Building a letterpress atelier in LA. Yesterday's session at IPM was metal typesetting — setting type by hand, letter by letter. Each workshop adds another layer.
More updates to come. Happy to hear from anyone deep in this process.
Carta Prima
Kenan Capik
A few years ago, I translated Alexander Bevilacqua’s The Republic of Arabic Letters into Turkish — an award-winning 2018 study on the relationship between the Islamic world, Europe, and the history of print culture.
While working on that translation, I became fascinated by a strange historical reality:
For centuries, books were not simply carriers of information.
They were physical objects built slowly by human hands — through paper, metal type, ink, pressure, and labor.
That research eventually inspired me to write a screenplay titled The Face of the Other, centered around early Quran translations into Latin and the world of 17th-century printing
While working on the script, I started visiting printing museums and studying early presses more closely.
At one point, standing in front of a working Gutenberg-style press in California, I realized something:
I didn’t want this to remain only a story on a screen.
I wanted to physically rebuild part of that world.
So now I’m building a working Gutenberg-style press in Los Angeles — along with handmade cotton rag paper and small ceremonial print editions.
Not as a museum piece.
Not out of nostalgia.
But because I believe physical objects still carry a sense of permanence that we are rapidly losing in the digital age.
For the last few years, I’ve been studying early print culture and learning handmade papermaking.
Now I’m beginning to build a working Gutenberg-style press in Los Angeles.
The goal is to create a small ceremonial print atelier using movable metal type and handmade cotton rag paper.
Still early in the process, but I wanted to share the beginning.