words and sentences, rather than remixable letters) I've collected or crafted.

I especially like wood type that is: big 👇 (or honestly any size—some great tiny wood type in my collection!), broken (see my Home for Broken Wood Type), serif, condensed, heavily used or pitted, lacquer-topped. I also appreciate lead type, though I've yet to really come to love when it's been heavily used the way I do with wood type (gotta do a print project around that to change my thinking...), especially big lead type (lol, not surprising—I print broadsides!). I also design, lasercut, & appreciate type in other materials, including acrylic.

More info to come, including around DH, multilingual type, lasercutting, queering historical letterpress, and letterpress accessibility.

Scholars' Lab Collection

Scholars’ Lab staff have active research, teaching, and practice around book arts, particularly letterpress printing and zine-making. Our makerspace frequently offers free public workshops on methods like bookbinding, book-based sculpture, and linoleum carving and printing; is host to the tiniest 3D-printed press; and maintains a variety of equipment helpful in this work (e.g. lasercutter and CNC router for making experimental custom letterpress type).

We’re focusing on 3 areas not currently well-supported by Charlottesville’s relative wealth of bibliographic and book arts resources:

• Low-barrier, friendly, safe/hard-to-break printing experimentation available for no cost (including for UVA classes, students, staff, faculty, local community, and hopefully beyond via virtual workshops and async means such as zines), following the UVA Library’s ethos of learning and practice for all, and Scholars’ Lab’s staff expertise in pedagogy, practitioner-building, and community design
• Work toward support for inclusive and multilingual printing, especially for non-Latin scripts, Braille, and other typefaces uncommon or difficult to procure in the U.S.
• Experimental & digital humanities explorations: applying our makerspace and prototyping expertise to develop custom, cheaper, and/or otherwise unavailable typefaces and printing apparatus (e.g. to address dearth of multilingual options); explore other connections between hands-on book arts practice and our DH skillset.

Book arts, and particularly letterpress, are part of Scholars’ Lab’s work with critical and creative technologies, digital and otherwise.

• Beyond locating both history and current (including analog) technologies in our work, Scholars’ Lab applies digital approaches to book arts through book-adjacent data science research, makerspace fabrication of book arts materials, and digital innovations around the same
• Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture at University of Wisconsin-Madison is one example of the many “BookLabs” and other centers recognizing the continuum of historical and digital textual technologies
• The Mellon-funded Building BookLabs Symposium attendance strongly overlapped with digital humanists

Mmmovable feast

"Movable Feast" as this project's name started as a play on Hemingway's (variantly spelled) work of the same name, with a reference to both "movable type" and the feast of options for appreciating and using type these collections support.

(Hemingway's memoir title refers to some religious observances that occur on different dates on different years—movable dates. Hemingway uses the "moveable" spelling with an "e", but the term "movable type" tends to use the also-correct E-less spelling; as this project focuses on letterpress work, I chose to title it using the spelling most used for letterpress rather than matching Hemingway's title.)

That wasn't punny enough. While taking photos of the type in Virginia Book Arts' collection, I decided to hold up one of the same sort per case to get a photo showing its scale against my hand. Lowercase m's are a good character to demonstrate scale: not in a narrower cell, so easier to pick up; on my non-camera-hand side; one of the wider lowercase sorts, so decent at being visible even with tiny type. Choosing lowercase m's also meant a play on our delicious feast metaphor.

Behold: mmm! A delicious movable feast. (Actually a better thing is coming: photos of the lowercase m from every type case! These are just some examples for now while I build this site and the databases.)